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Flashes and Lighting Materials

Using a camera flash is an inevitable part of being a photographer, especially since photography is mainly concerned with light. But to gain more confidence in using your built-in and external flashes when taking pictures, one must first understand its many uses.

Contrary to what many beginners think, flash is not only used to brighten a nearby scene or subject. It can also set the mood, add emphasis to image elements, and create special effects in your photograph, making flash photography fun and extremely useful for photographers.

Below we’ve listed a few widely-used flash photography techniques that you may have already heard about and tried. You can use your camera’s built-in flash for some of these, but for more freedom and creative control, you’ll need to use an external shoe mount flash for these tips.

Bounce the Light
Diffuse your Flash
Make use of Ambient Light
Use Colored Flash Gels
Use TTL Technology
Enable High-Speed Flash Sync
Use More than One Flash

Bounce the Light

One of the first and most important things that aspiring photographers need to learn about flash photography is that pointing the flash directly towards your subject is a no-no. After all, nobody wants to see harsh, flat lighting and unsightly shadows in their photos.

The key to creating better lighting is to bounce the flash against another surface. This means firing your flash elsewhere—like a neutral-colored wall, ceiling, or a reflective card on your flash—to create a bigger light source and soften the light that will hit your subject.

Diffuse Your Flash

Another technique for creating more attractive lighting is to diffuse the light that comes from your flash. Like bouncing it, using a diffuser enlarges the size of the flash area to create softer, more even light.

There are pop-up flash diffusers and there are also tupperware-looking diffusers for professional speedlights, both optimized for widening the coverage of your flash even when directing it towards your subject. But for more of a studio lighting effect without the bulk, there are also mini softboxes that can be used with your speedlight.

Make Use of Ambient Light

It’s easy to just keep flashing your camera to provide better lighting for your subject, but it doesn’t always produce the best photographic results. Oftentimes, you’ll make the background disappear almost completely while you’re busy exposing your subject.

Allowing the ambient light and your background to appear will add context to your subject and give your photo a sense of atmosphere. You can do this by shooting in Manual Exposure Mode instead of Auto and then adjusting your camera settings to first expose the background. This will expectedly underexpose your subject, but then you can use the appropriate flash power to compensate for the light stop difference between the background and foreground and properly expose your subject.

Use Colored Flash Gels

Using flash gels is a great way to add interest and color to your photo. They can be attached to your flash to add a colored tint to the light that it emits. Aside from producing creative effects, it is also commonly used to match the the color of the flash with the ambient light.

Room lights usually have a different color temperature compared to flashes. Without matching the light temperatures, your image will look unnatural and it becomes easy for viewers to tell that a flash was used. This can be easily fixed by setting your camera white balance to auto or tungsten (for tungsten room light) and then adding an amber filter or Color Temperature Orange (CTO) filter over the flash lens to correct your foreground color.

Use TTL Technology

Using the Through-The-Lens (TTL) mode of your flash unit helps make shooting under changing ambient lighting conditions a whole lot easier. When enabled (iTTL for Nikon and eTTL for Canon), the flash quickly communicates with the camera, which then checks the current lighting condition and the distance between the flash and subject to determine the required flash power to light the scene. This makes it perfect for virtually any shooting situation and can also be used in conjunction with bounce techniques.

Enable High-Speed Flash Sync

There may be times when you want to use your flash with a fast shutter speed, either to stop motion or to provide fill light while shooting in broad daylight. However, there’s such a thing as a maximum flash sync speed, which is the fastest shutter speed you can use that will still remain in sync with your flash. Going beyond 1/125 or 1/250, depending on your camera model, will leave large sections of black in your final image thanks to the shutter blocking the image sensor mid-exposure.

Part of the reason why your camera’s native sync speed doesn’t work well with your flash is that the flash duration is shorter than fast shutter speed exposures. And by turning on the High-Speed Flash Sync (in Canon cameras) or Auto FP (in Nikon cameras), the flash fires longer and in the exact moment that the sensor is fully exposed.

Use More Than One Flash

For a more three-dimensional light effect, you can use more than one flash to illuminate your subject. This requires significant knowledge in operating and syncing multiple wireless flashes with your camera directly or via a wireless transmitter or slave.

The concept of using more than one flash unit is simple: you use multiple lights to create shadows, highlights, and sometimes even rim lights on your subject.

To create the traditional studio quality three-point lighting setup, you’ll need a Key light facing your subject and positioned close to either side of the camera, a fill light facing your subject and positioned near the other side of the camera, and a backlight behind the subject (ideally facing the Fill Light) to create subtle highlights and separate the subject from the background. Alternatively, you can use either the Fill Light or Backlight with the Key Light for a two-point setup.

COLOR TEMPERATURE: UNDERSTANDING THE KELVIN SCALE

A lightbulb may look white to our eyes, but light actually comes in different colors. The sun at sunset creates an orange light. A florescent light bulb will create a different color of light than an incandescent one.

A camera’s white balance corrects the image automatically so white objects are white in the photograph under different light sources. Most cameras have an automatic white balance mode, as well as options named after the different types of light sources, like shade and incandescent. Manual white balance allows you to take a picture of a white object, then the camera will determine the white balance from that image. Manual white balance doesn’t offer as much control as using the Kelvin scale, however.

Adjusting the white balance on the Kelvin scale is the equivalent of manual mode for exposure — it gives photographers complete control over the white balance. Shade is often set at 7500K, while daylight is about 5500K and sunset 2500K.

An accurate white balance means that objects that are white in real life are also white in the image — but "accurate" isn’t always what’s right for the photograph. Using the Kelvin scale to skew the white balance to be more orange creates a warm feeling in an image, creating a look similar to shooting near sunset. On the other side, adjusting the white balance towards the blue end creates a cooler look, often used to create a somber mood in a photograph. Film photographers often used warming and cooling filters to create these effects, but digital photography makes it easy to simply adjust the white balance in camera (or in post).

White balance is also one of the reasons many photographers shoot RAW files instead of JPEG — with a RAW file, adjusting the white balance is as simple as using a Lightroom slider. Getting it right in-camera is easier, but editing in post with a RAW file makes fixing white balance errors easy. RAW files also make it easy to remove a green or purple hue as well.

Outside of using white balance to create a balanced image or one that’s warm or cool, photographers can also get creative with the source of their light using flash gels. These colored pieces fit over the flash and create colored lights — like the lights on a dance floor. Since color helps create mood in a photograph, using gels can be a fun way to experiment with the color of light.

Without light, there is no photography — and without understanding light, you simply cannot become a great photographer. Start simply by learning to recognize soft light and front and side lighting — these types of light are easy to work with and great for beginners. As you advance and learn how to modify light, then move onto experimenting with hard light and backlighting — they may be trickier to get right, but they can create some pretty dramatic images.

Studio Lighting Simulation

Better Opened in Google Chrome app/web (Incognito):

http://www.zvork.fr/vls/

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