Hello.
I'm Sanjay Jogia. I'm a wedding and portrait photographer and a Canon Ambassador
based in London.
Last time we spoke about natural
continuous light.
This time we're looking at flash. Light works in the same way,
whether it's flash,
daylight or continuous light.
Only with a flash it's a brief burst.
So why use flash?
Well they give a huge light output that can compete with daylight and
even sunlight.
Whereas common continuous lights don't have the same power to fill in the strong shadows
caused by bright sunlight, for example.
It's an instantaneous burst of light, and the amount of light, depends on whether you set your
flash to manual
where you can control how much light you want, or if you choose through the lens metering,
known as TTL. TTL is where the camera reads the
amount of light entering the lens, decides how much power the flash needs to
fill in the shadows to balance with the brightest part of the scene, the sky, for example.
Okay, so we're just in my garden. Birds chirping, kids playing in the background.
We can have a little bit of fun outdoors during the day,
with just a tree that's in the garden
and a flash.
So just one speed light,
if you own a speed light,
then I'll show you what we could do with it and have a little bit of fun.
If you have a remote trigger as well
it really helps so that you actually create some interesting lighting.
So what I want to do here is I want to show you what I could do with this.
There's a very interesting looking tree,
lots of interesting textures on it.,
and it just basically means you can create a little bit of drama.
So it's nothing fancy.
It's just my back garden in Harrow.
I'll be using a light stand. If you don't have one,
use someone in the house. Use children,
brothers or sisters. If you don't have anybody else, you could
probably just buy something like this online.
They're easily available.
So you won't have any problem with that.
I'm gonna place this off-camera. I'm gonna place Roshni by that tree,
I'm going to pose her over there,
and I'm going to show you what kind of drama we can create with the flash just off camera
Camera set to TTL.
I'll set the camera up on manual while I talk about the camera settings,
so you understand what it is
I'm doing to try and create this.
Okay, so in the background is my lovely wife Roshni, who's going to be helping me out over here.
And I'll have her step into the shot.
And, I'll pose her against the tree
and I'll show you how I set the lighting up and how I actually create the scene.
Basically I'm going to use the drama of the tree,
the texture of the trunk, against Roshni.
So I'm going to light Roshni with the flash and I'm going to add actually just a standard
household floodlight to light the tree up,
create a little bit of drama.
So these are things, easy things that you can do because I want to show you how you can create some
interesting photographs with just things around the house.
I'll extend it up. Now when you're placing your lights,
when you're photographing people it's very important to make sure that you try to
light from above and not from below.
So you want the flash to be above their eye line
so it creates beauty lighting.
If the light comes from below,
it becomes ghoul lighting, so we don't want to do that.
It looks ghoulish and evil.
Okay, so I have the flash on Roshni over here
and that's just going to illuminate her and hopefully just pick her up. I've actually tightened
the beam and you zoom these flashes in and out,
and it makes the beam tighter and wider
if that's what you want to do.
I have this floodlight on the trunk in the background just to create a little bit of separation.
My camera settings, I'm just using the EOS R here
with just 24-70mm standard lens and my camera settings are
200 per second, f4 at 200 ISO.
I've got the actual flash setting the trigger on the top.
That's just set to TTL.
This will tell the flash how much power to put out.
Let's see how this looks.
Where you place your flash
will have a big impact on the look and feel of your photo.
For example, if you mount your flash onto the camera it limits the directionality of the light
and shadows to a certain degree.
However,
modern flashes and cameras can communicate with each other via dedicated radio triggers
or by multiple flashes.
This will give you much more control
and versatility with your creativity.
Whilst direct forward-facing on-camera flash will be unflattering and harsh,
you can still create beautiful soft light by pointing the flash in a different direction.
For example,
you can bounce a flash upwards and use the ceiling as a diffused reflector.
My personal favourite is to use a wall to bounce the light from.
Just be sure to turn the subjects toward the wall too.
Another alternative is to bounce it from a wall and slightly upwards for a light
that looks more directional.
Be careful not to use coloured surface or you run the risk of introducing a colour cast to your photo.
If you have a transmitter,
you can control the shape and direction of your light, to much greater effect by having
the flash off-camera. Separation between the camera,
the flash position allows you to balance light and shadow in your image.
After all,
shadows are as important as light when creating striking images.
Position of a light horizontally is as important as the height of the light
above the camera and the subject.
Be careful not to separate the camera and the light too much otherwise you may have unwanted shadows.
So come up on here.
And turn this way again.
Flash stand. I'm going to put up on the table
so that it's coming from above you.
You're just gonna turn toward the flash a little bit more and then you're going to turn your shoulders this way.
Brush the hair off your shoulder there.
It's amazing sky behind us over here.
Cropping to lose the houses and the garden in the background.
So I'm underexposed,
f14, 3/20 of a second, 200 ISO.
I want lots of depth of field to pick up all that dramatic sky in the background there.
I need to get a lower angle
so I can get some of that blue.
You need to lean into me from there.
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If you really want to be creative,
you might consider modifying your light. As a professional wedding photographer,
I own dedicated
light-shaping modifiers,
but it's possible that you don't.
