Simple Flash Photography

I noticed that I got caught up on lighting gear lately- beauty dish, softbox, umbrella, etc. Lighting is fun but how about going back to the bare minimum? Yes, the bare flash. I forgot that a bare flash mimics the sunlight so I went out yesterday and shot some pictures of Nicoleta in St. Petersburg.
I dragged out all of my gear from the car, 6 flashes, lighstands, reflectors.... and then I suddenly decided to use one bare flash for the whole night.
Here are some pictures that demonstrate that sometimes going back to ONE bare flash can become a fun experiment. Since I am using an SB600 on a lightstand, I need no triggers for the flash.
Here is a great and SIMPLE tutorial by Chuck Arlund on how to use one basic flash to improve your photography (read the comments posted too).
To read more about Nikon's CLS system, click here.
I put the flash on a flash stand instead of the flash gun (monopod) and placed it in different angles to create different lighting effects. Unlike Chuck Arlund, I used no reflector, just one flash (1/200th is my syncspeed). I also used one lens- Nikon 50mm, 1.8- this lens is sharp!
To see Nicoleta's other shots, click here.
Some of the shots (Nicoleta wearing a white shirt) were taken with the 3 lighting set up (one beauty dish to the right or left of the camera, one flash to the right of the subject and the other flash was on the left side of the subject).

Tip 1: Fill Flash Why Should I Use Fill Flash?

My friend, blogger, Kevin Hing, purchased a nice camera- Nikon D300s and asked for some tips he can use while he is in Ireland.
First tip, put me in your luggage, Kev :)
These tips may be useful for beginner photographers too.
Before you buy a camera, do your research to make sure that you are buying the product you need. A good source for this is DPReview.com and their review of the Nikon D300s is quite good.

1. Fill Flash
The on-camera flash can be useful when shooting a subject in low light or shadow. In this example, my subject was backlit, so her face had no detail in the first image that I shot without flash and using ambient light.


There are various ways to "doctor" this image, but the easiest is to use the on-camera fill flash. If the light is to harsh looking, you can place a tissue/Band Aid over your built-in flash to soften the light. Try it with the tissue and without and see which one you like it.

• you can also control the amount of fill flash falling on your subject's face by the distance you stand from the subject. If you are closer to your subject, you let in more light; if you are farther away = less light -- use the zoom feature of your camera to pleasingly frame the subject's face regardless of the distance between the two of you

• the objective of the fill flash is to "fill in" just a little to enhance the quality of light already falling on the subject's face -- fill flash can be used in direct sunlight or open shade to augment available light

In the second picture, I used on-camera flash with a tissue. As you can see, the subject's face has details now.


In order to reduce the disturbing light shining through the window behind her, I zoomed in on her face in the third photo because she is the subject of my image.

Experiment with this technique before you go out to take fill flash portraits.













Here is an image where the fill flash is too harsh.All the images in this post were unprocessed.
An example on Fill- Flash photography is Apple bobbing.