When is the right time to use flash?

skene

Senior Member
OK, I've watched plenty of videos on youtube on how to set up lighting for portraits and the like... but provided you do not have a light meter, when should it be necessary? Excluding portraits and events... I'm just referring to your everyday out and about.

Provided you took all other necessary steps... ie. lenses, aperture, ISO etc...

I'm just trying to get the hang of using a flash now. Just picked up a new to me SB-600, so I just want to know what you all feel about when you end up pulling out the flash for other day to day reasons.
 

stmv

Senior Member
outside, I typically only use my flash as fill, one good thing to buy is the cable connector that allows you to separate the flash from the camera, I'll typically put the camera on a tripod, and then move the flash around for fill, even taking mulitple pictures to merge later.

using flash to recover details when the object is backlit is basic and saves many a picture

but, I am more of the school that avoids flash, unless doing indor portraits and or for the function stated above.

and when I am indoors, I still prefer mobile flexible fixed lighting so that I can dial in the light for total contrl.
 

Disorderly

Senior Member
There's main lighting and then there's fill flash. Speedlights like your SB-600 aren't powerful enough to provide the main light in most cases, so I use them for fill. Here the idea is that you can get a reasonable exposure from ambient light sources (usually sunlight) but the contrast between bright and dark is too high (harsh shadows) or there are areas you want to soften/brighten. I use an SB-900 with a Ray Flash ringlight adapter. It lets me keep everything on-camera but eliminates the shadow that screams snapshot to most people.

Here's an example. We were shooting in an abandoned restaurant. The key light was from a broken out window to the right. Everything else was pitch black, so I used my speedlight and the Ray Flash to give her arm and her side some detail. Otherwise the falloff of light would be more extreme than I wanted.
 

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skene

Senior Member
Disorderly, nice pic. However I'm just getting into using the flash and do not really want to drop coin on an SB-8/9 series. Maybe if I enjoy it enough I'll eventually step it up, or if I end up getting more into portrait work.
Thanks for the info.

:)
 

Disorderly

Senior Member
I understand, skene. You can do the same sort of thing with a lower end flash. You'll just have less power to work with, which may or may not be a problem. For that image I used a 50mm lens at 2.8 and 1/100 of a second so I could use as much ambient light as possible. Make the flash do less work.
 

dmc

Senior Member
i notice that the local art college has it's students out shooting with fill flash on all shoots outdoors. I asked several of them why, and they said they get consistently good exposures using this technique. I have only used fill where my subject is in bright light, but their faces are in shadow. Clearly indoors in low light flash can be of great assistance. I dislike flash, so use it infrequently, but sometimes it is the only way to get a decent exposure.
 

FastGlass

Senior Member
I use flash pretty much most of the time. Outdoors on sunny days I use it as fill (SB-800 with pocket wizards). On cloudy days I use it as my key light to give dimension ( SB-800 with pocket wizards). Indoors I use a 3 light set up for the normal studio set up ( Profoto D1 air 1000, 500, 500). As far as I'm concerned, every shot can use some kind of additional lighting. I was amazed on how different my shots came out once I learned how to use flash and lighting. The secret is knowing how to use it while making your shots look like you haven't.
 
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