Off Camera Flash: Part II

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!

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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. undefined undefined undefined

 

And light painting.. WAY fun. You need a tripod, long shutter speed, a speedlight to flash the subject, and a flashlight to write with. undefined

 

  • Max Surikov - September 27, 2011 - 1:38 am

    Love OCF setup and the results. What a great difference between ambient and flash.

  • Max Surikov - May 29, 2011 - 11:03 pm

    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.

  • Meredith - May 14, 2011 - 11:18 am

    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!