This week I'll show you the basics of flash photography.
I've owned and used many faster units over the years from the really expensive
Canon strobes right through to the Profoto units I now use the cheaper
third-party Youngnuo flashes I have three of them
I have remotes for them and they work really well one thing I've found is with
these cheaper third-party units I do have to change the batteries a little
bit more often but for doing small corporate head shoots they work
perfectly I can fit all of the flashes and cameras into one bag and the stands
and soft boxes into a tripod bag giving me a very portable flash photography
setup but in saying all this you do need to know how a single flash will affect
your photo and how changing the settings will affect the flash in that photo a
flash unit also known as a strobe helps to put more light on your subject when
done properly you can decrease your ISO increase your shutter speed giving you a
much cleaner image a flash fires quickly and I mean really quickly and when you
see flashes filmed sometimes you'll see part of the frame as normal and then
part of the frame overexposed with that flash this just shows that the flash is
faster than a readout of a single frame this doesn't happen on cameras with
global shutters but I'm talking about videos that read from top to bottom even
though there are TTL or through the lens modes on your flash or some automatic
mode I'm going to show you how to shoot in manual mode when you understand how
the flash works in conjunction with shutter speed and aperture you can gain
control of everything and you can control the shot and make it look
exactly how you want now there are a few things that you need to understand when
shooting with flash units and the first one is sync speed sync speed refers to
the fastest shutter speed you can have in your camera when the sensor is
exposed as a whole in one go so basically the way a shutter works is
that you have one shutter that exposes the sensor to light and the nother one
that covers it up these may be mechanical or electronic at certain
shutter speeds the rear shutter will start to close before the front curtain
has finished opening and this is why if you go over a certain shutter speed your
start to get part of the shot really dark and the other part exposed for the
flash in these examples I took this first one below the sink speed the
second one at the sink speed and the third one over the sink speed I did take
a fourth one as well that was twice the sink speed so you can see the faster
your shutter is than the sink speed the more of the shot that will be obscured
by the shutter from the flash when you start to see these black strips in your
shots the flash is basically fired and only been exposed to part of the sensor
as the shutter mechanism is covering the darker part of the shot so the shutter
sync speed just means the fastest shutter speed that the camera has the
hole of the sensor exposed in one moment enough for a flash to be fired and not
to be obscured now it does seem a little bit counterintuitive because you think
that the faster the shutter speed the more likely the flash is to fill that
shorter exposure time but due to the way that the shutter works it limits the
fastest shutter speed that you can use which then is actually a lot slower than
the duration of the flash and there is a function called high speed sync and this
enables you to shoot with much faster shutter speeds but this is a subject for
another video now there are a couple of ways you can find the sync speed for
your camera one is to Google it and the other one is to take the same test shots
as I just have so you'd fire it maybe at one one hundredth of a second one one
fiftieth of a second one one 80th of a second when two hundredth of a second
and one 250th of a second and maybe 1/3 20th of a second once you start seeing
the black strip you know that you've gone over the sync speed for your camera
so then just take it back to the shutter speed where you don't see any of this
black strip just make a note of this shutter speed and then don't ever take
the shutter speed faster than this so I have a few rules I stick to when using a
flash and if you think of your settings like this you'll be able to really
control the flash and ambient light in your camera and in your photographs you
basically break your light into ambient light and flash light now you may want
to cut out most of the ambient light you may want a mixture of the two or you may
just want to use the flat just to fill the shadows slightly for
any of these scenarios I always think of my settings in the following way your
shutter speed is much slower than the duration of the flash so think of it as
just controlling your ambient light this is because no matter how slow or fast
the shutter speed is up to the sync speed of course it won't be as fast as
the flash so whenever the shutter is open
it'll take in all of the flash light but the longer you leave your exposure the
more ambient light you'll let into the camera your ISO and aperture controlled
both flash and ambient light this is because with aperture you're increasing
or decreasing the size of the hole that the light can get through and with ISO
you're changing the application of the signal from the sensor so these control
the overall exposure of your photograph and then we have the flash power setting
this comes in fractions one over one being full power one over two being half
power one over for being quarter power and so on and so forth right down to one
128th the lower the power the longer the batteries will last in your flash and
also the quicker the recycle time one other thing to take into
consideration is that for each fraction change that you make in the power on the
flash this changes the flash brightness by one stop so one quarter to one half
would be the same as f five point six to f4 or ISO 100 to ISO 200 and one quarter
to one eight on the flash would be the same as f five point six to f8 or ISO
100 to ISO fifty might be wondering why I haven't included shutter speed and the
reason for this is that really short duration of the flash no matter how long
or short the shutter speed is as long as you're below the sync speed it'll take
in all of the power of the flash so it doesn't matter what shutter speed you're
at the flash power will be exactly the same and for now this is all you need to
know about your flash you can have it in manual mode and you're gonna change the
fraction of power that you're going to use so as long as you understand stops
of light and you know how app shutter speed and ISO work together this
fractional change should seem quite familiar if you want to learn more about
aperture shutter speed or ISO click on the eye in the corner this will take you
to another of my tutorials one other thing to take into
consideration is the flash duration especially if you have things moving
fast through your frame the closer to full power that you are on your flash
unit the longer the duration of the flash so if something's moving fast
through your shot it's more likely to blur in this highly sophisticated test I
take the first shot at full power and the second at 1/64 of the power the
first is blurred and the second isn't so the lower the power the shorter the
duration of the flash don't worry too much about this for now
