Lighting How To

Modern digital cameras perform so well under dim light at high ISO settings that some photographers haven’t used a camera flash for months (maybe even longer). Well, here’s a news flash for them: for a small investment and a little practice they can turn most shoe-mount flash units into a controllable package of portable sunshine.

Capturing the details in nature requires getting close to small subjects and sometimes you will want to use flash. Shooting close-ups with flash is very different than using flash as you normally do.

Whether the holidays bring out your “Humbug!” or your “Ho, ho, ho!” there’s one thing you must admit: it’s the most colorful season of the year. And all of those colorful lights are just begging to be zoomed, blurred and pleasantly smeared. Here are two common techniques that are easy to try.

Profoto B1 lights are the first studio lights to feature built-in TTL. They also have their own battery and controller so you can go on location and just pop up a light and start shooting. As of this writing they are available only for Canon, but by the time you read this the Nikon version should be available as well. To me, this is tailor-made for location shooting, so that’s where I did my tests.

The first thing I did after receiving Flashpoint’s 180 battery-powered monolight was shoot a few tests to get a feel for how well the unit performed. Although impressed, more so than with some other battery-powered units I’ve used, at one point while shooting with a Canon EOS 60D, a BG-E9 battery grip, and an EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens, I thought, “Wow, why is this camera so heavy?” That was when the “Small Monolight/Small Camera” concept was born and I decided to shoot this review using a Micro Four Thirds camera. And why not, so I worked with my Panasonic Lumix G5 for the test.

You bought your DSLR or high-end compact camera to shoot by available light without flash. The latest digital cameras, for the most part, are capable of producing exceptional results at high ISO settings under very dim conditions. But there are times when a little flash makes all the difference in the world. 

One of the first techniques I learned in photography was to use long exposures at night to blur traffic lights. I liked it decades ago, and I still enjoy seeing artful streaks of light superimposed over an urban environment. You never know exactly what the resulting images will look like, and that’s part of the fun. When the background happens to striking, like the Walt Disney Theater in Los Angeles, California (#1), the combination of abstract lights and architecture makes a winning photograph.