Outdoor Flash Photography

John Gerlach, Barbara Eddy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317516545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografía

Maximizing the power of your camera's flash is difficult enough in a studio set-up, but outdoors literally presents a whole new world of challenges. John Gerlach and Barbara Eddy have taken the most asked about subject from their renowned photography workshops and turned it into this guidebook that is sure to inspire your next outdoor shoot, while also saving you time and frustration.

Outdoor Flash Photography covers a range of practices from portrait to landscape, including unique strategies that the authors have pioneered through 40 years in the field. Mastering the use of multiple flashes to freeze action is shown through one of most challenging subjects in nature, hummingbirds in flight. This book will benefit photographers of all experience levels who are eager to evolve their outdoor photography and get the most out of their equipment.

Firing the flash at right angles to the buckeye butterfly helps to bring out wing details by creating soft shadows. Nikon D3, 200mm Nikon micro lens, ISO 200, f/20, 1/13, Cloudy WB, Manual exposure, and auto flash using FEC +1/3.

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Getting started with flash

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To begin our journey into flash photography we will explain what flash is and how it can help you shoot well-illuminated and dramatic images. Let’s first clarify at least one notorious nomenclature nuisance—the word flash itself. We photographers use the word flash in at least three ways:

• As a noun—an electrical device that, on demand, emits a burst of light.

• As another noun—the burst of light that is emitted by the device.

• As a verb—the act of illuminating a subject … “To flash, or not to flash, that is the question.…”

This triple use of the word flash can be confusing. Moreover, some companies use their “own” name for their flash units. Canon calls their proprietary line Speedlites and Nikon calls them Speedlights (Nikon is less trendy!). Rather than adopting the maker name, it may be simpler to use flash to refer to the device emitting the light, the light being emitted, and the act of causing the emission. The context of the usage should make the meaning clear.

Why do Speedlights and Speedlites exist? What’s so speedy about either or both, or one by another name? These small flashes produce much shorter and much brighter bursts of light than the flash bulbs of decades ago. Unlike those flash bulbs, modern flashes are capable of generating their large amounts of light in tiny fractions of a second, all while creating very little heat.

COMMANDER OR MASTER

Using one or more flash units, not mounted on the camera or attached to the camera by a cord, is an excellent way to light most outdoor subjects. When no wires connect the camera to the flash, it is called wireless flash. Multiple wireless flash setups are accordingly quicker to set up and modify. Moreover, getting rid of the wires eliminates the tripping and entangling hazard that otherwise might exist. The camera controls the remote flashes by use of a commander or master device.

CANON AND NIKON

Once again the two major camera companies—Canon and Nikon—use different terms to describe identical things. A wireless remote flash requires a device to send an optical or radio signal to fire the flashes. Nikon calls both its internal and external devices that send such signals commanders. Canon calls them masters. The flash units receiving the signals are called remotes by Nikon and, to my discomfort, they are called slaves by Canon. I am a Canon user, but that discomfort spurs me to prefer Nikon’s terminology.

Disregarding my concerns, the industry accepts commander/remote and master/slave as interchangeable word combinations. I use commander and remote in this book, but I will use master and slave when specifically addressing Canon, just to be consistent with Canon’s manuals. When I am elected to Grand Exalted Terminology Wizard, I’ll require all camera companies to use standard nomenclature!

A CONTROLLABLE LIGHT SOURCE

Flash units produce brilliant bursts of light whenever commanded. They are extremely reliable and safe to use. Think of the flash as a “sun in the box” because it looks like a plastic box, and its light is able to make spectacular images.

The light emitted by a flash is similar to midday sun in color temperature, about 5500 K or 5500 Kelvin. Flash is a tiny sun whose light can be easily colored with gel filters in various hues.

Fear of the unknown causes anxiety in nearly all of us. Barb and I often notice that anxiety in our clients when we encourage them to use flash for the first time. Should we even as much suggest they use their flash to add backlight to a flower blossom, we observe just the thought overwhelms them. With gentle encouragement, they reluctantly get out their dedicated flash and a dedicated cord that allows off-camera flash positioning. That is when we notice that they have a pop-up flash that can be programmed to act as a flash commander. We now urge them to use the built-in wireless flash system that until now they did not understand they already had. Again, they protest! However, with a little persistence and guidance, they quickly have their pop-up flash correctly set in the commander mode and their handheld flash properly in remote mode. Students are amazed at how simple it was to set everything into the wireless flash mode. Within an hour, they are using the wireless flash system effortlessly and they begin the steady downhill progression to skilled flash use.

