mrca
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Someone brought up on camera flash but that raises the next things to try after you get used to turning on the flash, getting it to fire with the camera.
How do you decide where to set up the lights? It starts with your vision,message or mood for the shot. When you shoot with available light, usually the sun, you have one source that produces hard shadows, ie sharp edged shadow edge transition. It moves on it's own out of your control other than chosing time of day and camera position and will soften, slow the shadow edge transition with clouds, fog or dust. With lights you control all that. Light has 4 characteristics: direction, diffusion, intensity and color. With lights you can pick and chose among them.
Direction: on camera axis flash produces flat, no shadow light. Think drawing a circle on a piece of paper, it's flat. Move the light away from camera say 45 degrees and you now produce highlight on the light side and shadow on the other. That shadow is like taking your pencil on it's side and shading the circle...making it a ball, 3 dimensional. with depth added. Research the standard main light patterns, paramount, loop, rembrandt and split and try kickers behind the subject to rim it with light and separate the subject from the background. Each pattern helps alter the appearance of theshape the face and flatter or detract from different facial shapes and the shadows can hide things like double chins in deep shadow.
Diffusion: shadow edge transition is controlled by the relative size of the light source. Although the sun is so large it is far away and relatively small and produces hard edged shadows with the rays lined up parallel. Clouds, or with your strobes, a diffuser panel or two including in soft boxes scatters the rays randomly and produces softer shadow edges. Soft for babies women hard for men and texture.
Intensity: when folks initially think of strobes they primarily think of getting "good exposure" and the proper exposure shows the actual tone of the skin. But part of the face is in shadow and how dark compared to how light the area lit is expressed as a ratio. Low ratio or little contrast for things like babies, women, gentle mood, high ratio for more dramatic, contrasty look. For men, drama, texture. See how these can be used combined with direction and diffusion to step up how light matches your vision? eg, dramatic male shot with direction other than paramount plus hard light and high contrast, you have maximized how light matches your message or vision. Women, paramount or loop, soft light low contrast, peaceful gentle romantic mood.
Color: You can control color using a gel, colored clear plastic on the flash. You can warm the subject to match the warm sunrise/set. Or color a background with a background light.
So, like I said in a prior post, it gives you all sorts of creative control you didn't have accepting what BOB, the big orange ball, the sun, hands you when you are standing there. Instead of flat, low contrast light on a guy on a cloudy day, you can harden it with a flash, power it high enough above ambient to have a higher contrast between the lit and shadow side and get the source smaller by using a maller light source and moving it further away. If you work with these concepts one at a time and see how they work then file what you saw in the back of your brain, when you envision a shot you will be able to draw from what you have created before to make a shot that is your style. I hope this post gives folks who have feared flash and no used it will see what a huge improvement it can make to your images. It's digital folks, if the shot is too hot, under exposed, etc, who cares, every shot is free. When I shoot with my medium format film camera today, every click is $2.50, you don't want to screw up a bunch of those.
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This wall bounce creates 100% fill, meaning the light has no directionality. In contrast, direct flash creates directional light with hard shadows, and the only fill is the secondary bounce:
