Welcome back to our discussion on flashes. In the last article we discussed what to look for in a good flash. Now that you’ve settled on one (hopefully at not too great of expense to your wallet), now we need to take a look at how to use that flash in a practical situation. I took use of my camera and my flash over the past holidays at many gatherings with my family. Let’s review a vertical bounce technique first.
Shot on a Fujifilm s100fs PS with no flash and high iso
Also shot on the Fujifilm s100fs with a vertically bounced flash
The picture above on the left is a shot taken without a flash. As you can see, the lighting in the room is extremely dim. In order to even try to get a decent shot without a flash I had to ratchet the ISO up to 1600+ (I think I may have even played with 3200) and dropped the shutter speed way down to about 1/15. Obviously this was not a recipe for much success. Most pictures turned out either fairly soft and noisy or just plain blurred by subject movement. Contrast that to the picture taken with the flash, I was able to use ISO 400 producing much less noise and could up my shutter speed as needed. By bouncing my flash straight up off the ceiling I was able to greatly diffuse my light across the whole room. This produced a picture that was mostly shadow free. I like using this approach when I need to illuminate a wide area such as a group shot or want to overexpose the picture to produce a soft cover effect. Now let’s look at horizontal bouncing…
Horribly exposed and balanced picture but straight from the camera...
Same settings except with a flash bounced horizontally to the side
In these two pictures we can see the effects of an effective horizontal bounce versus no flash. In the shot with no flash we have a very very yellow picture! (This is what happens when you combine a couple of incandescent lamp lights along with some yellow carpeting). I must admit that I didn’t adjust the white balance in the picture without the flash so that I’m sure did aggravate the problem. However, by using the flash I was able to balance out the lighting in the room and get a decent result. I personally believe that horizontal bouncing can be the most rewarding technique but also much harder to master. In this picture I bounced the flash to the left against the wall about 8-10 feet away. In this picture the lighting was fairly equal (a lamp on either side of the subject). However, what about when you want to preserve those dramatic shadows? Let’s look at the next set of pictures…
Another horribly exposed and balanced picture straight from the P&S camera
Bounced Horizantally in the direction of the light source
Here I made a conscious choice that I wanted preserve the dramatic shadows and still try to get a clear, well balanced picture. I chose to bounce my flash horizontally in the direction of the most light! This runs counter-intuitive to what most professionals would tell you about using your flash. Most say to use your flash to fill in the shadows to get a well exposed and distinguishable picture. In general I agree with this technique but I also on occasion like to maintain the dramatic shadows in a natural scene. You can use your flash to achieve this by simply pointing in the direction of the light (as long as there is something bounce off of). There’s so much more we could cover but I think this is as far as I’m going to go today. As always, I recommend visiting and reading the excellent Lighting 101 tutorial at: http://www.strobist.blogspot.com