just know that if your subject starts blurring due to motion when you're using
a flash you may have to reduce the power which will reduce the duration of the
flash more likely freezing your subject and do remember to increase your
aperture or ISO to compensate for this decrease in flash power those flashes do
you have a zoom function they tend to go from about 24 millimetres right through
to around about 100 to 105 millimeters all this is doing is widening or
focusing that light with the Frenette built on to the front you don't have to
worry too much about this for now just make sure that the zoom follows what
zoom you're using on your camera so say if you're shooting with a 24 millimeter
lens make sure it's at 24 millimetres if you're shooting at 70 make sure the zoom
on the flash is at 70 so in knowing this I start off with the following settings
I put the shutter speed at around about 1/100 of a second my iso at 100 aperture
at f 5.6 and i set the flash to manual and 1/4 of the power I set my white
balance to flash if you're using a mirrorless camera you'll have to turn
live view display off to see what you're shooting once you've done this take a
test shot one quick tip to get much better light from your Flash instantly
is to tip the head of the light up towards the ceiling as long as you've
got a white ceiling it'll give you
a really nice light this will bounce the flash off the ceiling making the flash a
much bigger light source and making the light a lot softer it will dissipate the
intensity so you may have to increase the flash power if needed then you want
to play around with your shutter speed and flash power to get the right ratio
between the two sources of light once you've got this you can adjust your
aperture to get a good overall exposure and this is where personal taste comes
into play you might like more flash or you may prefer more ambient light but
knowing how to change each light source is critical to get what you want if I
want more ambient light I'll lower my shutter speed if I want less ambient
light I'll increase my shutter speed you just need to make sure when increasing
your shutter speed you don't go faster than the sync speed if I want just the
flash to be brighter I'll increase the flash power if I want the flash to be
darker I'll decrease its power so very quickly you can dial in your settings by
just thinking of shutter speed for ambient lights and flash power for flash
so I've taken a sequence of self-portraits changing the settings so
you can see what I mean when I change the shutter speed the flash amount
doesn't change as it fires off much faster than the shutter speed I've set
so whether I'm shooting at 125th of a second or 1/2 hundredth of a second it
doesn't matter the flash power stays the same when I change the aperture you can
see it changes the intensity of the flash this just changes the size of the
aperture which changes the amount of that flash coming into your camera now
if I do the same shot but with some ambient light in the frame look how the
ambient light reduces as the shutter speed increases but the flash intensity
stays the same when I change just the aperture you can see the flash changes
as well as the ambient light next I keep the aperture and the shutter speed the
same and then change the power intensity of the flash obviously the closer to
full power that you get the more overexposed the shot will become I tried
to keep my ISO to 100 and when you're using a
this is pretty easy to do because there's lots of lights about and
obviously the lower the ISO the less noise in your photographs
so when dialing in my settings if I want there to be very little ambient light
and all flashlights I'll have my shutter speed said at the max sync speed which
on the a7 three is one two hundredth of a second and then I'll increase the
power of the flash and then control the overall exposure with aperture you can
see in this shot the lamp on the left side has been completely overpowered by
the flash and it looks quite dark outside if I want to blend ambient and
flash light what I'll do is I'll decrease my shutter speed and then play
around with both shutter speed and aperture if I then need to increase or
decrease the flash compared to the ambient light what I'll do is change the
power on the flash now you can see the light from the lamp on the left-hand
side and the sunlight is more balanced with the flash light all I need to do
now is change my aperture to change my overall exposure because I've balanced
the ambient light outside and the flashlight inside together to where I
want them to be it does take a while to get your head around this but once you
do you'll be able to dial in those settings really quickly and then you'll
have ultimate control over your flash and ambient light you'll also be able to
get really consistent results that you wouldn't do in maybe an auto mode or TTL
mode now this is just an introduction to flash photography
but if you understand these basic principles you'll be well on your way to
getting good photos with flashes the next thing to think about is how you use
the flash head to disperse that light if you have it pointing directly at your
subject it'll be a really harsh hard light because that light source is
really small if you have one of these flash units with a moveable head what
you want to try and do is bounce it off different surfaces in the room that
you're in as long as the surfaces aren't black they will bounce that light back
and they'll normally create a much bigger light source so in using the
basic principles that I've just taught you try tilting the head of the flash
towards a big wall or a big ceiling just to see how the light changes you can
grab a remember and use them as a subject or if
you have a remote shutter you can take photos of yourself this is direct
flashlight this is bounced off the ceiling this is bounced off the left
wall and this is bounced off the right-hand wall so you can see even with
the flash on the camera you can find big white surfaces or big surfaces that you
can bounce the flash off and get much better softer light now these are just
the basics but there are many more aspects to flash photography for
instance you can bounce the lights like I've just shown you you can used soft
boxes you can use umbrellas you can use really big soft boxes then if you have a
remote system of firing the flash off camera you can start angling the flash
compared to the angle that you're shooting at and as well as all of this
you can start using multiple flash heads in a single shot so there is so much to
learn and that's about it like I always say you just need to go out and take
photographs with your camera and with your flash to really understand the
basic principles of it if you have to re-watch the video to really understand
these basic fundamentals and before long you'll be using your flash in really
creative ways so over the next few months I'm going to make more tutorials
on flash photography as it's such a big subject if you are into flash
photography or there's something I missed leave a comment below it'll be
great to hear your thoughts and it'll be great to hear how you get on with
Flash's in your photography as always if you like what you see give me a thumbs
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in the next one