Flash Photography

Flash photography certainly has its place, but not always where you might think.

Sure, it is one option in low ambient light situations and can also be used in daylight to make sure the subject is correctly exposed without overexposing everything else. But is a standard 'pop-up' flash the best option.

Pop-ups are useful but are all but guaranteed to create red-eye when photographing people. And are they really powerful enough to be useful.

Realistically you need to buy a flash gun and I talk about a few of the things to consider when using one. These will also influence which flashgun is right for you!

Now, there were some maths in this podcast. The important maths is the Guide Number (GN) of the flash. This is calculated from:

GN = (flashgun to subject distance) x (Aperture needed for good exposure)

This will be specified at a particular ISO. The example I gave is a distance of 7.5 meters at aperture f/8, which gives a GN of 60 (7.5 x 8) @ ISO 100. 

Obviously you will need to vary the aperture and/or ISO as you change the distance to your subject, but the answer to the equation will always be 60.

Flash (especially off-camera flash) adds another dimension to your photography and is well worth exploring.

It's time for another podcast...

Transcript

>> Speaker A: 0:17

Hello again, and welcome to another podcast. In this one, I thought I'd talk about something that I don't think I've spoken about before in a podcast. If you have been with me long enough to remember when I was doing, a monthly kind, of magazine, a PDF magazine that I'd send out every month to my mailing list, I did have an article in my of those about flash photography. But flash photography is something that I don't use very much myself, given that I'm primarily interested in photographing wildlife. You can imagine that, even if I'm shooting during the day, a bright light suddenly appearing out of nowhere is not going to do me any favors when it comes to getting natural looking photographs with animals. So I don't use flash photography with wildlife. Definitely don't use it at night. it does have a place, that's for sure, and it isn't always where you think. So I think most people just think of flash photography as what you would do if you're taking photographs at night or indoors when it's dark and you don't have enough ambient light. So you go to flash photography, and that's definitely, one of the areas where you'd use a flash, but you can also use it during daylight to create fill in. So it could be that you're shooting into the sun a little bit, there's quite a bright ambient light, and your subjects, so I'm thinking portrait here, but you're trying to get the faces, and there's quite a lot of shadow, and it's actually very difficult to get a good exposure of the whole scene without either having, your subjects with dark faces, so you can barely see who they are, or you totally overexpose the, background so that you can get a good exposure on their face. So fill in flash is a way of dealing with that kind of situation. But if you're going to use flash photography, if you're going to get into it, I do recommend that you spend a little time just learning about it. Now, with this podcast, I'm not going to do by any means, any kind of an in depth discussion or tutorial on flash photography, partly because it's not something I use very much, and so I'm not the best person to speak to about, flash photography, but primarily because, there's quite a lot to it. So what I thought I'd do in this podcast is really just give you some pointers and I don't know if I'm dispelling any myths, but at least give you a version, if you like, of how you work with Flash. So flash definitely has a place. Now, most cameras these days, that I've seen anyway, have a built in pop up flash. Certainly dslrs would have them. and of the two cameras that I've got, I use a canon eos, five ds and a canon eos, seven d mark ii. And the 7D does have a pop up, but the eos five doesn't. And something I've noticed is that the more professionally targeted camera bodies, the more expensive ones quite often won't have a pop up flash. And putting my own opinion aside about pop up flash, I'd say there's probably a good reason for that. That if the people designing the cameras are probably thinking that if you are, let's say, committed enough to your photography to invest in a really top end camera, you will know enough about flash photography to not use something like a pop up flash. why don't I like them? Well, Flash, let's go back to what flash photography is. You're basically providing an additional light source for the photography that you're doing. However, how effective that light is, is very very heavily dependent on the distance between your flash and your subject. And generally speaking, I'd certainly favour that when, if I am using Flash, I much prefer to use something that's a lot more powerful than a pop up flash will give me. Because realist really, for a pop up flash, again, my opinion, you can use it as filling, but you've got to be very close to your subject for it to be of any real benefit. And if you're using it at night, I think it's very very limited. So it very much limits what you can do. So I guess that's point number one. Flash, can be good pop up flash, generally not. So where does that leave you? Well the next place to go is a flashlight. So something