Flip That Flash
Flip That Flash!
Disclaimer: If you are interested in purchasing any of the products mentioned in this blog post you can click on the Adorama link on the right side of this page. Doing so will NOT affect the price of the purchase in any way, however, a small percentage of your purchase price will be paid to this website and will help keep this blog alive and healthy. In fact, if you are going to buy any product from Adorama anyway, doing so by clicking through the Adorama link on this website would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
I envy the photographers who shoot night baseball games. Or night football games, or basketball games, or even hockey games! Why? Well, the players, the umpires, and the fans that have tickets (obviously!) must have enough light to see the ball, or the goal line, or the hoop, or the puck. So the field is flooded with light! And, if the game is televised, the amount of light provided for the TV cameras makes photography not only possible but also almost downright easy!
But pity the poor DSLR photographer. All this poor photog wants to do is have enough light to take a picture! Some photographers push their ISO setting up to – I don’t know – a million! – and just shoot away but whenever I’ve tried that my subject’s, more times than not, have black eye sockets (caused by overhead incandescent lights) and the results look pretty awful (caused by the very high ISO’s required) to me. Other shooters plunk down big bucks for 1.0, 1.2, or 1.4 lenses and then shoot pictures with their aperture set to wide open but I too have those lenses and whenever I’ve tried that I’ve found my fastest lenses are never as good wide open as they are when stopped down two or three f-stops, my depth of field is so razor thin wide open that a portrait leaves my subject’s ears out of focus when their eyes are in sharp focus, and the lenses needed are just too damn big, heavy, and expensive! All of the above has brought me to taking pictures using electronic flash, so much so that I’m now totally comfortable doing it. And in turn, because no one solution to lighting is perfect, the more flash pictures I take, the more often I think about improving my “working with flash” technique.
I’m sure the Canikony DSLR camera company is happy about this. They want me to buy their flash units….They need me to buy their flash units (thanks Jack and a few good men) and I can understand and appreciate their point of view. When the available light level gets really, really low, when I must freeze action, when I must use a smaller f-stop to get sufficient depth of field to cover the depth of my subject, it’s just so darn easy to slip a flash into my hot shoe and blast away. The simple reality is that today’s shoe mounted flash units are so compact and convenient that using one when there’s not enough light to take pictures by the available light is a no-brainer for most photographers. But, I find this often reduces lighting to a matter of convenience instead of quality.
When I first started taking flash pictures in the stone age…J…I was only interested in having a sufficient quantity of light to make a photograph but the longer I took pictures using flash the more interested I became in the quality of the lighting I was using. So much so in fact, that I now believe that my flash photography technique is just as important as the camera and lens I choose to use. Sort of like a ying-yang thing, the camera and lens choices I make must work in harmony with the flash technique choices I make and all the choices, working together (in harmony!), result in photographs I (and my clients) seem to appreciate. There was a long time when I only worked with a single flash unit on my camera, then I added a second flash unit to the mix, and now I most often work with three, four, or more, flash units firing simultaneously. While I plan on going through working with one, two, three, and more flash units on this blog in the coming months (with occasional side trips when and if something else pops into my head) I have to start somewhere and that will be with using a single flash unit attached to my DSLR. So, now that you know my plan, let’s get to it!
But first, with due deference to Sesame Street, a momentary rant brought to you by the words “vertical” and “horizontal”!
Why did tech writers have to change the perfectly descriptive words “vertical” and “horizontal” to “portrait” and “landscape”? Are all “portraits” vertical? NO! Are all “landscapes” horizontal? NO! Is it that tech writers think average people are too stupid to understand the definition of “vertical” and “horizontal”? Possibly. Or even worse, are they so involved with their own self-importance in making up new age speak that they think they must rename things with words that have a less than perfect meaning just to use different words that are less than perfectly descriptive? Must we now rename all “doorways” with the word “portal” because it sounds more…more…high tech? Phooey!
Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.
