Beginner Just getting into flash photography

[realspeed]

not for portraits purely for my own amusement as i havn't really gone into it properly.
Done a couple with a single flashgun

so now have 2 flashguns for nikon a Nikon SB900 and Meike 910 . ordered another pixel king radio flash unit as below

Up to now or recently I have had to rely on "line of sight" to fire the flashgun which is very limiting. Now with radio triggers things a bit easier.

Still annoying but can't be helped is the command module sits right over the camera popup flash making it useless. However the Pixel king master has a through input allowing a flashgun to be mounted on top

Now comes the learning part. power output- positioning- sync- etc etc. still give me something to study and try out during the winter. Also as the master is a t/x I can use that for another remote flashgun if I decide to get one. Still with 2 masters will allow me to use 2 cameras without swapping things around


At the moment also have 16 Enelope PRO AA batteries and a host of others so no problem there. wife is going to kill me for getting this extra gear

footnote
on ebay there is an advert for these Pixel kings at a really knock down price in the photo one is upright and the other part lying sideways for £45.99 well worth the prices and the last one was the latest version not the one shown. other wireless flash units may not have the through put as shown in the last photo

 

[footman]

That's a coincidence, just this week I've moved to using twin macro flash, the first hurdle was understanding the manual

 

[realspeed]

That's a coincidence, just this week I've moved to using twin macro flash, the first hurdle was understanding the manual

especially when half of it is in Chinese/Japanese.

 

[footman]

The Chinese bit was easier to follow.....

 

[Deleted member 34016]

You might want to expose for the BG and use the flash as a fill light and avoid the ominous black BG


Les

like this Twin flash shot

 

[Phil V]

You might want to expose for the BG and use the flash as a fill light and avoid the ominous black BG


Les

This^
The skill with using flash is to understand the balance between flash and ambient.
The next bit is to understand how the (apparent) size of the light source affects the shadows.

Bare flashguns are fine for Macro ( the front of a flashgun being about 20x the size of a bee) but for larger subjects, you’ll probably want a larger light source.

 

[realspeed]

Hence having 2 flashguns for larger amount of light spread

 

[Scooter]

Hence having 2 flashguns for larger amount of light spread

Sadly it doesn't work like that - for larger subjects (like a human) you will have 2 smaller sources and two sets of hard shadows. You need to scale up the light in line with the size of your subject to get the same quality of shadow (hard or soft edges). Things like softboxes and umbrellas exist for exactly this purpose - to make the light bigger. You can also bounce it off white wall - the light "source" for photographic purposes, is the last thing it reflected off or refracted through before it hit the subject

Here's some examples

One Light | Owen Lloyd

owenlloydphotography.com

 

[Phil V]

Hence having 2 flashguns for larger amount of light spread

What @Scooter said.

 

[realspeed]

These things I have to learn an experiment . Just got to wait for second trigger receiver

 

[Phil V]

These things I have to learn an experiment . Just got to wait for second trigger receiver

You could do some research whilst waiting, the free e book that’s pinned to the top of this section is a great start.
And an hours reading could save a day of trial and error.

 

[Phil V]

People starting with flash think they’re starting from scratch. Which leads to wasting tons of effort re-learning stuff they should have realised to start with. (Flash is just light)

The sun: there’s only one of it, and it lives in the sky (so that’s a start point for light looking ‘natural’.

The sun is massive, but because it’s millions of miles away, it acts as a point light source, creates a hard edged shadow.

On overcast days, the sun doesn’t light the earth directly, the cloud cover becomes the light source and shadows soften (or disappear completely).

And light - like all energy behaves according to some scientific laws, it bounces off a surface at the same angle it hits, and if you double the distance from light to subject, you need to quadruple power.

 

[Deleted member 34016]

Look up Inverse-Square Law

 

[Deleted member 49428]

And Gavin Hoey e.g. on adorama
And Strobist.org
While these primarely deal with portrait lighting the same principles apply