like the speed lights that can and do. Or you might, if you're using another maker camera, most manufacturers will have a flash gun that's designed to work with their cameras. And what I mean by that is they will talk through the hot shoe connection, which is the little connection on the top of the camera that you probably noticed with some silver contacts on and a little area for something to slide in. Well that's where your flash gun goes. And if you've got a flash gun that's designed to work with a particular body, then all of the kind of electronics and communication, that you kind of need to know a little bit about, but then can forget about once you understand it. That's where all the magic happens, rather than in the old days, we'd have cables off to the side and this kind of thing. So we generally don't see that these days. I don't, having said all of that, I don't use a canon flash. I actually use one from mets, simply because I've used them in the past for when I was doing portrait work. And I like their flash guns. So key point from that though is if you are going to buy a flash gun from another manufacturer, say a third party manufacturer, do make sure that is compatible with the camera you're using because these things, they're not particularly cheap. I mean, they're not hugely expensive, expensive either. but nonetheless, it's, it's an investment and you do want to make sure that your investment is actually going to work with the camera you're using. Otherwise, you know, it's just a big mistake. So I've already mentioned that the key thing about Flash is it's how powerful it is and how far away you are from your subject. So the really the only technical thing, or at least technically in terms of it has numbers, is a thing called guide number. And this will be something that you will see on a flash spec. The guide number will be there. And basically that tells you how powerful that flash gun is. And essentially, the bigger the number, the more powerful the flash. Now, what it actually means is that you'll have a number. And let's take the number 60, for example, which is actually quite high. And that number is the result of a little calculation. And that calculation is the distance from the flash gun to the subject multiplied by the aperture that needs to be sent on the camera for good exposure. So for example, if I'm taking a photograph of a subject that is seven and a half meters away from the flash gun, you'll notice I've used really easy numbers here. Seven, and a half meters away, and f eight is the ideal aperture for me to use to get a correct exposure. That gives me the number 60. So that would be that guide number. However, those of you who know your exposure triangle will, know that there's an important bit of information missing. And that is, what's the ISO level for that to all happen? So the ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor or the film. So when you look at a guide number. It will basically, specify a number. So that's how powerful the flash is. But at a particular, ISO. So that might be 100. So it could be 60 at ISO 100. So this is the kind of thing to think about or to understand, I guess, when you're looking at these specs. Now, I haven't mentioned shutter speed, and that's another thing I will talk about. So when you start using a flash, you generally have a flash sync speed. Now, in the old days, it used to be one 60th of a second. These days, it's more likely to be, one, two 50th is, a number that a lot of cameras will do these days. So, obviously much faster. And on some cameras, you can go even faster than that. And they have a thing called, sss high speed sync. And it basically means that the electronics, linking the camera and the flash gun and all that stuff together will run at a higher, shutter speed. I think m if you're going to get into that, then you definitely need to, start looking and learning more about flash photography, because that's sort of beyond what I want to talk about in this, little podcast. but for most of us, a 60th, a 60th you can hand hold. That's generally regarded for most people and most cameras, they're using as the slowest shutter speed you can go to and still hand hold and get a nice, stable image. some of us, it might be faster than that because you can't, you're not that steady at one 60th of a second, but that's where that number comes from. Obviously, if you're able to sync up to one 250th of a second, that's a much faster shutter speed. that, you know, you've got less worry about having a blurry final image as long as you do everything else right. So, what shutter speed you need to use? you can. So normally you would use, you would just sync to that shutter speed, and the camera may well automatically sync the shutter speed to one 250th if you want to. and if you do want to vary the shutter speed, the recommendation is that you go for a slower shutter speed than your syncing speed. So if you're synchronizing at one 250th, you go for something a little bit slower. The reason for that is that it means you're exposing the sensor or the film to both ambient light and flash photography light. And the reason you might want to do that is that you get a more natural looking, image, a more natural looking color, or black and white shading, whatever, you know, contrast. but that's where that comes from when, as always with any aspect of photography, the