In a Flash

During one of the classes a couple of weeks ago - just ahead of our still life studio session which I will come on to talk about - we looked at the use of flash. We've all probably used flash on our cameras - and got annoyed with the "Red Eye" effect that we can get. This is caused by the intense light from the flash travelling down the iris and reflecting on the veins at the back of the eye. This is the "bounce" flash effect. With modern day Photoshop techniques, we can eliminate red eye with some brush strokes on the computer.

There are, of course, some other techniques for the effective use of flash. The teacher illustrated this with a picture of a robin in flight that he had taken. In this particular example the tutor had used "Fill in flash." This has the effect of just "filling in" or "highlighting" a section of the photograph or image in the photograph. It is a more subtle effect. On the robin illustration, it meant that the robins red breast and face were highlighted, but not the background - very effective. You need to be relatively close to the subject to use this technique.

The contrasting technique to this is "Full Flash" In this type of flash technique you are trying to light everything, as you want the full image captured. Whilst full flash will achieve this affect, the downside is that you can get very harsh shadows.

We also talked about "White Balance" This was a new term to me. To the human eye, a white object looks white regardless of the type of lighting. However, with photographic techniques, white can come out yellow or green or blue - depending on the type of lighting that is being used. With a digital camera, the colour temperature is adjusted with software to make the white areas look white. This adjustment serves as a basis for the colour correction. The result is natural-looking colours in pictures.

The following week we are going to be in the studio and using "softbox" lighting. The beauty of using a studio with all that equipment is that no flash is needed and therefore I can use the "daylight" setting for white balance.

It is worth bearing in mind though, as touched on above, that with modern photoshop techniques, a lot of the "problems" of shine / reflections / white balance can be adjusted using photoshop on the computer. I guess that can just make us lazy with learning the correct use of flash - however I think there are still techniques worth utilising when using flash to light our subjects to achieve the photograph we would like.