Today, my cheap and manual Chinese flash arrived, directly from Hong Kong. It’s a Yongnuo YN460-II, and if you order it in China, it is about 45$ including shipping. If you oder it in Germany, it is 70€ plus shipping. So I ordered it in China, together with some radio remote triggers, so I can use if off-camera.
Works like a charm. Look:
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| From selfmade |
Tho these aren’t the best portraits ever, they show that with getting the flash off the camera, you can achieve very good results. Note the ambient in the background, this is an energy-saving tube light from the kitchen, tungsten-color (around 2700K). The camera white balance was set to flash (which is about the same as daylight), thus the “warm” yellowish or orange color in the back, which doesn’t matter much here. I bounced the flash over the ceiling from the corner of our small dining area, and it doesn’t look that much like a flash photo. Mission accomplished. You don’t need 300€+ TTL flashes from the camera makers for shots like these. Manual flash and manual lens here, no auto focus.
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| From selfmade |
Another one. Note the daylight from outside, which you get if you set the camera to manual mode and take a time longer than the usual flash sync speeds of 1/60s or so. Here the flash was about 2m away in an angle of about 45 degrees, and pointed to the ceiling again. The whole exposure was a bit dark at ISO100, but then I’m still at my first few baby steps with flash. Raw Therapee fixed that nicely from the raw file. This was shot with the shorter of the kit zooms at an EFL of 84mm (42mm with the typical factor 2 crop from 4/3rds sensors).
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| From selfmade |
In this last one of yours truly, taken with -2EV for the ambient, and so a shutter time of half a second, you can see the limitations and problems when mixing flash with ambient room light. Behind me is a dimmed halogen lamp which also has a strong tungsten color of about 2600 or 2700K, while the flash is a flash of course; bright as daylight, and of about the same color. So how to correct that one? With software, this is impossible. The solution is to put some CTO (orange) gel onto your flash, so that is has about the same color as the ambient. Then you would set the white balance of your camera to Tungsten (or manually somewhere in the 2700K area), and daddy would be a happy camper. That means it is really important to get those cheap add-ons for your flash(es), and then to experiment and learn.
And where can you learn all of that and more, and even for free? Take the “Lighting 101″ and “-102″ courses at David Hobby’s “Strobist” blog - and also bookmark the pages of other masters of flash photography, like for instance Joe McNally and Kirk Tuck. And if you can afford it, then order David’s DVDs or a book or two from Joe and/or Kirk.
I mean, really. While I always thought I hated flash photography, in reality it was only a blockade in my own mindset. But now I’m really eager to learn - and this is great fun!
Thanks for looking.