key is to practice, try different settings, try different modes, all those sorts of things, and really get familiar with what your camera, your setup can do in the situation that you're working in. Because I don't know what you're photographing, I don't know who you are. So, it's really impossible for me to give you anything other than the most general of advice. Now, some cameras have a thing called flash. exposure compensation. All that does. it tries to compensate when it decides the flash is either giving too much light or too little. And that's fine. And in fact you can have a. I'm going to talk about how these things do the metering in a moment. but you do need to very much play with that because anything that's automated when it comes to exposure, it's going to be trying. It's gonna try and get what we call a mid tone. So the camera is set up to expose correctly for what we call mid tone. So this is just something that isn't too dark, too light, too bright, all those kind of things. And that's what the camera will always be looking for and trying to expose to. So if you have a subject that is not a mid tone, the chances are the camera is going to get it wrong. So whereas flash exposure compensation might be feature and it's not on every camera for sure, it may be something. Again, I would suggest that you just experiment with it, look at what the manufacturer recommends in terms of using that setting, and then just play around with it and get familiar with it. something I'm going to talk about is basically another term you might see. This is the other technical bit, really either TTL or eTTL. TTL stands for through the lens. And it's basically one method that you can use to get an exposure, using your flash and camera combination. So what will happen is that, when you press the shutter button, you'll get a. The flash will actually send pulse flight out. You'll get a kind of pre flash. And that's designed to give the camera some idea of what the exposure is going to be. because if you think of it, if you've got quite a dark scene and you're using the flash as pretty much the sole light source, which is, on the whole, I wouldn't recommend it. But there are exceptions. obviously, until you fire the flash up, the camera has no idea what the exposure needs to be. So you'll get a single pulse first and then the main flash happens. But that initial pulse is to allow the camera to use its own metering through the lens metering system it uses to calculate what the correct exposure needs to be. So it will work out the aperture that you need to be on to, get a correct exposure. so that's TTL. The other way you can do it is manual. And you'll probably see that setting somewhere on your flash gun, somewhere near TTL. Usually they're a slider or some sort of a switch, or it might be on a menu. These days, manual means simply that, the flash will just pump out whatever, however strong a light you tell it to do. And the actual exposure is all down to you. So, with TTL or ETTL, the camera is trying to get calculate the correct exposure. The alternative to that is manual. And that's where you are doing everything. So, that can be better for sure. it just means that you need to take some test shots generally to make sure you've got everything exposed the way you want it to. as I've said, cameras themselves, and this is for any automatic exposure that a camera is doing. It, doesn't have to be flash, but cameras are looking for mid tones. So if you are in a situation where you've got a very dark subject, what the camera will tend to do is to overexpose everything else because it's trying to treat the, subject as a mid tone. And the same, if it's very bright, it will tend to underexpose everything. So you will get the. I try not to use the word failure of correct exposure, but I guess that's sort of what it is. but again, this comes with experience, knowing when to override the camera's, own exposure settings. Now, a lot of these things you can fix in post processing. But again, I always recommend, and I would like to get the actual exposure, the exposure that creates the photograph as correct as possible. So that any additional work that needs to be done to that in terms of exposure or color or anything else is absolutely minimal. Because the further you get away from what you shot, the more the chances are that you're going to end up with something pretty ugly in front of you. You'll get a lot of, maybe, color hues. You get a lot of pixels showing through all sorts of things. So it's always best to get the best possible exposure when you take the initial shot. Now, I've mentioned, ah, fill in flash. That's something where you're using the flash to fill in, an area that, where you've already got ambient lighting, maybe quite strong ambient lighting, but you just want to put a bit more flash onto, or a bit more light onto your subject. So that's one way you'd be using flash, probably during the day, actually. if you've got a lot of ambient light. another thing to be aware of with flash is that it can produce quite a harsh light. If you're using a flash gun, particularly if you're photographing a subject with, quite a low ambient light, you're going to get a very harsh, light. And if you're taking, for example, a photograph of somebody, you might begin to burn out their nose in the image and, you'll start losing a lot of the surface detail. without