Hi, I'm Tony Northrup and for chapters 3 and 6 of my book I want to tell you about
using a remote flash. By taking your external flash off camera you can get
studio lighting effects on the cheap.
So you'll need a little bit of extra equipment, the cheapest way to get into
it is to use what they call an off- camera shoe cord.
These shoe cords aren't expensive at all, but they have a limited reach and if you
get a longer cord there's a good chance somebody is going to trip over it.
For that reason this type of cord is primarily used by wedding photographers
who happen to use a bracket to allow them to move the flash from horizontal
to vertical positions. A better solution is to get a wireless shutter trigger.
These triggers from cowboystudio will only cost you about thirty dollars. You
connect one to the flash and one to your camera
and any time you push the shutter the flash will fire. These cheap versions are a
little bit limited though.
First, they're not completely reliable, they'll flake out sometimes and they might
even break on you. So they're not good for professional use but that might be
okay for amateur use. Second, they don't communicate all the, what they call
the ETTL information, from the flash to the camera.
So your camera might not be able to auto expose your flash correctly. That means
you'll need to manually adjust the flash up and down. If you're comfortable doing
that it's actually a great way to learn and it's something I prefer anyway.
If you have a little bit more in your budget you can upgrade to a PocketWizard system.
PocketWizard is the system that I use and the system will cost you about 450
maybe 500 bucks for both the transmitter and the receiver.
However, they're completely reliable and they work just great.
So, to demonstrate how you can use off
camera flash, I'm going to start by taking a picture of Chelsea there
without any flash. Note that i'm using a remote shutter trigger which allows me
to trigger my camera without actually standing next to it.
This will allow me to move around with the flash. This system only costs about
thirty dollars, you can get an off-brand for that and I've had great luck with it.
So I'll fire that first picture. That's without any flash at all, not a bad
effect. Now we'll try it with an on-camera flash.
The on-camera flash look isn't bad but it's really common and it's very flat.
It adds a catch light to the eyes but it also hides a lot of the detail in the
face and doesn't bring out, say, the cheekbones in a portrait.
You can make that much better by taking your flash off camera.
The first thing I'll do is I'll take a picture with Chelsea and I'll hold the
flash just a little bit higher than it would normally be so you can see the difference.
I think that's already a much more pleasing effect. But as long as you've
got the flash off camera you can walk anywhere with it and check out the
difference between side lighting, back lighting, or any other type of lighting
that you want. I'll walk around now and take a few different pictures so you can
see the variety of different effects that are available.
You can see the wide variety of effects just by moving the light to different places
around the model. I want to show you one more trick. We'll move to a wider angle shot of
Chelsea and I'll show you that you can remove yourself from the photo. So this
allows you to stand closer to the model making the light brighter and a little
bit softer by adding those two layers in photoshop later we'll be able to remove
you or your light stand from the picture.
So, first a shot without me in the picture. Now I will move into the frame so I can
light Chelsea directly with the flash.
By using multiple exposures we can add
those two pictures as layers into Photoshop. Then, using the eraser tool I
can simply erase myself from the picture. It's an old photographers trick, it actually
happened in the film days using multiple exposures.
This was for chapters three and six in my book Stunning Digital Photography.
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to take portraits
don't just take it, make it.