Using flash effectively and learning about lighting is often the “final frontier” in a photographer’s journey to mastering photography.

This is part four in a five part series on using your detachable SLR flash creatively. Part one covered flash to ambient ratios. Part two covered “shutter drag”. Part three covered bounce flash. You can read them here all on this site.

This instalment is going to cover off-camera flash. By now you should have a good understanding of how your flash affects your exposure, how to balance it with the ambient light and how to bounce if off nearby walls or ceilings to make it look like a much larger light source. All of this stuff becomes easy when you practise.

It’s worth taking a little step to the side here for a moment. I often hear people say that they don’t need to understand flash photography as they’re “natural light photographers.” I’ve never met a skilled natural light photographer who isn’t also a reluctant master of flash photography. That’s simply because the best way to understand, see and learn to control natural light is to first teach yourself about light by mastering flash. So even if you’re a “natural light” shooter, this stuff is well worth the effort. I guarantee it’ll make you a better natural light photographer.

So what’s the deal with off-camera flash? As long as your flash sits on the hotshoe of your camera, it will always be fixed in position relative to your lens. Every landscape-oriented photo you take will be lit from above and every portrait-oriented photo will be lit from the side. And not by much, as your flash is only a few centimeters away from your lens.

That means that your photos will always have that slightly ‘over-flashed’ feel to them. I don’t necessarily mean they’ll be over-exposed, just that they’ll have a fairly flat standard look. Pretty much the same as if you’d taken them with a compact point&shoot, rather than a $10,000 SLR getup. The point of all this gear we use is that it gives us significant advantages over compact cameras. But with our flashes on the hotshoe, all our gear isn’t giving its best.

I’ve shown you how you can make the most of on-camera flash with bouncing and shutter-drag techniques, which are essential tools in any photographer’s technique list, but to really make the most of your lighting, you need to get your flash off-camera.

This means you’ll get separation of your flash from your camera and lens.

But if your flash isn’t in the hotshoe, how do you fire it? There are several ways.

Easiest: If you’re lucky, you won’t need any extra equipment. Your camera’s popup flash might fire your flash, even on TTL. Check out my video for how to set this up using Nikon’s amazing “CLS” lighting system.

Some Canon, Sony and Olympus systems also have wireless flash functionality. If you have two Nikon flashes (or Canons for example) then one flash in the hotshoe can also act as the “Master” to control, and fire, the “Slave” anywhere in range. These two flashes may be the same model of flash, just set to two different modes. So if you shoot a top-end pro SLR that doesn’t have a pop-up flash, you may still be able to do this.

Easy: An off-camera cord. This is a simple piece of gear that has a male hotshoe on one end that goes on your camera and a female hotshoe on the other for your flash. Check out my video summary of off-camera cord use.

Make sure you buy the off-camera cord that works with your camera and flash or you might not get the TTL metering you’re going to want. You can get them either made by the manufacturer (Canon, Nikon, etc) or straight out of China. The Chinese versions are always cheaper but many aren’t made with the same attention to detail so do check this before choosing. You can use a PC cord instead, but I’m only going to suggest you use TTL as you have to set your flash manually with a PC cord.

Advanced: You start getting into significant investments when you go to wireless TTL systems, but the advantages are total reliability, considerable range and incredibly versatile functionality. The gold standard for off-camera TTL wireless flash at the moment is the Pocket Wizard Flex system. Radiopoppers also do a really cool alternative that I think comes in a little more affordably too.

There are some other wireless systems like the Elinchrom Skyports but as they’re mainly designed for studio systems, they don’t work with TTL.

I prefer to use my Nikon’s CLS system and always ALWAYS carry an off-camera cord just in case something goes wrong. It’s essential if you’re a pro photographer or anyone who takes their shooting very seriously to always have backups. An off-camera cord is the perfect backup for wireless gear.

OK. So that’s the how. Now for the why.

Here are some almost-straight-outta-the-camera examples shot at a tradeshow recently…

This is on-camera flash. I think my model Sinead knew what it would look like, so decided she wasn’t happy.

Now for off-camera flash with a Nikon SB800 fired wirelessly by the popup on my Nikon D90 held at arm’s length. Again, not pretty.

Here’s an example of a super simple off-camera photo where I’m holding an orbis® off to one side. You can even see my light source in the photo… but note how pleasant the light now looks on her features, with a soft fall-off that’s much easier on the eye and much closer to the way natural light might fall in through a window. The light in this photo is so much better than the light with bare off-camera flash thanks to using a larger light source, like a small softbox or in this case my orbis®

Natural light very rarely comes from right next to your eyes, which is my theory for why photos taken with on-camera flash look so characteristically slightly out of place. When we get our flash off-camera we start to be able to mimic the light that’s all around us that comes in from oblique angles. Light isn’t always the same size either; that’s to say that sometimes a light source is tiny, like a candle or a torch and sometimes it’s huge, like a large skylight or window. When we get our flashes off the hotshoe it also gets a lot easier to change the size and shape of the light as well as its direction.