Flash is so widely underused by outdoor photographers simply because most do not perceive that it can, and will, create attractively illuminated images. Here are several examples. I was photographing Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park on a cloudy day. Although 20 photographers were actively shooting in the basin, I was the only one using flash. One puzzled photographer questioned the reason I used flash. I showed him the image I was shooting on my camera’s LCD. He was indeed enthralled. However, he could not duplicate it because he had no separate flash and his pop-up flash had inadequate power.

Most outdoor photographers love to photograph waterfalls. Have you ever seen anyone use a flash on a waterfall? Have you noticed that many outdoor photographers seem to be afraid of the dark because they pack up their gear and flee as soon as the sun fades away? Instead, I put my flash to work. Moreover, I use flash in about 35% of the landscape images I shoot. Consider a butterfly quietly clinging to a flower on a chilly morning. Most photographers would shoot it with ambient light, a quality macro lens, and a tripod to help good composition and to make a sharp image. I do that too, but additionally I nearly always mix flash with the ambient light, especially with close-up subjects.

I hope you are wondering about the reasons for so often using flash in those, and similar situations. The cloudy day at Grand Prismatic spring had flat, dull light. Yes, I used a polarizing filter to remove the glare from the colorful foreground of the hot spring’s runoff channel, but the white sky remained unappealing and distracting. If the sky were a dark gray, and a shaft of warm sunlight penetrated the overcast sky to brightly light the runoff channel, the light would be vastly improved. Since I was using a wide-angle lens and the foreground was only a couple of yards away, well within reach of the flash, I could make that light happen! I underexposed the ambient light by about two stops to turn the cloudy background dark gray, and used my flash to imitate the shaft of sunshine to brilliantly light the foreground. Instead of a dark, dull foreground and a bright sky background, the flash changed the light ratios to produce a bright foreground with a dark background!

The patterns in the runoff channel at Grand Prismatic Spring offer an appealing foreground. On a cold and cloudy day, though, the foreground doesn’t grab your attention quickly. Canon 5D Mark III, 28mm, ISO 500, f/11, 1/60, Cloudy WB, Manual.

Hoping for a shaft of sunlight to light the foreground without success, John shot a two-shot multiple exposure that let him light the foreground with a 1/2 CTO filtered Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite. He zoomed the flash head to about 50mm to light the nearest foreground, then zoomed to 200mm for the second shot of the double exposure to light the more distant foreground. He also underexposed the ambient portion of the image to make the gray skies menacing. Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite fired at 50mm and 200mm zoom on manual to make certain the Speedlite emits all of the light. The Master was a Canon ST-E3-RT.

Consider photographing a waterfall by mixing ambient light with flash using a long exposure. The long shutter speed causes the water to blur, while the flash freezes some of the water drops in mid-air, making the waterfall look “wetter” in the final image. Think of a dark night sky filled with twinkling stars. Expose so the stars are correctly rendered by ambient light, and use your flash to expose and reveal the foreground. As for that sleepy butterfly, ambient light does an excellent job. But a slightly underexposed butterfly with a little flash skimming across the wings to reveal the wing texture works far better. Alternatively, I use the flash as a backlight to highlight the edges of the butterfly. In both cases, the flash makes the butterfly appear to have more depth and to look more three-dimensional.

The two-tailed swallowtail is one of the largest butterflies in America. A Nikon SB-800 Speedlight front-lit this fine specimen. Nikon D4, 200mm micro lens, ISO 200, f/22, 1/6, Cloudy WB, Manual ambient exposure, TTL flash.

The Nikon SB-800 Speedlight is used wirelessly to sidelight the butterfly in order to reveal more texture.

The Speedlight lights the butterfly from behind providing a pleasing backlight.

Photographers find outdoor flash so extremely useful because it conquers numerous lighting problems. Flash mainly helps to create flattering light when the ambient light is a bit on the bland side. Here’s a list of eight worthy applications for outdoor flash:

• To add light to help reduce dark shadows—the conventional fill flash.

• To be the main or primary light on the subject, using ambient light for fill.

• To exclusively light a subject—using no ambient light.

• To correctly expose an otherwise dark area of the image using balanced flash.

• To improve the color of the subject or background.

• To sharpen the image.

• To backlight or sidelight the subject.

• To freeze fast subject motion, such as hummingbirds’ wings.

USE FLASH EFFE...