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| Technically publishable, aesthetically disastrous. Camera is set to 1/125 second at f/5.6, with a Nikon SB-800 Speedlight -- designated Group A -- placed high and to the left. The menu on the hotshoed master flash reads M (Master), then A, B, C. Three cursors on the unit's big LCD panel next to M, B, and C indicate they aren't active and M is serving simply as a "commander" unit. Only Group A is firing, with no EV compensation. |
Flash scares us. It is the monster lurking in a dark corner of photographers' brains. When we first approach the beast, as most serious-minded shooters must, it often rears up, attacks, and defeats our best effort at achieving pleasing, effective lighting. And then we never go near it again. We even convince ourselves that shooting everything by available light (Hello, high ISO!) is an important part of our style. "I never use flash 'cause it's against my aesthetic," we say. Your therapist might countenance that bullpucky, but try telling it to your basic harried, on-deadline picture editor who desperately needs a reproducible photograph, not a murky stew of pixels.
Photographers live for natural light, and sometimes die for lack of it, metaphorically speaking. Given the vagaries of location work -- the weather, your timing, bad luck, nasty people, insurance requirements that say no, you can't bring your subject to the roof, the airport delay that ensures you won't get to your photographic destination until the sun goes down -- you'll often be on location with no available light.
To twist the usual terminology, though, flash is always available. And the good news is that it's less intimidating than ever before. Using the small, compact, and powerful dedicated strobes now on the market, it is actually difficult to make a bad flash exposure. I use Nikon SB-800 Speedlights, which tap into what Nikon calls its Creative Lighting System (CLS), but there are other systems out there that offer similar capabilities.
Fast and accurate, these flash units can be operated completely wirelessly, eliminating the need for a tangle of cords, yet with no loss of creative control or exposure automation. With the Nikon system, you can use up to three groups of strobes, slaving them to a single on-camera "master" unit. And that's just the official line.
The series of images here shows how I often use multiple SB-800 Speedlights to "build" light on a portrait subject. In this case I start with an advantage -- an exceedingly pleasing face to photograph, a face that would be tough to make a bad shot of. Which is exactly what I go ahead and do. For image 1, in addition to the master flash mounted on the camera's hot-shoe, I place one remote unit off-camera to the left and a bit high in position. I designate the remote flash "Group A" (more on groups shortly), and the master unit is set to act only as a trigger for it. The results are predictably unflattering, with deep shadows caused by the hard, directional nature of the light. There's also glare on the background.
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| Better, softer light, thanks to the intervention of a Lastolite Skylite panel on a C-stand. I added a second strobe to Group A, not for its extra output but for more even coverage of light across the panel surface. I've had as many as eight SB-800 units in one group. The widget that makes this easy? The Justin Clamp. Cobbled together from off-the-shelf Manfrotto parts, it has become the state-of-the-biz hotshoe clamp. |
A word about backgrounds. They're important. Ever walk into a nice location, as I did here in this hotel lobby, look around, and think okay, this is good? Then you actually start looking through a lens and try to summon it all into a photograph, and you realize it sucks?
In such a situation you should affect the world-weary "Where do you want it, lady?" look of the veteran moving man, hoist a painting off the hotel wall, walk it through the lobby, and attach it to a couple of C-stands. Presto, instant background.
Back to those Speedlights, though; the amazing thing is that while I may be fumbling, they are not. They follow my lead, automatically adjusting their output to accommodate whatever I do to soften and shape their light. To diffuse my one remote strobe I put a 3x3-foot Lastolite Skylite panel on a C-stand and place it between the strobe and the model, with the flash still up high and left of camera. I don't touch the exposure settings, 1/125 second at f/5.6, which remain the same as when the flash was used without a panel -- and for image 2, the system pumps out the extra light needed to compensate for what's absorbed by the diffuser. This is because the master flash, hotshoed to the camera, emits a "monitor pre-flash" milliseconds before the real exposure, and, in concert with the camera, it sends all that data about subject distance, reflectance, and color to the remote unit behind the Lastolite. Pay no attention to that strobe behind the panel! And you don't have to, because that strobe is paying attention to the camera. You stand at the camera with a latte and click.
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