Flagging your back-lighting flash with the black foamie thing
My favorite on-camera light modifier, the black foamie thing, is of course, nothing more than a very affordable (and flexible) way to flag your flash. This helps control how the light from your on-camera flash spills. (It's not a flash diffuser!) I also keep one on hand when I use off-camera flash, to flag any direct flash - whether to control it from flaring the lens, or from spilling onto my subject.
When I did the photo session for the review of the Canon 600EX-RT, I had to flag the one speedlight so it didn't spill Read more inside...
Okay, true strobists might recoil in horror, but I often prefer using TTL flash to sweeten an image when shooting on location. I get to the final image faster than if I had gone the more methodical route of manual flash.
For some situations, manual flash is the only way to go. For example, when your subject is static in relation to your lights and you have to get consistent lighting and consistent exposures, image after image, then manual flash makes the most sense. But for times where you want to shoot faster, and shoot on the Read more inside...
Taking photographs of people in hard sunlight will always be one of the more daunting lighting situations we can find ourselves in. Without additional lighting, or the use of scrims, we have a few basic ways of dealing with the harsh sun:
- pose our subject into the light,
- pose our subject with their back to the sun, or
- just suck it up and accept that our photos will look bad.
Well, that last option isn't really the way to go if we have any pride in our work as photographers. Which leaves us with the two other options ... Read more inside...
Photoshop tip - easy effect for more punch to your photos
Here is a well-known Photoshop technique - one that I like and use on occasion. It desaturates the photograph, while also compressing the tonal range. It creates a modern look that also looks quite trendy. It is also quite easy to apply, by dragging the layers from a reference image once you've set it up.
Starting with the original image, I add these two layers: Read more inside...
A simple lighting setup for home studio photography
This photo of Anelisa and Aleona, two of my favorite models, were taken towards the end of the evening of the most recent flash photography and lighting workshop in New York. The studio that the workshop was held in, had a white cyclorama that was just inviting to be used. As a recap of manual flash photography, I wanted to show how simple and easy a basic studio lighting setup was ... and that it was quite within the reach of every photographer. Well, not the studio itself, but the lighting setup and equipment, as well as the Read more inside...
As a photographer you'll often hear instruction to just "look at the available light". Great. But this advice is also often given without clear examples of what we're actually supposed to be looking at. So let's explore that a little bit using a sequence of images of our model, Aleona, photographed during a recent individual photography workshop.
This is also keeping with the loose theme over the past few weeks, that for a photographer "using the available light" is not a random thing or just a meaningless catch-phrase. Read more inside...
Going to High-Speed Flash sync, ie, over maximum flash sync speed, comes with a penalty - loss of flash power. This might be a crucial thing when we are shooting in really bright light, and need to match that with flash. So here's a solid recipe for when it makes most sense to go to high-speed flash sync / Auto FP.
High Speed Flash Sync makes most sense when you need either
- shallow depth-of-field, or
- fast shutter speeds,
and
- you have the flash power to spare.
As mentioned in the tutorial on high-speed flash sync (HSS), there is Read more inside...
recap: photography workshop - Jersey City & Manhattan (2010)
As a recap of the two-day long flash photography workshop, here are some images to show you some of the areas we photographed, and used as a backdrop. In the photo above, Aleona iscaught in mid-air during the recent flash photography workshop. As part of an explanation of High-Speed Flash Sync, she patiently vaulted into the air numerous times for everyone who attended the 2nd day of the workshop. As before, the 2nd day is the on-location fun practical segment of the workshop which takes place in Manhattan.
The Read more inside...
Aleona was one of our striking models at the recent 2-day long flash photography workshop held in Jersey City and New York City. The setting in this photo is the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, with Manhattan in the background. The challenge was to overcome the hard sunlight with a small speedlight ... and still make it look good.
The flash photography workshops have undergone certain changes over time - the material and sequence of material are always honed over time. The biggest recent change is that the workshop has expanded with an Read more inside...
The model, Aleona, was lit with an off-camera Q-flash T5D-R, using Quantum’s wireless system, and a 24×32 softbox, mounted on a lightstand.
The settings were: 1/1000th @ f4 @ 200 ISO
It is noteworthy that this was shot at 1/1000th of a second with a Q-flash .. and they don't support high-speed sync.
I never paid much attention to the physics and shape of the pulse of flash, or how the pulse of light is shaped, but after reading up on how the new PocketWizards work, I was curious .. and played around with the Q-flash. And to my Read more inside...
