Cavannah Richardson, lit beautifully with one Speedlite fitted with CTO (color temperature orange) gel and the setting sun behind and on the left. About her 5 o’clock.Cavannah Richardson, shot from further back with same lens horizontally. Do you think the blue pipe fixture and white sign is distracting? You bet.
One Speedlight used judiciously can open up a whole new world for your photography.
The key is knowing how to combine it with available but directional light.
Cavannah Richardson was recruited by one of my students to be her model during our location shoot, but when she arrived with her mother, my student wasn’t ready to shoot.
Expanding on the one light setup is nothing more than introducing a 2nd Speedlight with a blue gel that is set to output 1½ stops less light than my main light which exposes my niece Mina. The aperture on my lens was set @f11, so the Speedlight providing the blue backlight was set to output f6.5 or f5.6.
Once you have a handle on getting predictable well-exposed pictures with your Speedlight off-camera, that’s when the fun really begins.
It’s a matter of finding willing subjects to be in front of your camera.
Yes, we’d all like to work with a shirtless David Beckham or a bikini clad Aishwarya Rai but that will have to wait.
At this point, you need to practice.
Wireless or Hardwire?
If you choose hardwire, it will be cheaper and exposure controll will no doubt be easier.
More importantly you won’t get EMF interference.
(During my Small Flash Lighting workshop, when I had 10 photographers flooding the auditorium with wireless signals, we had some issues with Speedlights not triggering)
You get i-TTL (Nikon) or E-TTL (Canon) and even have High Shutter Speed synch capability because the cord fools the camera and the flash into thinking they’re physically connected.
Best of all down the road should you elect to buy another Speedlight from Nikon or Canon (OEM), you can probably use one as the Master and the other as the Slave, again simplifying your lighting setups.
If you’re not using OEM (original Equipment Manufacturer) Speedlights and opting for Vivitar, Sygma or some other brand, you have to be careful.
Some third party Speedlights have voltage that can harm your camera.
In that instance your only option is radio slaves.
Wireless, radio or infra-red, systems use 1 transmitter and 1 receiver with options to add as many receivers as you have Speedlights.
This portrait of Colleen Ember was made with one Speedlight fired into my home made beauty dish and a single reflector. Because the light was very diffused and coming mostly from the front, there was very little else I needed to do in the way of touching up in post production.
I don’t recall when exactly I realized I didn’t have to buy every possible piece of lighting gear to create a certain image.
Whenever I came to that conclusion, it signaled I understood how to break apart and deconstruct how an image was made, especially if the image involved lighting by the photographer.
Coming up with workarounds was a necessity for me when I was in college.
Years later even after I became a staff photographer at the newspaper, I would always find workarounds.
Hey, what can I say? The bossman was always a tightwad when it came to expenses.
