Prairie Light Images

Improve Your Flash Photography

If you are new to flash photography, you have probably been less than impressed with some of your photos. The Facebook classic deer in the headlights look, complete with the demonic red eyes grows old really fast. This happens when the flash unit is attached to the camera and the light from the flash blasts your subject at point blank range from straight on. For a lot of point-and-shoot cameras or iPhone or other camera phones the story ends here. The flash unit is firmly attached to the camera right along the axis of the lens and short of shooting without flash, there is no other way to take an artificially lit picture.

Start with a speed light

If you are fortunate enough to have a camera with a hot shoe, however, all is not lost.  Enter the speedlight. These are powerful flash units that, when attached to the hotshoe on your camera, talk to the camera and allow all of the computer wizardry of modern technology to set the flash exposure giving you perfectly exposed photos most of the time.

 

Sadly, most people do not use these units to their full potential. If you look at one of the units manufactured by Nikon, Canon, Nissin, Sigma etc, you will notice that most of the mid to high end models all allow the flash head to tilt and rotate. Herein lies a partial solution to our lousy flash photos. By rotating the flash head, for example, so that the light from the unit bounces off of a wall or a low ceiling, we can get softer, more attractive light onto our subject. Check out these examples at Nikon’s webpage.

Get it off the Camera

A hot shoe allows you to use a speedlight as your artificial lighting source. The design calls for you to slip the unit into the hot shoe and have the camera and speedlight talk to each other directly.  I find it ironic that a hot shoe attachment on a camera for a flash is the salvation to uninspiring flash photography. After all, logic suggests that the designers wanted you to attach the flash unit to the camera, right?  But a hot shoe also allows you to get that speedlight off of the camera.  If we can get the camera and the light source be be at different locations, we open up the possibility of getting into some attractive and darn creative lighting solutions.

For some creative examples of flash photography (99% of which are done with flash taken off of the camera) check out the Strobox website . Make sure to click onto some of the pictures to get a look at the lighting diagrams showing how the light was set up for the photo. It is a great source for learning about artificial lighting.

Extension cords

Extension chords for flashes are specially designed to plug into your camera hot shoe and allow you to take the flash away from the camera axis. The distance you can move the flash away from the camera is restricted by the length of the cord, but it doesn’t take much of a move to make a difference. Photographic icons like Joe McNally routinely hold the flash unit away from the camera by hand with an extension cord connected to the hot shoe. I have watched him do this at one of his seminars, and he produces some pretty amazing work.

Camera Flash Bracket

You have probably seen these things in movies and real life. They are a convenient way to position the flash above and away from the axis of the lens without having to hold the flash by hand. Again, the location that you can put the flash relative to the camera is restricted, but this is an ideal solution for an event photographer at a wedding or a concert.

Go Wireless

Camera systems like the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) and the Cannon Wireless Speedlight System were designed to give the photographer even more flexibility in getting lighting sources into more creative locations. These systems make use of infrared signals between the speedlights and the camera so that they can properly set the exposure using the Through the Lens (TTL) technologies. Additionally, these systems are capable of handling multiple flash units, allowing you to put multiple flashes into separate lighting groups for different lighting ratios and effects.

Even if you are only using one speedlight, though, these systems work very well in 90% of the situations the average photographer will put them into.

The achilles heel for these infrared systems is that they must have a line of sight to the master unit that controls them. If you have your speedlight around a corner or at a fair distance away from the camera, the triggering signal may not reach the light. The solution to this problem lies in radio triggers. These are probably the most expensive solution for strobists, but if you are at the level where you need them, they are probably worth every penny.

Companies like Pocket Wizard have spend a lot of time and research ensuring that these radio triggers talk to the Nikon and Canon brand of cameras and are able to speak in their native TTL, thus giving the photographer the full benefit of what their lighting systems are capable of.

So there you have it. If your camera has a hot shoe, you have a multiplicity of solutions for lighting your subjects. I hope you can take advantage of this knowledge and never again have to use the red eye removal feature in your image processing software.

Posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2011 at 10:47 pm. Filed under: Flash photography, Photography, portraits Tags: digital cameras, Flash, learning, light modifiers, lighting, photographic equipment, technique RSS 2.0 feed.