Flash and what you want.

Your background is what you want, not what it is.

Huh?

Take this example. My room looks like this, right now.

(0.5 sec, f/8, 200 ISO).

But when I set my camera to 1/250 sec, f/8, 200ISO, I get:

Dark. Even the TV is almost entirely dark.

Why? Because that is what I want. I do not care that the room is pretty well lit; I want it to be dark. So what do I do? High f-number, fast shutter, low ISO. And that gives me not what there is, but what I want.

And when I crop that, decrease saturation, and increase clarity, then I have a low-key portrait.

…which is of course what I wanted all along.

Note that I use two flashes to light me. They are set to manual at 1/4 power, my standard flash setting. I also have a grid mounted on each flash (a Honlphoto grid). These stop the light from spreading through the room. If it did, the room would be visible.

You can have serious fun with one or two flashes and a few radio triggers, and this is how. Make ambient go away , then use flash to light where you want the photo to be lit.

 

Direct Flash: Can It Be Used?

Unmodified flash? Without umbrella, softbox, or bounce? Can I use that and still get good results?

In a word: yes. You do not always need flash to be modified.

For instance, you may intend the look. One single, unmodified flash can give you a hard look, and that may be exactly what you are after, like in this high contrast B/W self portrait:

So sometimes you can use it to deliberately accentuate the hard look of a photo. So this is the intentional hard look.

At other times, you are mixing in ambient light to take away some or all of the hardness. That, in other words, is the minimized hard look. One way to do this is to use another flash; another way is to mix in ambient light, like here:

That was made with one flash; see it on the right here:

The key in all examples here is that the flash may be direct, i.e. unmodified; but it is not where the camera is. In other words, it is off-camera flash (OCF).

Whenever you want to try a new look or technique, my advice: yes, try it and see. You may be surprised by the results.

x100: Can you see a theme?

Regular readers will see that the last few days, I have been shooting with, and talking about, the Fujicolor x100 camera that I carry:

Fuji X100 (Photo: Michael Willems)

The theme has been: given the right light (e.g. flash!) and the right techniques, you can take professional pictures with it that are as good as those taken with an SLR. This is almost straight out of camera (a crop and a few dust spots removed):

Now while I am not recommending product shoots with the x100, this goes to show it can be as good as an SLR.

But now let’s take it a step farther. It can be better.

Yes, better. And here’s how:

I just took that picture at 200 ISO, f/8, 1/1000 sec. That makes for that nice, dark sky.

Wait. Did he just say 1/1000 sec, one thousandth of a second? That is impossible since the flash sync speed of 1/250 second limits the shutter speed you can set the camera to when using a flash. Right??

Wrong. The x100 has a leaf shutter. And it allows flash up to 1/1000 second. And as said, that is why that sky is so wonderfully dark. It is in fact noon and it looks bright to my eyes. But 1/1000 sec makes it dark. Two stops darker than my other cameras could have done!

But he could have done that with aperture, with a higher f-number. Or with an ND filter.

Nope. If I had, I would have run out of flash power. The flash needs to get through that filter, or through  that small aperture, and it is not bright enough at higher apertures, especially when a modifier is being used.

So the x100 may be small, but it can do things my $8,000 1Dx cannot do. Just saying!

 

Crispness

I like crisp images, like this one I just took of one of my toys:

You see, here’s my floor, with that toy, using available light:

Nothing wrong with that, but I prefer more crisp sharpness, more contrast. Like the sharpness flash gives you:

I took that picture purely to illustrate how to take this picture, Namely, with a Fujifilm x100 camera (which has an APS-C sensor) with a Pocketwizard on the flash hotshoe and “external flash” enabled. The camera was set to 200 ISO, f/8, 1/125 second: standard studio settings. Two flashes, one on the right at 1/16 power; one on the left at 1/4 power, fitted with a 1/4″ Honlphoto grid:

When you click through to view these at full size, they are good.

View that full size and a few things may occur to you. Like “remove dust with brush and blower before taking any close-up flash shots”. And “a small camera, like the Fujifilm x100, can make excellent, sharp, crisp photos when you use it well”. But especially: “flash is one way to make photos crisp, both in reality and in perception”. Reality, since the flash lasts only 1/1000 sec at full power, and therefore 1/4000 sec at quarter power”; hence, there will be no motion blur. And perception, because exposing to the right (i.e. brightly) and with lots of contrast makes things crisp.

Look at this image full size:

There you have it: sharpness. just one more advantage of using flash.

 

Wizards

For the making of this kind of wizard, I need another type of wizard.

Namely, Pocketwizards. This is manual flash, fired by Pocketwizard radio triggers. I used a key light (camera left), a fill and rim light (right), a background light (gelled, background left), and a fourth flash, a gelled flash behind the skull. Four flashes, fired by five Pocketwizards.

“I don’t have that kind of money, to buy five radio triggers”, I hear some of you say. “I am going to just use wireless TTL, my camera’s built-in system (Canon e-TTL, Ninon i-TTL/CLS, etc)”.

Let’s have a look. 5 Triggers can cost up to $500. Wireless TTL is included in your Nikon or Canon (or Sony, etc) system, so costs nothing. Easy decision. Of course TTL is cheaper. Right?