There’s a major problem with placing a flash right over the camera lens in your camera’s hot shoe: it results in lighting that is akin to a punch in the nose. It’s a flat, featureless, lighting that makes subjects look like cardboard cutouts! Still, a single flash on camera is the most compact way to take flash pictures. Now I can understand why coal miners put a light on their helmets. They are working in the literal (not proverbial) darkness of a coal mine and they want their light to shine on whatever they are looking at. But like a coal miner’s helmet light, a flash in the hot shoe can create passable (though very boring) lighting, but this is only true as long as the camera is held horizontally! Changing to a vertical composition moves the flash to the side of the lens instead of over it and this resulting flash position makes your lighting quality head for the dumpster!
Can we never shoot a vertical image with a flash in our hot shoe? Woe is us. Woe is us! What can we do? What can we do? Actually, quite a few things but I want to focus on just one today!
One way to eliminate the most glaring fault that the lighting a flash in a hot shoe creates when shooting a single light, vertical image is to use a swing bracket. To prove this to my wedding workshop class at the Maine Media Workshops I set up two side by side comparison photos. Now look at the two vertical photographs below. The left vertical image is shot with a shoe-mounted flash while the right one is shot with a swing bracket mounted flash. The subjects are two of my students (thanks for posing guys!) and, when I present a program on light modifiers to a camera club or a class, I often joke that the shoe mounted flash vertical image created lighting that was so terrible it made the male subject’s eyes cross (he’s such a card – the joker!).
At first glance most people notice the large distracting shadow created by the shoe-mounted flash’s position in relationship to the subject and the camera lens’ point of view. This shadow is basically eliminated when using a swing bracket because with the flash swung over the camera the shadow that’s so distracting in the shoe-mounted vertical flash photo becomes almost completely hidden by the subject’s heads. You can still see a touch of the shadow behind the male subject’s head (subject right, camera left) but the female’s hair blocks it entirely. But, if you look at the lighting on the subject’s faces there are more important differences worth noting. In the vertical image using the shoe mounted flash, because the flash unit is no longer over the lens but to its side instead, the light from the flash creeps under the subject’s brow into their eye sockets and that looks unnatural. Next, again because the flash is next to the lens instead of over it, the flash’s light creates a shadow on the side of the subject’s nose and that too looks unnatural. Although I’ve just pointed out three glaring deficiencies when shooting a vertical with a shoe mounted flash, even if I didn’t, you should be able to see the differences just by looking at the two pictures!
To see what a swing bracket looks like when the flash unit has been swung for a vertical picture look at the two pictures below that illustrate the flash’s position in a vertical composition when it’s mounted on a hot shoe versus mounted on a swing bracket. Also, note that if you want to use a flash bracket but still use dedicated TTL auto-flash both Nikon (the older SC-17 version shown) and Canon offer TTL cords that can connect your DSLR to the flash mounted on the swing bracket. The current Nikon TTL cord for their SB800 and SB900 flash units also includes an auto focus illuminator and is called the “Nikon SC-29 Dedicated TTL Coiled Sync Extension Cord, with Male / Female ISO Hot Shoes & AF Illuminator”. It sells for $ 73.95 at Adorama. The current Canon cord is called the “Canon OC-E3 EOS Dedicated TTL Off-Camera Shoe Cord” and sells for $ 69.95 at Adorama. Adorama also sells its own in house version of the cord called the “Adorama Off-Camera eTTL2 Coiled Flash Cord (extends to 3′) for All Canon EOS Cameras – Heavy Duty Version”. The Adorama cord sells for only $ 34.95 but I have no hands-on knowledge of this cord (nor the Canon OEM version for that matter) and some of the reviews of the Adorama product are sketchy. The reviews plus the facts that I prefer manual flash and I’m a Nikon user make it hard for me to recommend these last two products whole heartedly but still, in the case of the Adorama cord, a $ 35.00 savings is still $ 35.00!
