learning to flash

So, as I mentioned before, I bought myself one of these for christmas. I finally stopped procrastinating about it and just tried it out for a client shoot the other day.

I was happy to see that it's dedicated to my camera, so I didn't actually have to pretend to know how to use it and fiddle around until it did something. Basically you install it onto your camera's hotshoe and away you go. All I had to do was turn it on and it examined my camera settings and fired whenever I pressed the shutter button on the camera.

Now, as convenient as that is, I do still intend to learn how it works so I can use it for more complicated set ups, but for now I'm pretty pleased that I could be an idiot and still have it work for me.

I did a quick couple before/after shots to see what the difference was:

As you can see, a pretty decent difference in lighting. I still don't like the "flash shadow" that shows up, so I did my best to minimize that throughout the shoot. Because this flash can swivel around in all directions, I had it pointed at my reflector to the left of the camera. I tried it on the silver side first, but that was too much contrast for this particular kind of portrait, so I switched it over to the opaque white side to give a lighter diffusion. It's still a bit stark in some of them, but for the most part it did what I wanted it to.

After changing to a horizontal frame for some shots, I started bouncing it off the ceiling instead. My ceiling isn't necessarily the best for this since it's that textured kind with all the bumps on it, but I liked the result none the less.

The ceiling bounce offered a better version of the kind of light I was looking for. There's enough extra light to get a brighter picture, but without the flash sacrificing the natural light coming in from the window.

So, nothing terribly complicated at all. Just a matter of finding things to bounce it off of and hopefully avoiding the ghastly flash shadow that makes everything look like a cardboard cut out. In the future hopefully I'll be able to report on using the flash's manual settings and maybe try using it off the camera. It did come with a stand! For now though, I'm happy. Winter is so overcast around here, it's hard to get a good amount of natural light shining in through the windows.

Also, that's my kitty Noelle being her usual nosey self. I believe she was looking to have an affection attack, but we were kind of busy.

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Here are a couple of the final images:

business abby, originally uploaded by avalilly.

business abby, originally uploaded by avalilly.