All I need for the cheap “TTL solution” is four flashes by Canon or Nikon. Or, if I have a pro camera that does not contain a pop-up flash, five flashes by Canon or Nikon. One needs to be a 580EX/600EX (Canon) or SB800/900/910 (Nikon). Total cost? Between $1500 and $2500. Peanuts.

And for the expensive Pocketwizard solution, I need five expensive triggers; say $500. And then five “any type” flashes: any brand, any type as long as they use a standard hotshoe or an x-type connector, and they can fire manually at a power level of my choosing, and I can disable any auto-switchoff timeout. These flashes can be as little as under $100. And I only need four at most. Say, $400, then. And perhaps cables from Flashzebra dot com, another $100. So the total cost can be as low as $1000.

Wait. The cheap solution is $1500-$2000, and the expensive solution costs $1000? Perhaps things aren’t so simple after all. Just sayin’.

Yes, using radio triggers can be cheaper because you do not need your brand’s TTL flashes. Whatever brand you use, the remote flashes can be new or old and can be made by Canon, Nikon, Vivitar, Olympus, one of the Chinese, Taiwanese, or Korean clone makers: don’t care.  And that can save you a lot of money.

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Multiple OCF’s today

OCF = Off-Camera Flash. And OCF is the name of the game. Why? Because off camera flash gives you control over light direction. And you can have fun, like here, in today’s shoot:

(1/125 sec, 200 ISO, f/8)

The yellow flash fires into the camera, This works fine with some lenses, but not with others. If you get a  lot of flare when trying this, try another lens, use the lens hood, and remove any protective lens filters.

This yellow flash and the purple flash are speedlights fitted with Honl photo grids and gels. The main light was a beauty dish on our left; fill light was a softbox on our right, feathered forward. As hair light, a snooted light on our left behind, aimed forward (not visible). So:

The speedlights and one strobe were fired using Pocketwizards; the other two strobes with their light-sensing cells.

The moral: try and have some fun with your speedlights and strobes.

 

Easy does it

“Convenience” is one of the things that drive me. I want my life to be easy. That is why I use speedlights when I can, for example. So when I shoot, I often use this:

That is an off-camera flash on a light stand with a bracket, a shoot-through (or shoot into) umbrella, and a Flashzebra cable that connects the Pocketwizard to the flash.

Look carefully and you can see all the individual components:

The charm is  that you can leave it all connected so it effectively becomes on integral unit. An easy-to-fold up unit:

Zoom zoom zoom.

Your flash has a ZOOM function. This allows the light to be sent “where the lens looks”. If you use a telephoto lens, why send light to the sides, where the lens cannot see? This would waste energy.

Normally, the zoom factor is set automatically, depending on the lens. Look at the back of your flash and zoom your lens just after touching the shutter button: the flash will alter its zoom as you move the zoom lens through its range. No work for you. So the light goes only where the lens looks.

But you can override this. Set flash zoom to “M” (manual). Like here: Wide lens, but I zoomed the flash in as much as I could:

See? A small oval of light.

Why would I want to do this?

  • Sometimes, I do this for effect.
  • Sometimes I do it to get more power: A concentrated small beam is brighter than a wide area, of course.
  • And sometimes, I do it for correction.

Like here:

My garage during the recent garage art sale.

Without flash, it looked like this:

The back was dark, so I needed flash. But I did not want that flash to light up the close areas, which were already very bright. Solution: zoom the flash in manually. The lens was 16mm; I zoomed the flash to about 50mm if I recall correctly. That sent light only there where it was needed.

Problem solved. More even, without overexposure of the foreground.

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Daily tip: Power

Flash TIP OF THE DAY:

Say that you are ready to take a TTL flash shot. Once you have set your camera to a certain ISO and aperture and flash exposure compensation, and you have decided how to point the flash, you can do your test shot.

Say it is too dark. Why? Is it “incorrect metering, subject too light, etc”, or is it just “not enough power at this ISO/Aperture” (the shutter makes no difference)?

To ascertain that, and to see how much reserve you have, set your flash to manual, full (1/1) power:

The example shows half power (1/2); you should select full power (1/1, or 100%).

If you now have an overexposed picture, you know you can do the shot. Go back to TTL (press “mode” until “M” changes to “TTL”) and try again, changing flash compensation until your picture is good.

But if instead, your picture is too dark still, then there is simply insufficient power available. So no amount of flash compensation or metering changes will help. Instead, you have to lower the F-number or increase the ISO until that is no longer the case. (Or you could move to a room with a lower ceiling, if you are bouncing the flash).

I.e. if I were to sum this up, I would say:

Never go to TTL unless in full power manual, your picture is overexposed.

Simple, no? But you would be surprised how many photographers struggle with this simple check.

 

“Bracketing”, another meaning.

If you have ever attended a wedding or similar event, you may have seen a photographer with a flash aimed straight forward, but mounted on a bracket like the one here:

That is, a bracket that allows the flash to be mounted far from the camera.

A bracket like this is not as good as bouncing, or as an umbrella, but it can have advantages when those two are not possible: The flash is quite far from the lens, but still above it, to avoid side shadow. And on the bracket pictured, I can mount several flashes:

That makes a difference. In fact, the bracket pictured even allows me to mount an umbrella. At the risk of looking silly, with this bracket I have a way to get pretty good light even outside and anywhere else where bouncing is not an option.

 

This is an excerpt of the Portrait Photography book. Get your free preview chapter here (click to download).