1/20th sec, f/3.5, handheld, available light
(Click for larger, as usual)
To take pictures like this, use exposure compensation (minus two stops, in my case this morning) or use manual mode. A wide lens means that focus is easy (everything is sharp) and you can shoot at low speeds.
Look at this picture, which a student took of me in a class the other day:
Michael Teaching
Can you see how she turned her flash behind her, so it aimed at the wall above her, which in turn lit me with soft, gentle light? Otherwise, if she had aimed it at me directly, we would have seen all the things that people hate in flash:
Instead, we get soft, natural looking light. And it’s easy: turn the flash so that the light bounces behind you. With TTL, it’s easy: the camera does the math. You just push the button.
…with a hand, if you want a foreground object to light up with your flash, when for effect the background needs to be darker. Like just now in The Distillery District in Toronto:
Another snap:
Again, using flash for lighting up the foreground, while exposing down to saturate the background on a bright day around noon. Sure you can take pictures at mid-day.
…in spite of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom has it that the Canon 7D is not the best for high ISO shots. And that you need twice the lens length, so 50mm on a crop camera needs 1/160th second..
So you could not possibly do a shot like this at
Cat, 3200 ISO, f/2, 1/40th sec, Canon 7D, 50mm
Yes you can. Hand held, slight noise reduction applied in Lightroom.
As we approached Phoenix last week, where I was teaching workshops (one with David Honl), I took this:
To do this:
Do all that and you’ll get some cool pictures.
Here’s an impromptu portrait I took on Tuesday, of a lovely student who kindly volunteered to be the subject, in the Flash for Pros course:
And here’s how I did this:
And how I used those flashes:
Another student that night wrote a blog post, here, where you can see a few pics with some of the modifiers I used.
So it’s actually quite simple: now you go try. It is amazing what you can do in just a few seconds with just a couple of flashes (speedlites) and some small, light, convenient modifiers.
Your assignment for today, should you choose to accept it: shoot a picture of a machine.
Use, if you can, a 50mm lens.
Tips (since this is a teaching blog): Try to fill the frame. Consider shooting in black and white. Avoid direct light.
Remington
And have fun!
Not quite Hopper perhaps, but it conveys the mood. Indianapolis, 25 March 2010.
One more “blue background, gold foreground” picture for you all. No, two.
Here is Christy, of Studio Moirae, looking radiant, mainly because she looks radiant – but also perhaps just a little because I lit her with a CTO gelled flash (with the white balance set to “Tungsten”, which turns everything blue except the bits lit by my gelled flash)?
And one more lovely participant in the course, who soon will be two:
