Flash photography?
I have always been a fan of natural existing light. It gives your images the exact look and feel of the moment—the atmosphere. I used Flash for more professional work when I started as a photographer and for some portraits I did in the past. I mostly used it as a fill-in light or bounced it off a wall or ceiling. I was always a bit opposed to using Flash.
After looking at some good tutorials on YouTube, and seeing my son use his Speedlight Flash, I became curious. I wanted to see for myself how I could use it again. I forgot how to use Flash, and I can’t remember exactly how I did it, when I shot film, in the past.
Nikon F3HP plus Metz 45 CT…?
This was my setup in the past. I found this image on the web so the copyright doesn’t belong to me but belongs to the rightful owner.
I'm so happy I don’t have to carry this heavy stuff anymore, although it was a beautiful workhorse and the best camera I’ve ever owned, the F3hp.
What I didn’t like about Flash was how it looked like you used Flash. So, to like Flash, you have to make it look like you didn’t use it. That makes sense, right?
Direct Flash almost always sucks, except when you are using it as a fill-in light outdoors, and know how to balance the ambient and Flash light. For me, the easiest, and best way is to use TTL, Through The Lens, Flash light metering.
The formula is pretty simple. There’s ambient light, and there’s your Flashlight. You need to expose both correctly. To do that, you take care of the ambient light exposure, by setting your camera to Manual mode. Set your shutter speed to 1/250 or whatever your sync speed is, or lower. Your ISO to what’s needed, so maybe 200 ISO for outside situations, and up to 3200/6400 ISO for dim indoor situations. Your aperture determines the depth of field, play around with the ISO and Aperture to get the correct exposure and the effect you want.
The ambient light exposure is taken care of, now we’ll do the Flash Exposure. This is the easy part. Let your Speedlight do the Flash exposure automatically by setting it to TTL. You can make it give less light by setting the exposure compensation on the Flash to minus, for example, -1, and if you want more light from the Flash set it to +1 for example.
For the best results indoors, bounce your flash off a light-colored wall or ceiling. It will make the light source bigger and thus softer, and less flashy.
The lovely part of digital photography is that you can directly see what looks best and play around with both exposures to find the correct balance at no cost.
First curtain or Second curtain synchronization?
The second curtain looks more natural when there’s movement in the frame and you use slow shutter speeds. The speed blur will be behind the moving subject and that feels more natural. The first curtain will make the speed blur be in front of the moving subject which looks weird. A disadvantage of the second curtain is that you can more easily catch people with their eyes closed, while blinking, as a reaction to the pre-Flash, which is the light the Flash fires first to determine the correct exposure. I would use first curtain synchronization normally unless you are working with slow shutter speeds and moving subjects. That’s when you use the second curtain sync.
Read this article for more detail and to see where I got my knowledge from :)
https://neilvn.com/tangents/first-curtain-sync-vs-rear-curtain-sync/