That’s going to be my topic for my final instalment next time around when I’ll dive in detail into using off-camera flash.

Links, resources and cool lighting sites:

• http://www.sportsshooter.com/message_display.html?tid=37811 to let me know what you think of this series, and tell me what you’d like me to cover
• http://www.pocketwizard.com/products/transmitter_receiver/
• http://www.radiopopper.com/products
• www.orbisflash.com
• www.lumiquest.com
• www.honlphoto.com
• www.youtube.com/enlightphoto
• http://www.dg28.com/blog/technique/index.htm

- by James Madelin, inventor of the orbis®, pro photographer and lighting workshop tutor. © James Madelin 2011

This is part three in a four part series on using your detachable SLR flash creatively. Part one covered flash to ambient ratios. Part two covered “shutter drag”.

You should now be having a lot more fun with your flash. You’ll have quite a few disasters, but if you’ve stuck at it, you should also have had some great “Ah HA!” moments. If you use your camera and flash to make money, you should be much more confident about your ability to get a broader range of photos in any situation.

This article introduces bounce flash, which is a technique to turn your tiny flash into a huge, soft, gorgeous light source. Without having to spend time and money on a huge, soft gorgeous light source.

Because your flash gun is such a small yet powerful light, you’ve probably noticed those horrible, hard edged shadows you always get in your photos. They’re distracting at the best of times, and can only work if you’re photographing someone spectacularly handsome or beautiful. That just doesn’t happen that often to most of us, right? It’s probably another reason you don’t use your flash much.

Bounce flash depends on pointing your flash at a nearby surface so that when its light bounces back onto your subject, it becomes a much larger light source. Before we get into it, here are some things you need to consider:

• Is there a nearby surface, like a wall or ceiling, to bounce off ?
• Is it light coloured ? Is it neutral in colour ? If I bounce my flash off it, will the light come back green or red or worse ?
• When the light bounces back onto my subject, what direction will it be coming from relative to my subject ?

Like many things in photography, don’t worry about memorising this or think you need to hold it in your mind to get it right… Practise will do that for you.

As you might have gathered, in a lot of situations, if the answer to the first question above is NO, there’s not generally a lot you can do. Unless you happen to have a surface with you, like a large white handkerchief, a book or something. That’s right, you can make the surface yourself. But if your pockets are empty and there are no nearby surfaces, bouncing isn’t going to work.

So here goes, let’s dive into it. I need to get a shot of a young model. It’s got to be good…. he knows I’m a photographer. But as I look around, all I see is a messy town centre. And all my lighting gear is in the car; I’ve just got my camera and my flash. Time to bounce.

Leaning my model against the black sign board, I’ve just got my flash firing straight at him from the hotshoe on top of the camera.

I spy a light, neutral coloured wall on what looks like a folly (yes, this is the UK, it’s not uncommon to find follies in town centers). Conveniently, there’s a black sign board right next to it. Here’s a shot of what direct flash would look like (right)

Not only does the light look horrible, you’ll notice that the black board is a lot more reflective than I thought, giving me an annoying and distracting mirror image. So I do two things… first up reframe to lose the reflection and second aim my flash head away from my subject at the light coloured wall. That will bounce the flash’s light back at him, but with a lot more chance to spread, the light will come back onto my subject casting a much softer, less harsh, less distracting light.

Note that I’m shooting with my left eye, keeping my right eye open. If you shoot press photography or anywhere busy, work on this technique until you can do it… it pays to have an eye on what’s going on around you as well as one in your viewfinder.

And this is the result:

Note how soft the light is. Also that the cream coloured wall has warmed it up beautifully. There’s room for improvement in post processing of course, but this is fine straight out of the camera; maybe slightly better framing and a tiny touch of colour balancing to lessen a little bit of that warmth could be an option. But with no accessories, on camera flash and less than two minutes to shoot in a town I’d never been to before ? Bouncing can save your bacon.

With the bit between my teeth, I figured I’d try an off-camera bounce. Getting your flash off-camera is something I’m going to cover more next time, but here goes a bounce/ off-camera combo shot:

First up, direct off-camera flash:

Here’s the bounce setup

And here’s with bounce. Bingo.

I should probably get rid of that distracting little door next to the model’s right arm. But this is all about the light. You get it I’m sure.

Are you going to find the same combination of walls ? Nope, so grab your camera, flash and a friend and go and have some fun experimenting bouncing.

You can bounce off the ceiling, but it’s hard to get it right without finding that your subject(s) eye sockets darken a lot. With ceiling bounce, you’re often left with soft light, but it comes down onto your subject which often doesn’t look right. But it’s all in the practise. So get to work trying this out and having some fun!

