To flash or not to flash .... ?



There is a lot made of natural light photography and those who claim they only shoot this way often seem to infer that their style is in some way superior to any other, mainly they argue because they understand the principles of lighting whereas those who add additional lighting may not.

As predominantly a wedding and portrait photographer I agree totally with the use of 100% natural light it is the most photographically pleasing light we have to work with, I always look for a window if I am in a building or which direction the light is coming from when outside, but the demands of my job and that of other photographers also means we have to often work in less than ideal conditions. I can of course always ask a client to meet me at 4.30 am for an outdoor shoot because the light will be just right the sky, but I somehow think few would actually agree to such an early start, and if a wedding is at midday ...it is well .... at midday with the sun directly over head casting down shadows over the the couples eyes and nose, unless we seek shaded areas to avoid this, which isn't always possible, or alternatively have our clients look straight towards the sun and squint to avoid those dark shadows under their eyes.

We can sometimes in difficult lighting situation use a reflector to very good effect, reusing the suns natural rays to remove unwanted shadow but this can sometimes be impractical especially if you don't have an assistant or two. so there is another solution and this is where I mention the thing the natural light photographer professes to hates ...the "flash" or "strobe" (no difference just that our American cousins like to call it the latter). Oh yes "flash" it is sort of like cheating right ...? In my view ... absolutely not cheating it is the difference between getting a consistent batch of quality professional images or having unwanted shadows especially to the subjects face. The principle is actually quite simple like with a reflector you are simply using the flash to lift the desired amount of unwanted shadow, the most important thing is to remember this is fill in flash, it is not the principle light, the correct mix of flash and ambient light is what gives images that natural light look.

I have put a couple of examples here from a recent pre-wedding shoot which we started at 8.30 am so although still fairly early morning with the light low as you can see in a forest there is still a lot of contrast and the sun is already quite strong and creating some unusable areas for the the subject to stand, but is making for great backdrop lighting. For these shots I used Quantum Q-Flash in TLL mode with Canon camera and shot in either aperture or shutter priority with the flash about one stop under the camera which also about a 1/3 of stop under centrally metered light in the camera. As you can see with the shot of the tree on it's own without flash it is a poor image, but by adding flash we pick the tree up nicely and then when we add the subjects to the composition we have our final image well light natural looking image:


 I tend to shoot off camera where I can and use a light stand or hand held boom if I have an assistant, so in this shot below you can see the shot as it was taken, with a little of the light and Assistant (Mark) visible and then next to it the same shot with these removed with a small amount of editing, which would have even easier if I had asked for the light to be a bit further from the tree it intersected. However without this single light to highlight the couple the refection in the water wouldn't have been anything like as significant.




I think you will agree that the mastering of light is crucial to photography however that light doesn't have to be totally 100% natural as long as it looks for the most part like it is in the final image.

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