Off camera flash is also very useful outdoors. When you are in non-ideal lighting situations (i.e. your client can only schedule the photo shoot at noon), you want a nice sunset photo, or anytime you don’t want to blow out your background to properly expose your subject. Same deal as with indoors – you can control your ambient light when you have a secondary light source to get your subject looking oh-so-pretty.
One of the most common problems with OCF outdoors – is that at noon on a cloudless day, the sun is VERY bright. You’ll have a hard time fighting & beating the sun with just your little speedlight. So, what do you do? You add in another speedlight (or two) or you bump up your power by bringing out a studio strobe (like this one) powered by a battery pack. It just depends on how portable you want to be.
For a fun little practice session, I gathered a group of friends from Twitter and we met out at Utah Lake to practice some sunset photos. My awesome intern came through again with models and we had a great time! Even got some light painting in at the end which I had never done before and was super fun!
As you can tell from this out-take, it was pretty chilly. 🙂 This is also what a natural light photo in the same location looks like. Pretty big difference.
And light painting.. WAY fun. You need a tripod, long shutter speed, a speedlight to flash the subject, and a flashlight to write with.
Love OCF setup and the results. What a great difference between ambient and flash.
Great use of off camera flash. The flash images are really dramatic and are a mark of a professional. I love the painting with light. I have to practice this technique to master it.
Those are awesome Jess! Sad to have missed the meetup again! Not sad to have missed the cold weather though…Vegas was so WARM! 🙂 I especially love the light painting. I want to play!