reducing the, flash, you're going to get very hard, shadows as well. It's a bit like taking photographs at midday in very strong sunlight. It's really the worst time, to take photographs, unless you absolutely want that look to your image. But what you tend to do is you get these very black, very dark shadows. The highlights tend to burn right out. And, it's, well, I'm not going to say it's a, bad thing to do because it's all very subjective, but if that is not your intention to produce that sort of photograph, then you're likely to be disappointed with the results you're getting. So the way to get around that is to first of all, make sure you've got a flash with a bounce, rather than just a fixed head that just points forward. If you've got a flash gun that will bounce, and what I mean by that, it will tilt up, or, well, probably up actually, and then it will tilt, or can be rotated left or right. It means you can bounce that harsh light off another surface. So it might be the ceiling, it might be a wall. Now, and what that will do is have the effect of softening that light so you don't get these really hard, sort of burnt out, very heavy shadow images. A couple of things to think about there. One is, if you're bouncing off another object and you're taking a color photograph, ideally that color, that object needs to be white. Now you can, there is more to do with colors and flash temperatures and all of that. I'm not going to go into that in this podcast, but as a rule of thumb, look for something that's white, because if you're bouncing off something that, for example, is bright red, you're going to get a kind of red cast. That light is going to, that flashlight is going to be reflected and pick up that light, that red color and that will end up on your subject. So that may not be the look you are going for. So that's one way of doing it. Using a bounce head is the term there. another thing you'll often find on flash guns is a pull out cardinal. So that will generally be at the top of the lens where the light is, where the light comes from. So if you pull that out and then you can tilt the bounce head back. So it's sort of pointing upwards. But you can use that card as a reflector. So that will usually be white to reflect white light. And that's another way of just softening, that light. the other option that you have and is quite possibly on your flash gun is a diffuser. So that might be just a clip on plastic cover that goes over the flash gun, the flash head. And what it does, it just has sort of lenses, small lenses in there. And they diffuse the light so they give you a much softer light. So these are things to, to think about when you're using flash. Because again, depends what you're trying to create as a ah, final result. But as a general rule, it's best to try and soften the light that you are putting onto your subject. And I guess final option there is you can always use tissue and things like that. Just do a homemade. And once you get into that area, there are all sorts of things you can do if you're creative, but you could use colored tissues, over the flash gun and get a colored light, diffused colored lights. There's all sorts of other things you can do. as I've said, there are gels available with different colors. So that is a whole other area of things you can do. Okay, the other thing I want to just talk about is red eyes. So that the bane of a lot of people taking snapshots using flash. And if you don't know what red eye is, first of all, the way it appears is that you've got somebody you've taken a flash photo of somebody looking directly at you and they've got red eyes. The retinas of their eyes are quite bright red. And that can be distracting, maybe a bit disconcerting unless they actually look like that. But let's hope not. So what's that cause? What causes that is that you're using a flash so that light coming from the flesh is hitting the retinas. And if you've got people who have quite large eyes or tend to have quite big retinas, they're much more likely to get that effect because it's the light reflecting directly off the retina, but it picks up the color of blood vessels in the eye, and that's why it's red. And the reason that you get it is that the flash gun is aligned with the central axis of the lens. So if you look at these, I don't know why they do that. I'm sure there's a good reason. But if you look at where a pop up flash is positioned, if you look at where a hot shoe is positioned, normally they're over the top of the lens and right down the central axis. And of course that means that light that you've just sent out is hitting the subject's eye and then bouncing straight back down the lens. And, that's why you're getting these pretty horrible, if you're not going for them, effects on people's eyes. So how can you avoid that? Well, again, bounce the flash is one way so that the light is not sort of going hard and directly at the eye. Some cameras have, a pre flash, and one of the functions of that is to try and get the retinas closed down. Retinas react pretty fast. If you're in a fairly, or if you're in an environment that's quite low light, obviously your resins will open up to let more light into your eyes. And then if you were to shine a torch light, at somebody's eyes, the resins will close very quickly. And it's the same principle that's used in, flash. So that might work for