To continue our small flash theme from last week, lets talk in detail about some regular uses of speedlights.  In an effort to keep this simple, i will limit this post to two styles of photography: macro (close-up, high magnification) and portrait photography.

Macro photography offers a view of the world in a way that most people don’t have a chance to see it.  The trouble is you are often shooting into dark places and a little extra light can make a really big impact on your photograph.  In the image above, i used a single SB900 Nikon Speedlight triggered wirelessly with the built-in Nikon CLS control, a Nikon D90 and the AF-S 105mm f/2.8 VR Micro.  CLS is the “Creative Lighting System” and it offers some of the very best abilities in the flash photography market.  Nikon has always been pretty serious about speedlights and the role they carry out in photography.

Its a good thing today’s flashes have a lot of power output, because when you’re this close to your subject with a 105mm lens you need a small aperture to achieve good results in depth of field control.  I shot this image at f/18 and my flash setting was manual at 1/5 power.  Now you might ask me, “why would you shoot manual flash with Nikon’s fancy iTTL (auto flash) ability tied into CLS?”  I’ll tell you; that dark background wasn’t so dark in real life.  I was shooting into the eastern sky in the mid-afternoon.  It was awash with low contrast light and it was ugly.  This also means my image was almost completely back lit.  TTL flash would have nver figured that one out for me.  I could have exposed for the subject’s front side and let the background go a couple of stops overexposed, but then i would have lost all the beautiful color in the flowers and plants.  You could ask, “why don’t you change your composition and put the sun behind you?.  I’ll tell you; bugs don’t like to cooperate and they certainly don’t hold still for very long.  I hand held the flash approximately 3 feet away from the subject.  Shooting at a fast shutter speed kills off as much ambient light as possible.

The image is lit entirely by flash, but doesn’t have the look of a standard flash photograph.  The flash was up high over the subject and the size of the flash is quite a bit larger than our flying friend.  This means it will appear to be a fairly diffused (soft) light source.  By comparison, if we used a 6 foot tall light source to take a picture of a person, we would achieve a similar diffused value.  Small subjects are perfect for small flashes.

Portraits are my mainstay in photography.  Its the subject i first learned to shoot and it is what drives my passion for this labor of love.  In general, most people take pictures of people.  Family and friends, young and old, pictures provide memories of those we care about.  I remember sitting next to the living room window on this delightfully tacky, blue ottoman while my dad snapped frame after frame of my siblings and me.  The pictures are fun.  Cheesy smiles, gapped teeth, it was us.  I look at those pictures today and fondly remember it happening, but i don’t see the people i know as much as i see a couple of good looking kids.  It is said the eyes are a window to the soul and for a portrait to have life you must see the soul.

This image is a very basic setup in a studio environment, but could have been shot practically anywhere.  Essentially there is one light on the model (SB800 Speedlight inside a small softbox, a Lumiquest Softbox III would also work nicely) and one light on the background (SB800 bounced inside  a 45″ umbrella).  Here is where the control of CLS plays a major roll.  Using Nikon’s built-in control you can shoot multiple lights at different power levels and control everything from your camera or the master flash connected to your camera’s hot shoe.  By controlling the power levels of my flash units independently i can make the ratio between the two lights as even or contrasted as i want.  I can make the background go black or an extremely crisp and high key white.  The softbox was in very close providing a very diffused light.  This is a nice effect of softening skin and helping to reduce the appearance of blemishes or lines on a face.  If you light this image properly, you can avoid wasting way to much time touching up your image on the computer.  Grab this PDF FastTrack To Wireless Speedlights (open the link in a new tab or window and right-click for windows users/control-click for Mac users to download the file) for a Nikon guide on how to setup CLS with different cameras and flashes.

The image to the left is a very simple portrait shot during the afternoon in direct sun.  Even though the top half of the subject’s face is still shaded, you can see the catch light in the eyes (if the eyes are completely shrouded then the portrait has no life).  The setup was a Nikon D80 and 50mm 1.4D lens shot in aperture priority and a flash mounted on the camera and set in iTTL.  Basically, everything was set in near automatic.  Heck, i didn’t even look through the viewfinder and shot this one from the hip to have my camera well below the subject’s face.  This perspective eludes to a sense of strength or power from the model.  Using a speedlight outdoors helps to even out the brazen sun light and illuminate portions of an image that would otherwise be near black in shade.  If i hadn’t used a lens with a big aperture, i wouldn’t have been able to shoot this image very well.  Big apertures (commonly f/2.8 or greater) on your lenses will increase your flash power.  Each stop of your aperture i.e.  f/4.0 to f/2.8  gains double the power of a flash.  A simple 50mm from Canon or Nikon will allow not only for shallow depth of field rendering and great separation from the background, but also a much more capable flash unit.

In the final image to the right, I shot with a 4 speedlight setup.  A single SB800 in a 24×32″ softbox one on each side of the model provides a simple rim light to show contour and shape of the subject and the chair.  They are mounted up high with the middle of the box at nearly head level allowing for a nice falloff of light towards the bottom of the frame.  This keeps the attention up towards the face.  The other two SB800′s were bounced into 45″ umbrellas with black covers as background lights.  The black cover keeps the light from spilling forward into the scene which would  contribute to the exposure of the subject and cause lens flare reducing the contrast rendering of the lens.  Contrast is extremely important in this style of image because of the subtle shift of whites to light grays in the shirt and background.  I shot this image with a Sony A900, Zeiss 24-70 f/2.8 and  Pocketwizard PlusII’s to trigger one SB800.  I only needed one receiver connected to a flash because the SB800 and SB900 (newer version) have built in slave eyes.  A slave eye will trip the slave flash when it sees another flash fire.  This is an extremely handy feature and i refuse to purchase a flash without it.  Sorry Canon users, since your speedlights don’t have this capability, i guess you’ll just have to settle for using Pocketwizard’s incredible Flex and Mini radio triggers.  The only catch to the using the slave eye on the SB units is you lose your remote control ability.  Essentially your flashes turn into standard studio strobes.  However, once your ratios are set for the lighting pattern you want you don’t have to adjust anything.  Manual flash control provides consistency.  My lighting pattern here was in the ballpark of 1 to 1.5 stops up on the background to where my key lights (sb in 24×32″ softboxes) were metered.

Next time: Product photography and working outdoors and on location with strobes.  Stay tuned…