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flash photography: dealing with reflective surfaces

November 4, 2008 Neil vN 13 Comments

dealing with reflective surfaces when using flash

Rooms with wooden paneling are notoriously difficult to shoot in when using flash.  This is because of the tendency for the light source (flash) to create large hot spots on the wooden surfaces.    I've had someone ask me specifically about these images from a recent wedding, and how I avoided those specular reflections in the wooden paneling. The best way to avoid them is to make sure you don't "see" your light-source / flash-tube in the wood paneling.  Imagine the flat surface to be a mirror - and then from your angle of view  Read more inside...

review: RadioPoppers P1

September 9, 2008 Neil vN 19 Comments

[ click on the photo to see a larger image] Apathy Angel against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. The settings for the image above was 1/2000 @ f1.6 @ 100 ISO, and the reason for the wide aperture was that I wanted to have the skyline appear as that dreamlike haze in the background.  The bright light though, forced a very fast shutter speed.  In this case 1/2000th would let the background over-expose a little and blow out somewhat, but give me some detail.   But to control the lighting on my model more specifically than just the available light, I used flash. For the lighting  Read more inside...

traveling light in Vegas

April 24, 2008 Neil vN 20 Comments

Even though most of the tutorial pages here deal with on-camera flash, I don't limit myself to just using on-camera flash. When I need off-camera lighting or when I need more juice from my flashguns than a speedlight can deliver, I use the Q-flashes made by Quantum. For this wedding in Las Vegas, I decided to travel light and as an additional flashgun, bring along a single Quantum Q-flash in addition to the two speedlights I normally take along with me when I photograph a destination wedding.  I also wanted the flexibility of wireless TTL control over the flash, and therefore I chose a  Read more inside...

off-camera flash photography: what are your camera settings?

March 27, 2008 Neil vN 30 Comments

off-camera flash photography: what are your camera settings?

What are your settings? -  a question that I am often asked about various images. Sometimes, the answer is surprising  -  it doesn't really matter. Sometimes the specific settings are of importance, but usually much less so than the method of getting to correct exposure of the ambient light and the flash. This is the photographic equivalent of teaching someone to fish, versus just slapping a fish down on a dinner plate.  Just telling my settings will reveal very little about the how.  And yet, the how is far  Read more inside...

using bounce flash outdoors

January 3, 2008 Neil vN 16 Comments

using bounce flash outdoors

While the bounce flash techniques described on these pages are heavily dependent on shooting indoors which provide those places to bounce flash off ... it wouldn't seem possible to use these techniques outdoors.  After all, you can't bounce flash off the clouds.  (Although we've all seen photographers attempt this outside.) So while there are obvious limitations in applying these bounce flash techniques outdoors, there are times when these techniques can still be quite effective. This example, also shown in the tutorial pages is of this image taken  Read more inside...

my choice of on-camera flash modifiers

December 13, 2007 Neil vN 170 Comments

my choice of on-camera flash modifiers

There is a fundamental principle in lighting : the larger your light source, the softer your light. Using any of the myriad of flash modifiers that are on offer, helps in achieving that - spreading the light from the on-camera Speedlight much wider, thereby creating softer light that direct flash would've given.  However, (and this is a big however), these flash modifiers also throw light forward.  Ultimately all flash modifiers do the same thing - they disperse a lot of light around the room, while throwing some measure of light directly  Read more inside...

Directional light from your on-camera flash

October 25, 2007 Neil vN 55 Comments

Directional light from your on-camera bounce flash

Most often when photographers start using their flashguns out of the directly-forward position, they move the flash head to point 45’ or 90’ upward. The idea here is to bounce flash off the ceiling. Even though this is an improvement in most cases over using the flashgun pointing directly forward, this is also most often not ideal. We can improve on this. If we consider how studio lights are set up, we’ll rarely see a light source directly overhead of our subject. Top lighting just isn’t as flattering as light coming in from an  Read more inside...

Photography: Finding the light

September 12, 2007 Neil vN 55 Comments

Photography: Finding the light

I've been so inspired by the various photographers at seminars and magazine articles, telling everyone to just look for the light and to find the light. So many photographers just use available light, and make the rest of us who aren't blessed with perfect light like they have in la-la-land, feel so inadequate. It is our failing as photographers if we can't find the light and use it properly. I felt I had to rise up to this and push myself as a photographer, and just look for the light.  It is there to be found! Inspired like that, I approached  Read more inside...

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