So the other day, I got a message on Flickr from a chap called John (check out his Flickr photostream) asking for some advice on how to use his Sony HVL-F58AM flash. He’d bought it “on a whim” when Amazon mis-priced it (lucky him!), hadn’t used it much up to now, and didn’t think he’d use it much in the future, unless I could convince him otherwise. I thought, what a great idea for my next blog post! I’d already planned to do a post on the advantages of off-camera flash, and how to soften it in different ways, but this gave me a couple of extra ideas. So think of this as a sales pitch, except I don’t get any commission…
Natural light can be incredible, amazing, beautiful, but it can also be a real pain. Often, when you try to take a portrait shot outdoors it can be really tricky to balance the exposure of the background with the exposure of your subject, and usually you end up underexposing your subject or overexposing the background. The pop-up flash (if you have one) on your camera can help by providing a bit of fill flash flash to balance the exposure. Set it to aperture priority, metering to multi-segment, and can you get a pretty well-balanced exposure. There are a couple of problems. First, is that the fill flash can look pretty flat, because the flash is on the same axis as the camera. Second, is that the quality of light from your pop-up flash isn’t that great. Third, is that if you use a big lens, and your subject is close to the camera, the shadow that the lens casts can show up on your shot, which you’ll see an example of later. Last, the power of the pop-up flash is pretty feeble.
An external flash solves most of these problems. The quality of light is much better, shadows from the lens won’t be a problem, and they have bags of power. And here’s the killer selling point, you can take it off the camera to makes things really interesting. Remember I said that when the flash is on the same axis as the camera, the light can look pretty flat? Well, when you take the camera off axis, you can give your subject real depth, which makes your picture so much more interesting.
I figured that a good way to illustrate the benefits of off-camera flash would be to make a boring subject look interesting. No, not me! I decided to use my watch. The shot below was taken in aperture priority mode at f2.8 with my Tamron 17-50mm lens, which incidentally is a fantastic lens, using the ambient light from a tungsten bulb overhead. Pretty dull and boring huh?
The next shot uses the pop-up flash on the camera to provide some fill. The shot is much brighter and the colour cast is better, not so yellow. But there’s a nasty shadow at the bottom of the shot, cast by the lens.
The next shot is with my Sony HVL-F42AM flash on the camera. The light is nice and bright again, but better quality, not so harsh. And no distracting shadow, because the flash is higher up above the camera. We’re getting there! But it looks a bit flat. The lighting is even across the whole of the watch, giving it little depth.
For the next shot, I took the flash off the camera and attached it to my Manfrotto nano stand, about two or three feet above the subject and at a 45 degree angle, left of camera. I triggered it wirelessly, using the pop-up flash on the camera, but switched to shutter priority and set the shutter speed to 1/200 of a second. This sets the camera to HSS, or high speed sync, meaning that light from the pop-up flash doesn’t show up in your shot, which can be really annoying. The aperture was f2.8, as for the previous shots.
This gives much more depth to the watch, because the lighting is cast unevenly across it, leaving the right hand side in shadow. One problem. The shadow is very harsh and draws your eye away from the subject.
So, we need to soften our off-camera, off-axis light to make that shadow less harsh and less distracting. There are a few ways we can do this, which all give a slightly different feel to our final shot.
We can use an umbrella with a silver lining to bounce light down onto our subject. This scatters the light and makes it slightly more diffuse. If you look at the shadow in the shot below, you’ll see that it has softened up a bit, it’s less well defined and not so distracting.
Only trouble is, because the “bounce” umbrella scatters the light so well, much of it is lost, and the image is slightly less well lit than with the bare flash above.
The umbrella I have is a Lastolite Dual Duty umbrella, which allows you use it as a bounce umbrella, with the black and silver cover, or if you take the cover off, it becomes a white shoot through umbrella.
A shoot through umbrella solves a couple of the problems above. Because you’re shooting the flash through the white umbrella, the light is much more diffuse and shadows are a bit softer, and because the flash is pointed directly at the subject there is a bit less light lost. The shot below shows this.
An amalgamation of the bounce umbrella and the shoot through umbrella is the softbox. Softboxes diffuse the light, using a piece of white material like the shoot through umbrella, and have a silver lining like the bounce umbrella, to redirect stray light back onto your subject. You’ll see that the image below, using a softbox, is slightly brighter than the shoot through umbrella shot, although the shadow is not quite as soft.
If we’d used a reflector, either a silver one or something as simple as a piece of white card, on the right hand side of the subject then we could have reduced the shadows even further. But I prefer some shadow to give the image a bit more depth.
One last option. You could get creative and make a DIY diffuser. Something as simple as a white bedsheet, or a piece of white paper will diffuse your light, or if you do a Google search for “DIY softbox” then you’ll find plenty of designs for making your own softbox.
[Update: Thanks Juergen, for pointing out that a light tent is another option. They give an almost shadowless, studio look to still life shots, and you can pick them up pretty cheaply on eBay.]
So there it is. I think you’ll agree that the bottom shot of the watch looks much better, and is more interesting, than the top shot using ambient light.
And that’s only the beginning of what you can do with an off-camera flash. For my next post, I’ll be giving you a step-by-step guide on how to light a shot using off-camera flash, and how to post process it.
Thanks for all your comments on my getting started guide. I’ve tried to add them in. If anyone has any ideas for future posts, then let me know in the comments. And lastly, thanks to John for the inspiration for this post!
