Flash
What My Flash Taught Me
bY cHRIS jACKSON
I am a mature aged photographer, who started taking photos in my teens (1970s) with a manual Canon FTB. Loved the camera as it was manual, manual, manual. When digital came along, being a bit of a geek, it didn’t impress me as it seemed like a half-hearted attempt, and I gave up photography.
I probably always wanted to re-join the hobby, and then someone told me about mirrorless cameras, and now I am back. The interesting part was, and is, the learning curve, as I am enjoying both taking photos again and absorbing the new skills and knowledge. A lot of which, I should have known back then, but there was never the emphasis on the technical. Let me share with you an example, the simple use of a camera flash.The new camera I bought only had a small flash for close work only. However I still had my old Rollei from the good old days, with a high guide number. So I use this as my main flash mounted on a base plate out to the side of my new camera.
I joined a club where a topic came along to take photos of kitchen items, so intending to try and master flash photography for this, I searched the net for guidance. I came across a video that explained how to take a photo in the daytime which looked like the night. Admittedly it used “High speed flash”, which I had to investigate only to find that my old flash won’t do, but importantly found that there are 2 different exposure settings when using a flash. I never knew that, as I thought you took a flash picture at one 60th of a second and set the F stop, end of story. Wrong!. Learning this new stuff and then applying it to my kitchen shoot was an empowering learning curve. What I learnt goes like this;
I joined a club where a topic came along to take photos of kitchen items, so intending to try and master flash photography for this, I searched the net for guidance. I came across a video that explained how to take a photo in the daytime which looked like the night. Admittedly it used “High speed flash”, which I had to investigate only to find that my old flash won’t do, but importantly found that there are 2 different exposure settings when using a flash. I never knew that, as I thought you took a flash picture at one 60th of a second and set the F stop, end of story. Wrong!. Learning this new stuff and then applying it to my kitchen shoot was an empowering learning curve. What I learnt goes like this;
- The flash is the main illumination set by your aperture setting, I knew that.
- Your shutter speed controls the background lighting, something I never knew, but it makes sense as the shutter has no control over the flash, because the flash speed is many times faster than the shutter.
- Be warned, there is an upper limit to your shutter speed (usually around 250th/sec), and this is where high speed sync cuts in, but that is another story. Pushing your shutter speed up will darken the background, and going down, as low as you like, will brighten it.
.jpg)
Photo of my old flash taken after sunset using small camera flash showing that the settings can be miles apart when using a flash. S:15sec – F:20 – ISO:1600
Since then I have continued to expand my horizons. I now use the piddly little flash on my camera to provide fill in lighting. I am no longer afraid to push up my ISO to turn my piddly flash into something stand alone and worthwhile. However again, this is another story about understanding ISO.
The moral of this, and there are always a few, is simple;
Don’t stop learning and experiencing, and try what you don’t feel confident at.
It’s all about you, and not your camera.
Join a club and enjoy expressing yourself in pictures.
And finally, my kitchen image was only moderately received by the judge, but I still like what I did, and still enjoy looking at it. Plus, I enjoy learning and experiencing more.