You may not even be able to get them during the lockdown,
but there's nothing stopping you from making one, like the one I have here. As a professional, I need to be
able to control my light,
to shape it,
so the light goes where I need it to go.
So we normally use something like this,
which is a snoot. And this attaches to the front.
And as you can see,
there's little funnel on the front of that.
What that does is it funnels the light and it sends it in the direction that I want it to go.
If you don't have one of these and you probably don't,
you can actually make one.
So here's one I made earlier.
It's just a toilet roll attached to a piece of cardboard
which has a hole cut out in it, and I've just taped it
to my flash and it will do the same thing.
You'll see the effect that it creates.
You can create very interesting effects,
allows you just to stop the light spilling in places you don't want it to go, so you can
create some drama if you want to create a close-up portrait.
And you just want,
light to go into the face or a particular area in the background or something like that.
then it's really handy.
A photograph like this, I actually want to come in nice and tight because the rest of the body is
going be dark.
The whole point of this is to draw attention to the face.
Let's see how it looks.
Tilt that way.
Just turn your chin... that's it.
We're back of the house now by the patio.
I'm going to use this brick wall, and I'm going to use the same flash with the makeshift snoot.
What I want to demonstrate here is how you could just use a normal brick wall to
create something interesting using flash.
There are two ways we can use this wall.
One is by just using the available light and end up with quite a nice, soft, airy shot.
But it's not going to look particularly interesting.
But we can add a bit of drama in there using the flash and our toilet roll snoot.
The first thing I'm going to do is just take a photograph
of this brick wall with, without flash.
I'm going to underexpose the image.
So essentially what I'm going to do is make the brick wall look dark.
The reason I'm want do that is because I want to create a little pool of light with this flash.
That's just going to fire across the wall to create some drama.
And then later on,
I bring Roshni to that shot.
So if we get the base shot right,
that's what we call a plate shot,
then we know that we can layer the lighting on top and things become easier.
Let's always start with the plate shot.
Get the basic exposure you want first,
then you layer it in by just bringing in the light afterwards.
So the settings I'm going to work with are f2.8,
which means I want to get a very short depth of field.
So when I focus on Roshni,
I can slightly blur out the background so it's not competing with her again,
and then my shutter speed is at 1/800 of a second.
So it's quite a high shutter speed,
which means that the daylight suddenly looks a lot darker.
We're getting a lot less of that light coming in,
even though what you're seeing,
it looks like it's bright daylight over here. By having a high shutter speed,
you darken everything.
So it's starting to look a little bit like night.
You can get that night time look during the day
just by bringing the shutter speed up.
But we keep the ISO low, I'm at 200 ISO here.
Let's get this plate shot and we'll show you what that looks like.
Now that we have a dark plate shot,
you can see what the intention is over here. Now we'll bring in the flash.
I've switched on my trigger, it's still on TTL, l haven't changed the power-up.
The compensation is still on zero. Then we'll have the flash come across.
It'll create little cone of light. I'm going to zoom in nice and tight because I want a tight shot.
I don't want too much of the brickwork coming in.
We'll show you that pattern, what that light looks like over here.
You'll see from the picture how you get a funnel of light, little cone of light firing across the wall
that creates this interesting look and feel, and it's in that zone of light that we're going to place Roshni.
So now we have Roshni in the shot, I'm going to have her turn towards the flash.
I'm going to go for a nice top half photograph here with the light just coming into her face at this stage.
I showed you the pattern of the brickwork,
and I showed you the pattern of the light,
and we're going to place her face in that pattern of the light.
So heel, knee, hip away.
Chin away from me slightly.
And eyes just off-camera, just off there.
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As with continuous light sources like lamps or window light,
the closer subject is to the flash,
the less power you need.
This is great because you put less strain on the flash on its batteries,
but you'll also have softer shadows,
which is great for beauty portraits.
If you want a harder,
starker look to your images,
you might consider moving your flash further away.
So will diffuse the light even more by actually placing this flash behind the curtain
and see what we can create from that.
In theory, this whole thing will act like a big diffusion screen.
It's just a net curtain.
I'm not changing my camera settings, they're still set to the plate shot settings that we created earlier on.
But essentially the camera is going to take a reading of the scene
and figure out just how much power it needs from the flash and in theory, it should light
up the entire net curtain
and give us a nice,
big, soft light coming through there.
But it's also lighting up the brick wall on its competing with the subject,
competing with Roshni.
One thing I could do is bring her away from the brick wall.
Take one big step toward me.
Just turn toward the window.
If we need to, we can actually
bring her closer as well.
So just take a step toward it.
Hold that there.
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So that's even softer now and that you can do with your flash and just things around the house.
Net curtains for a big diffusion screen
essentially, creating snoot from toilet roll and a little piece of card and just using
a brick wall and a tree in the back garden to make it look interesting.
Remember, there are no right or wrong rules
in creativity and fun.
So let yourself loose and use this time in lockdown to unleash your creativity
and discover your potential and empower your passion.
Stay safe,
stay positive and be creative.