P365 Jun04: Flash

Photography is all about capturing light, and having a good, powerful flash in your kit is an incredibly useful tool for a photographer. I've always felt it was wise to spend extra on a great flash, in order to get the best control over artificial light, and the Canon 580Ex is exactly that: an expensive but incredibly capable flash.

It is pictured above attached to a wireless trigger (which I will discuss in a future entry) and mounted on a hotshoe stand.

This flash has amazing power, control, speed, reach and flexibility. I would have missed many many photographic opportunities if not for this gear, and the more I read about how to effectively use a flash (for example the brilliant blog Strobist) the more excited I get about using the flash more and in more situations in the future. More than any other piece of my equipment, I feel that I have only scratched the surface of what I will eventually be able to do with it.

Here are some examples of photos taken with the flash, and why the flash was so useful:

Towards the end of the day of my photo shoot with Rebekah, we were under the trees and rapidly running out of light. I wanted to shoot her on a large tree root with the 400mm, but it was simply too dark. I whacked on the flash, and even though she was a good 20m away, the flash beautifully illuminated her. By controling the shutter speed, I was able to bring up the background brightness to avoid the "cardboard cutout" look so common to flash photos, while also freezing her movement to give a crisp image.

My charming and beautiful niece Gabby was celebrating her 6th birthday in a relatively dark community centre. Trying to get an excited six year old to sit still enough for a dimly lit photo is impossible, and a direct flash on her face would have looked terrible. The 580Ex has a directional head which can be aimed anywhere in a hemisphere over the camera, so I simply pointed it at the roof, and bounced the flash off it, giving a nice even, flattering illumination.

When my new macro gear arrived (see previous entries), it quickly became obvious that illuminating tiny things being photographed from very close range was vital. With the fine control that I have over the flash, I was able to give a nice even, bright illumination of our clown fish for these macro shots. Given the colour balance and lack of blown highlights, even I was amazed how little this photo looked like it had been lit with flash.