Disclaimer: If you are interested in purchasing any of the products mentioned in this blog post you can click on the Adorama link on the right side of this page. Doing so will NOT affect the price of the purchase in any way, however, a small percentage of your purchase price will be paid to this website and will help keep this blog alive and healthy. In fact, if you are going to buy any product from Adorama anyway, doing so by clicking through the Adorama link on this website would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
While I mentioned using a swing bracket above I can see why some photographers wouldn’t want to use one because they are big and bulky, especially so when you try to pack it away. See the photo of my much-modified “Stroboframe Quick Flip 350 – 35mm Flash Bracket” swing bracket below to understand this. But today there is a special breed of flash bracket that folds up so it can be easily stored in a camera bag pouch. The “Stroboframe Pro-Digital Folding Flip Flash Bracket for 35mm Film and Digital SLR Cameras” folds into a very compact piece for storage and sells at Adorama for $ 89.95. Adorama also sells two versions of “Custom Brackets” folding flash brackets that also collapse into a small package for packing in a camera bag pouch. The “Custom Brackets Folding-S Short Camera Bracket” for Short Digital and 35mm Film Cameras or Cameras without a Power Grip and the “Custom Brackets Folding-T Tall Camera Bracket” for Digital and 35mm Film Cameras with a Power Grip. Either sells for $ 79.95 and depending upon which camera you are using one of these three will let you flip your flash and stow your bracket away easily! Three pictures of the Stroboframe folding bracket are just below so you can better understand how it does its thing. Till next time, good luck and good shooting.
In: My Favorite Things, Working with Flash
on December 18, 2010 at 12:39 am
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Being an ex New Yorker, I was raised in Woodhaven Queens and my Dad was a portrait photographer, the ones that went into your home shot your kids and the family dog. He did weddings and I went with him on several shots as his Lighting Girl, I held a Strobe on a 8′ Pole with a photo cell so when his strobe went off mine went off. I started to take photos when I was in HS @ 14-15 Years old. My dad lent me one of his old Yashica Mat 124 2 1/4 x 2 1/4. I shot a lot of B&W with that then I shot with a 35mm Yashica 35 Rangefinder and after working my first job in 1969 I brought my first 35mm SLR Nikon Ftn and a Tamron 70-210mm f4 lens plus a Nikon 50mm f1.4. I wish I still had it. As I got older I worked in the High Tech Computers and made good $$, I went with Olympus OM1 through OM4t camera system plus several lens. But My company was laying off and as low person on the ladder I went first, So I fell on hard times and my two kids need to live etc…. But now I live in Northern CA, I am 57 and disabled I went to pick up my one love photography plus using Photoshop CS5. I now take nature Photos Flower etc… I currently use a Nikon D90 with 28-300mm f3.4-5.6 lens Plus I have a 60mm Micro Macro f2.0 lens and 35-105mm f4 (for 35mm great 90mm and 50-157mm lens on the D90 1.5x) I am hoping to get the D300s but may try for a D700 used if I can and sell my D90 top my photography teacher at the local College. also I have a SB-900 plus 2 -SB-600′s flashes a Sekonic L358 meter but wished I would have gotten the L758DR with the spot meter. Plus a bracket that takes the flash off the shoe and moves it on the side plus I can raise the Flash up 20″ higher above the camera. I have enjoyed the several videos you did for Sekonic on lighting and I wish I paid more attention to my dad about lighting. So I am learning the old fashion way by just shooting a lot of photos. Again thanks. My Dad still lives in Queens, his name is Joseph Virgona. My parents still live in the house I grew up in. He still takes photos for the community and the local Catholic church. Anyway when I watched your video you reminded me of my dad’s old boss when he was in photography, Morton Wolfe in Glendale NY.
Regards
Kristyanna Virgona
Screaming Tut Productions
Dunsmuir, CA 96025
on February 6, 2011 at 5:22 am
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Truly actually very good web site article which has got me considering. I never looked at this from your point of view.