you. the best way is just to not have the, light source directly above the lens itself. So that brings me to, another thing which I kind of liked when I was playing around with photography years ago when I first started getting into it, and I was trying all sorts of photography, and that's to actually place your hot shoe off the camera. So you will probably find. Now I'm going to. You certainly could find, and I don't know what's available these days because it's not something I've looked at for a long time. But you'd have these, off camera shoes. So it's an off camera hot shoe. So basically what it is it's just a little kind of block thing with that same connector that you'd see on the top of your camera that's at one end of a wire. At the other end of a wire, you've got a connector that will slide into, that connector on the top of your camera. And depending how much cable you've got, you can then really start having fun with placing your light source well away from the lens. And this, to me, is sort of one step towards getting in studio flash, which is a whole other thing. But studio flash is really amazing. it's something that I've occasionally assisted with, perhaps more than dabbled, but it's something I've been very interested in. And, from time to time I've thought about putting a setup together. But what? But if you don't want to spend a lot of money on that, but you have got a flash gun or you want to buy a flash gun just for sort of use, just so you've got one when you need it, it's just another way of, putting that light source off to one side. And in those instances, so this is something that I like, where you've got a very dark environment and you want to shoot profiles or get a very hard kind of profile shot on a person. So sort of half their face lit up, and everything's completely dark. That's one way of doing that, achieving that kind of result. And it's a relatively cheap way of doing it. It, I don't know. I'll be honest where we are in terms of remote, controlled flashes. So obviously, if you can just do a kind of wireless connection to your camera, that gives you a lot of flexibility then, in where you position your light. But, I think the thought I want to leave you with is that flash definitely has a place in photography. it might not be the place you thought it was. it definitely has a place in photography when you're in ambient light as a fill in, and it can give you, options with, taking photographs in situations that are more low light. So once, you know, once you've experimented with your flash gun, you'll start to appreciate what you can achieve. And using a low powered, flash, can give you a much softer or lower exposure, or you can use a longer, slower, shutter speed, bigger aperture, all these kind of things. So, there's a lot of experimentation to be had there. And for me, one of the key things about photography is experimentation. And I've played a lot of things with photography in the time I've been doing it. And whereas I don't use flash now, although I have just the one flash gun that I have that I use from time to time, it's certainly something that, if it interests you, I would certainly encourage you to learn a bit more about it. if you can get hold of equipment fairly easily, then experiment with it, and just get used to using flash gun with your camera, with the kind of photography you're doing. And it's just another way of, experimenting with your creativity in a very positive way. So I'm going to leave it there. I hope you found that interesting as, a talk about flash. As I say, it's not something I do very much myself these days. It's not something I think. I don't think I've actually spoken about Flash in one of these podcasts before. So the intention of this was just to guess, raise a few points about it, hopefully explain one or two things at least, or give you a, kind, of leg up to go and explore further. Okay? So have a great day, whatever you're doing, and I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now. Just before I go, I want to remind you that first of all, I have an offer running, with my free download. So if you go onto the website and there's a link at the bottom of the description of this particular podcast, and that will take you to a link, to where you can give me your email, I will send you, a PDF, which is ten simple steps to improve your photography today. So, it includes the kind of things that I talk about in the podcast. So it's all there in black and white, with some examples, you can see what's going on. And also remember, I offer, online photography courses. I do fine art. If you haven't checked out my galleries, please do. The links are, again below the description of the podcast. And don't forget to help me out. So you're welcome to subscribe both to the podcast and you can become a member of my Patreon membership and, join me there. So in that membership, you get, access to me. and also you get advance notice of things that are coming up. I'll tell you about other things that are going on that I don't share in my Facebook group or on Instagram or anywhere else, really. So it is, just a membership where if you like what I do and you just want to be a part of it, the subscriptions are really low. It's just a cup of coffee a month. So, how much better could I be than that? So please take a look, and, I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.