Wedding Photography Project

Using off-camera flash seems like something difficult to do.  It isn’t.  Once you get over the mental hurdles involved, it is really quite simple.  To illustrate, I have an image that I really like that I took this last fall.

This image was really simple to create.  I took the couple out of the reception at sunset.  Then I set camera to the setting I wanted to expose the background.  When doing this, I usually underexpose the background by about 1 stop to create the deeper, richer colors.  So the ambient exposure that I set was 1/250, f8 at ISO 400 on my 30D.  Next, I decided I wanted the light to hit the couple from the left.  Then, I set up flash, which was an Nikon SB-25 on a small lightstand fired directly at them.  The flash was set to about 1/4 (might have been 1/8)  to properly expose the couple to “normal” density of the skin tones.  Finally, I put the groom where I wanted them and told the bride to go get him.  Pretty simple!  You can see more of my most recent work on my blog.

Article by Cory Parris. You can find this and other articles on Cory’s Photo School.

I am finally getting started on my series of articles on flash. I am going to start with the type of flash I use most often - the on-camera bounce.

The reasons I use on-camera bounce:

1. I move quickly and quite often have the two options of available light or on-camera flash. Sometimes the available light in a room is not flattering.
2. I don’t like direct on-camera flash in MOST situations as it produces very flat lighting with harsh shadows
3. Soft, bounced lighting, when balanced with room lighting, looks natural and flattering.

The reasons NOT to use bounce flash

1. Some rooms don’t lend themselves well to bounce flash (ballrooms a mile wide with 40 foot ceilings, black paint on the walls, red paint on the walls if you are shootingJPG, etc.)
2. It does not add any drama to the photographs (harsh lighting is dramatic and can add or detract from a photograph, soft lighting usually does neither).
3. Beautiful natural lighting already exists in the environment you are in.

Equipment that you will need.

1. A digital (or film, I suppose) SLR
2. Flash capable of tilt and swivel.
3. A piece of black plastic and some Velcro.
4. Good batteries

Okay, here we go with the meat of the article.

Bounce flash is a quick and easy way to upgrade the lighting in a room. Whenever I am looking through my camera I am looking at the type and angle of light as well as content and composition. When I see that the lighting is mostly from overhead sources, I usually want to modify it somehow. Overhead lighting as the only source of light leaves dark shadows in the eyes and causes people to look tired. This is probably my least favorite type of lighting.

To use bounce flash, you don’t have to do anything too difficult. You attach your flash to your camera (or to an off-camera shoe cord if you wanna get funky) and point the flash in the direction that you want the light to come from. Imagine that you have a big softbox on a set of wheels that you can position anywhere you want in the half-circle behind you. You can place directly to the left or right, directly overhead, directly behind you or the the left or right of directly behind. You obviously can’t make it come from the far side of your subject because of the physics involved (think of shooting a cue ball in pool - you can’t bounce the ball off the bumper directly on the far side of another ball without hitting the ball).

The softbox concept

A portrait on the fly using bounce flash
Now that you have your flash bouncing around the room, you need to control it a bit. The first thing to keep in mind is how you want the lighting to appear. Do you want to drown out the existing lighting, add to the existing lighting or somewhere in between? My favorite way to do it is to add to, but not completely overpower the existing lighting. I do this by manually setting the exposure to keep the room lighting the way I want it (to add to, but not completely overpower, I might set the exposure to underexpose the existing light by one to two stops). Also, the slower your shutter speed, the more you have to have the room lighting below the flash setting. To give you an example, if you are shooting at 1/20 of a second with only a one-stop difference between room light and flash, you will have blur from the movement of the people as recorded by the by room lighting after the flash has fired. In which case, you need to increase the difference to two stops to avoid the flash-blur look. Unless, of course, that is what you are going for!

Bounce from the right of the room balanced to the room light.

Something else that I wold recommend is controlling the light from falling directly into the frame (this is a more common problem when shooting wide). To do this, you either need to zoom your flash or create some sort of snoot-type device for your flash. You can see what I did here with a piece of black plastic (a file folder from Staples) and some Velcro. This prevents flash from hitting someone directly into the scene I am shooting. I’ve shown it to other people, but most don’t share my enthusiasm for attaching ugly, home-made devices to their flashes, but willingly spend $40 on a piece of Tupperware to sit on top of it!

My setup with black plastic “bounce tunnel”!

I have four more hints with bounce flash. The first is to use a high ISO because this increases the sensitivity of the sensor, which in turn reduces how hard your flash has to work and reduces how badly you blind anyone that makes the mistake of standing next to you! Second, buy a good pair ofNiMH batteries. NiMH batteries keep a consistent recharge rate during the life of the batteries. With Alkaline batteries, the recycle times on your flash become longer and longer as the power is drained out of them. Third, be aware of your surroundings. It doesn’t do any good to want the light to come from the left if the nearest wall is 120 feet away. It also doesn’t do any good to point a flash directly at the mother of the bride’s face! No matter how annoying you may find her, nothing good will come of blinding her! That last is just a joke; I haven’t had an annoying MOB in years.

Another example of side bounce.

Finally, experimentation is good! In fact, it is the only way to get a good handle on using bounce flash. Go forth and bounce!

Article by Neil van Niekerk

Photographing people with fireworks in the background, is just an application of the technique known as dragging the shutter.

I had the couple in an area where there wasn’t much ambient light, so that I could light them mostly with flash. The strobe was a Quantum T2 with an umbrella.

My flash exposure was determined in that I wanted the couple correctly exposed .. but my actual settings were dictated by my choices made in how I wanted the fireworks to register.

For my fireworks exposure, I had to juggle the three controls again :
shutter speed / aperture / iso.

That particular photograph was 1 sec @ f6.7 @ 400 iso

You don’t necessarily want a high iso .. because you want your shutter speed to be slow. Slow enough to record the fireworks as streaks of light. There is a lot of leeway here .. and chimping will tell you whether you need to adjust your settings. Therefore your is range should be 100 to 400 iso. Then your shutter speed should be 1 second or slower. In other words, you need a tripod.

Recording multiple bursts of fireworks by blanking out the frame with a black card is a great idea. This photograph was a single exposure though.

By chimping other firework bursts, I found that f6.7 @ 400 iso @ 1 sec gave me enough firework trails and the fireworks itself weren’t over-exposed in the shot.

So using f6.7 @ 400 iso, I set my Quantum T2 to an appropriate power level, to give me that exposure. (Manual flash in this instance, since my subject was in a specific position in relation to my strobe.)

f4.5 @ 200 iso @ 2 seconds .. would’ve given me exactly the same exposure, but the firework trails would’ve been longer. There is a lot of leeway here, and you shouldn’t be bound by specific settings. But my suggestion would be to start at 1 second (or slower) and 400 or 20O iso … and chimp to taste. Rear-curtain sync would not have had any effect here, since the couple was static in the frame.

Neil van Niekerk is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, but now resides in New Jersey where he works as a full-time professional photographer. Neil’s photography business is known as One Perfect Moment and concentrates on wedding and portrait photography. Neil also maintains the Planet Neil website, which (as Rangefinder magazine describes it), is an unusual and informative web site dedicated to digital imaging. You can find Neil’s upcoming seminars here.