Next time… off camera flash tricks. Don’t forget, let me know what you think of the series so far and suggest anything I’m missing, or that you’d like to see (link below).

Links, resources and cool lighting sites:

• http://www.sportsshooter.com/message_display.html?tid=37811 (to let me know what you think of this series, and tell me what else you’d like me to cover)
• http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101-balancing-flash-and.html
• http://www.daveblackphotography.com/workshop/06-2008.htm
• www.orbisflash.com
• www.youtube.com/enlightphoto
• http://www.dg28.com/blog/technique/index.htm

by James Madelin, inventor of the orbis™, pro photographer and lighting workshop tutor.

© James Madelin 2011

Now you should have a better idea how any photo taken with your flash is a combination of the exposure from the flash’s burst of light and the ambient constant light.

This article introduces flash blur or “shutter drag” which is a technique to make on-camera flash photos interesting. An added advantage is that it cleans up what may at first appear to be a cluttered environment.

Because the flash attached to your hotshoe is fixed in the same axis relative to your lens however you hold your camera, it’s a challenge to take photos with your flash in the hotshoe that look any different from those you might take with a compact camera. That’s probably one of the reasons you don’t use your flash much.

The shutter drag technique uses the ambient light to our advantage. This doesn’t work if you’re outdoors on a bright day; you need to be shooting somewhere, or at a time, when you’d be thinking it was about time to get your flash out.

It’s easiest to set your camera on the M mode, otherwise it will probably set your shutterspeed too slow, if it’s dark, or too fast if it thinks it should be at the maximum synch speed. It depends from camera to camera and mode to mode, but we want to be in control.

We’ll start at ISO400 and f5.6 or f.8 as they’re both good middle ground apertures; not so wide open (eg. f2.8) that your focus might not be accurate due to shallow depth of field, nor so stopped down (eg. F16) where your flash will have to be at, or near, full power.

Settings of 1/20th at f5.6 IS400 produced this appealing movement blur as a basis for our exposure.

With your flash off, set your shutter speed around 1/20 of a second and, as you pan your camera from left to right, press the shutter mid-swing. Your results should be slightly underexposed and blurred. Too dark ? Drop your shutter speed and try again. Too bright ? Raise your shutter speed. Your settings will depend on where you are. My first example photo is at 1/20 of a second in a tradeshow hall at New York’s Photoplus Expo 2010. Remember, this exposure should be on the underexposed side; a little dark.

Now turn your flash on and set it to TTL (or E-TTL or whatever your system calls it) and, with your camera settings unchanged, have a friend walk past you as you shoot them.

You should get something like this second example:

The shutter drag technique freezes the foreground, in this case a model walking past, while blurring the background. It’s a great technique for cleaning up messy backgrounds in crowded areas. Note the flash caught some of another passerby but a couple of minutes post-processing with Curves or Levels would subtly reduce that distraction even further.

As you can see, with this photo you get both the blurred background and a sharp subject. Why is the subject sharp and not blurred ? Remember your first test shot, before you used a flash, had to be underexposed ? That’s so that when we introduce the flash hitting our subject, with the TTL system correctly lighting her face, the short duration of the flash (hey, that’s why it’s called a “flash”!) freezes your subject. The background is too far away (mostly) to be hit by the flash. Voilá, an interesting shot with a hotshoe flash; a great exposure of your subject and a de-cluttered background.

Shutter drag works great if you have to shoot something in a hurry in a press-scrum or busy environment as the movement blur in the background often makes it a lot less distracting that it would otherwise be. This also works really well in nightclubs or really dark places with interesting background lights. Practice makes perfect… too long a shutter speed and it gets messy.

Using a slow shutter speed allowed the nearly totally dark alley to show on the final exposure, without distracting from the foreground element, the model.

You don’t even need to make the background blur. Just using this technique without any camera movement can bring out a pitch black background and make it a feature of the shot. My third photo was taken with a shutter speed of 2 seconds.

Although I didn’t want much camera shake, hand holding for 2 seconds is always going to result in some blur. I could have used a tripod but I was shooting fast so didn’t have time. I knew the thing that counted in the frame, the model, was going to be sharp as she was being flashed. She was lit with an orbis™ held out at arm’s length, a technique we’ll begin covering in the next part of this series when I’ll introduce off-camera flash.

I’m using the same technique here in a pitch black underground bar. To liven up the photo I used an 8 second shutter speed; I shot the girls and then waved the camera at the lights. The newspaper loved the unusual style and ran it. With practice you can get the light trails not to intersect your subject if you prefer it that way.

Links, resources and cool lighting sites:

• Strobist – lighting 101
• Dave Black Photography
• Orbis flash
• Enlightphoto on YouTube
• http://www.dg28.com/blog/technique/index.htm

James Madelin is inventor of the orbis™, a pro photographer and a lighting workshop tutor.

