In Focus: To Flash, or Not To Flash

In recent years, flash photography has gained an undeserved reputation as a last resort, a tool exclusive to the snap-shooter. Something we use to blind our friends in dimly lit nightclubs with the resultant unflattering photos blanketing Facebook. They are often characterized by blown-out all white facial features and deep, shadowed backgrounds. Not cool. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

The flash, even the built-in version that comes with most consumer cameras, can be a very useful tool and can indeed help you capture moving images. The trick is understating your light. That’s the light that’s coming out of your little flash and the light that’s already present in a scene (a.k.a. ambient light) – be it sunshine, the light of the moon or the hot fluorescent stage lighting at a Wonder Girls concert. What you most often want to achieve with flash is good balance within the scene – blasting one element of the frame with flash and leaving the rest in darkness isn’t cool, but avoiding this is simpler than you might think.

Understand that there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do to a dark background with a single, on-board flash. You can control the light you send out to your subject, but in a cavernous club, a church or a Buddhist temple you simply don’t have enough power to bring the whole scene up to proper exposure levels. This is where one or more dedicated flash units become invaluable.

Using a dedicated unit – often called a strobe – you can bounce light into the ceiling or off of a wall so it cascades down over your scene evenly, dropping soft, even light on your subject and carving out shadows that will give everything a 3-D look. You want to light up the entire room, from front to back? Put two strobes on light stands and place them in opposite corners of the room, trigger them remotely (Flashwaves and Rembrandt triggers are affordable Korean makes) and delight at the studio-level quality of your light. You’ll be doing celebrity weddings in no time.

It’s a myth that flash is best served in the dark. The next time you’re out shooting under the sun and you find the shadows and the contrast too much to deal with, don’t ask your model to rush into the shade so you can fire away in the even light. Your on-board flash unit is plenty strong enough to cut through the hard shadows and you’ll come to realize a facet of photography often ignored by the casual shooter: the beauty of the fill flash. Try it out for yourself. Underexpose a little and hit your foreground subject with fill flash. The result will showcase an evenly lit subject and dramatic, textured background – perfect when snapping friends at a temple or on a mountain. Without even realizing it, you’ll have become a strobist yourself.

By Shawn Parker

Weekly Winner: Chris Mockford

Cool Yin/Yang captured at a Buddhist temple.  Well seen Chris.

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Weekly Winner: Jeremy New

Dramatic concert capture Jeremy, nice.

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In Focus: Coping with Low Available Light

What do you do in the dark? Or to be a little more specific, when you are out there with your camera, how do you cope with situations that are a bit dim, such as a city street at night or the interior of a bar? It’s a no-brainer, right? Just pop up the flash and we’re good – our subjects are well lit, no problem with blurry slow shutter speeds, great!

But have you noticed in these flash-captured pics that your subjects are often harshly lit, or the background is very dark, or all the character and feel of the situation has been washed away?

You could purchase a clip-on flash unit, which would give you a bit more control over the light you supply, but we’re going to look at an alternative, that when employed effectively, can deliver stunning results, otherwise unachievable.

Low available light photography is shooting in very low light conditions using only the illumination that the environment provides. Basically, all you need are a fast lens, a high ISO and a steady hand.

The kit lens that came with your DSLR is likely to be too slow to be effective; we need a fast lens with an aperture of at least f/2. The lower the f-number, the more light gets in and we need as much light through that lens as we can get. An aperture of f/1.8 is good and f/1.4 or even less is better (but much more expensive). Fortunately, most camera manufacturers make a relatively cheap but fast 50 mm lens ideal for this kind of photography.

Once we have a fast lens we need to get out of auto mode. If we let the camera make the decisions, then it will make choices that don’t suit our purposes such as popping up the flash or selecting a shutter speed that is too slow. Aperture priority mode is the way to go, as we want to stay locked onto the aperture of our choosing.

Select a high ISO value. Not a problem with today’s DSLRs – anywhere from 800 ISO upwards will be ideal. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive to light the camera’s sensor becomes.

In practice, what we can do is this: set the aperture at 2.8, the ISO at 800, look through the viewfinder and depress the shutter half-way. The camera determines the shutter speed and displays it in the viewfinder. Now we can make adjustments if necessary. We’re looking for a shutter speed that we can hand-hold without blur from camera shake. Anywhere from 1/8th (with a steady hand and practice) up to 1/60th are typical in these low light conditions. If the shutter speed is too slow we can raise it by going to an aperture of f/2 or f/1.8 and/or raising the ISO value again. A little knowledge on how to use exposure compensation is also useful for tweaking the shutter speed.

A couple of other tips to get the most out of low light are to ensure that your subject doesn’t have a bright light source close behind them, and if you can get some colored lights behind your subject (perhaps down the road or a bit further down the bar) you will get some super background effects.

It takes a bit of skill developed through practice and a little patience, but the results can be truly amazing.

In Focus: What the EXIF??

Think of the EXIF data as the pencil and paper of the pre-digital days. Before the digital era, the photographer had to manually record the settings of each shot so he or she could look at their photos later and learn what worked for a given situation, or what combination of settings produced what effects.

These days it’s a breeze — no pencils in sight! When you take that shot, a great deal of information is written into the image. Much of the data is of no real practical use as far as the average photographer like you or I are concerned, but some of it is extremely helpful. Things like the aperture, shutter speed, focal length and ISO value are all available to be referred to later — sometimes it could be much later. Occasionally I’m looking through my archives on Flickr and I think “That looks good, how did I do that?” The EXIF data is there and I just click through and find out.

For those new to technical terms and important but initially difficult-to-grasp concepts like the relationship between aperture and shutter speed, the benefits of this information are much more immediate and valuable. As soon as you take your shot you can check the EXIF data right away in-camera and perhaps compare to other shots you have just made. For those new to photography this is very useful, especially while out there shooting.

Having your data available to you through an image sharing community like Flickr is convenient, but it’s also good to check out other’s EXIF information too. You might see a photograph and think “I like that motion blur, I wonder what the shutter speed was?” If the photographer has retained the EXIF data in the file, you can check it out for yourself.

I say “retained” because sometimes the data isn’t there. Images from film cameras don’t provide EXIF data of course, and some image editors have an option that strips out the data when saving for the internet to keep the file size as small as possible — so beware of that when saving your files.

So keep an eye on your EXIF data, it’s an important part of learning about your camera and the more technical aspects of photography in general. But any amount of EXIF data is useless if you aren’t actually producing it, so get out there get shooting and see you in the Seoul Photo Club on Flickr.