I met up with my friends Chris and Josh at Hell’s Kitchen for breakfast this morning, and then headed out in downtown Minneapolis to get some practice shooting with “Radio Poppers” to do some “TTL off-camera flash”. If you’re a not a photographer, you’re probably scratching your head. I’m talking about the ability to do creative lighting, quickly. When I shoot portraits, I want to emphasize the people I’m shooting, and you CAN’T do that by leaving the flash sitting on top of your camera – the angles are no good. Why? Take a look at the shots below, what do you notice? First, that I have a goofy sense of humor. But once you get past that, you notice that everything has depth. Life is 3D, photos are 2D. If you want your photo to have some depth, you have only a few tools at your disposal, and shadows are one of them. When you see little shadows on someone’s face, shadow’s cast on a wall, or shadows in the pillowing of a leather chair; you see dimension in the image. When you shoot a flash from the same place you are viewing the scene (ie, putting the flash on top of the camera), then everything gets high with light. You have to shine the light from another angle so that some of the scene ISN’T lit. So you have to take your flash “off-camera”.
Ok, so taking the flash off the camera makes better images, but what’s this TTL stuff? It means “through the lens” and what really matters is that it means the flash operation is automatic. That doesn’t mean I don’t have to make creative decisions, but it does mean that I can adjust everything I want to adjust without ever having to walk over to touch the flash, and that let’s me work fast! The Radio Poppers let me shoot TTL (the alternative to TTL would be to either not shoot off-camera, or to shoot with manual flash – which means I either lose quality or time). For anyone looking to learn more about off-camera flash, be sure to check out Tri-Coast Photography, Mike and Cody as masters of it and have created a ton of great material to help educate other photographers.
The pictures below are a quick sample of what we did this morning in a couple of hours with no plan other than to go out and have fun learning. The first shot (of me) was taken by Chris Gotz.
no comments