All text and images © James Madelin 2011

For many, the challenge is a step too far. The flash gun you bought lives in the bottom of your bag, or worse – in a cupboard, and to anyone who asks, you are a “natural” or “available light” photographer. If you’re anything like I used to be, you really mean that you’re a photographer who knows next to nothing about light! That was me a few years ago, so I’m talking from personal experience.

Until recently, learning about lighting was a hugely involving and time-consuming process. Now, thanks to the instant feedback we get on the back of our camera, it’s easy. It’s just a question of finding out where to go to learn.

I’m going to de-mystify this whole thing a little bit and set you on the way to having fun with light.

To paraphrase famous photographer Joe McNally, “I’m an available light photographer. I use any light I can lay my hands on.”

So let’s put our flash onto our hotshoe. This is a great place to start. Yes, the flash is fixed in position relative to the lens and everyone’s always talking about off-camera flash these days, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

With the flash set on its TTL setting and your camera set to ISO200, put your camera on f5.6 on AV mode and let the camera decide the shutter speed. Take a photo of something. It’s always fun if you can find something (or someone) beautiful, but anything will do. Now set your camera mode to M for Manual and fix the same aperture and shutter speed into the camera that you had just now. Take another photo of the same subject with the same positioning as before. Your two photos should look identical.

Here’s where it gets interesting. We’re going to play around with the shutter speed and see what happens. It’s easy to forget the concept of “STOPS” of light thanks to our modern cameras that we can adjust in small increments, but to review, shutter speed ‘stops’ correspond thus:

… > 1/4 > 1/8 > 1/15 > 1/30 > 1/60 > 1/125 > 1/250 > 1/500 > 1/1000 > …

You can change your aperture in stops too, hence the term f-stops, but we’ll come to that later.

So if you started on 1/160, drop your shutter speed to the nearest stop below that; 1/125 and take another photo (same subject, same position). Then a photo at 1/60, 1/30 and so on until your photo is blown out when reviewed in the back of your camera. Then go back to the shutter speed you started with and RAISE the shutter speed, for example to 1/250. You’ll see the background get progressively darker while your subject remains well lit by the flash. Be careful not to exceed your maximum flash synch speed (see your manual for details)

What we’re doing here is changing the ratio in the photo of ambient light to flash exposure. Every time you use flash in a photo, the final image is composed of some ambient light (i.e. light from any source that you can see with your eyes) and flash light (i.e. light cast from the flash(es) you’ve introduced).

You control how much ambient light appears in the photo with the shutter speed. Take a look at the differences in the photos you took in the exercise above and we’ll go over what’s happening in the next instalment.

Here are some hasty examples. A very unglamorous set of a corner of my untidy desk at enlight photo HQ. I’ll replace these shortly with some glamorous shots of a gorgeous model in New York but until then, these will show you what you should be aiming for. All of these are at ISO200. My AV setting of f5.6 gave me a starting exposure of 1/60. You may find as soon as you turn your flash on and put it in the hotshoe, your system defaults to the flash synch speed. If this happens, simply remember the shutter speed that the AV setting chose and set your camera to M and dial it in.

OK, so here is a photo taken with the flash on TTL, shutter speed 1/60 and f5.6. Note the foreground is perfectly exposed with the flash (albeit with horrible shadows) and the background of the office where the flash doesn’t reach is exposed… kinda just about.

Next up I’ve left the flash on manual, but gone for 1/30. Note the flash foreground exposure is identical, but the background lit by “ambient light” is brighter.

All I’ve changed is the shutter speed to 1/15. Again note how the foreground exposure is unchanged, but the background is even brighter.

And finally, shutter speed to 1/5. Now the background is almost getting too bright. Yet the forground is still lit perfectly with the flash. D’you see how changing the shutter speed has altered the “ambient light”-lit parts of the image ?

So now let’s go the other way. Here the shutter speed is 1/125. So the background is consequently darker.

And finally, darker still with the shutter speed at the maximum synch speed of 1/200. Notice how in all of these shots the foreground, lit by the TTl flash, is identical. Because we haven’t changed the position or the aperture, the flash has actually fired all of these at the same power.

Now your turn… imitate what I’ve done and think through what’s happening.

Resources and cool lighting sites:

• www.orbisflash.com (yep, that’s my website)
• www.youtube.com/enlightphoto
• strobist.blogspot.com (check out the excellent Lighting 101)
• www.lastolite.com
• www.chimeralighting.com

James is inventor of the orbis™, a pro photographer and lighting workshop guru. Watch out for the next part of this series soon, featuring shutter drag and second, or “back” curtain synch.

Main photo – James Madelin demonstrating on the Orbis photowalk in Leeds, September 2010. Image by Matt Dean. All text and other images © James Madelin 2010