THAT is the question.
i’ve always been a HUGE natural light fan (and all of my portrait work for clients IS natural light), BUT, i’m finding as i aim to document our lives here chez willette with the camera, that there isn’t a whole helluva lot of natural light at 7 p.m. or at 5 a.m. I’ve been resisting the need/urge to slap my speedlight onto my camera, but i have FINALLY resolved that it is what i have to do (if i’m not going to keep my point and shoot battery charged…LOL).
soooo…we’re on day 3 of project life now (and loving every minute of it). Still waiting on my kits to arrive…UPS tracking says one will be here today and one tomorrow. you KNOW i’m stalking the front porch waiting for our cute UPS man. if you haven’t yet purchased your kits, it isn’t too late. visit here to order.
i HAD to put the speedlight (i have the nikon sb-800 with a diffuser on it) on my camera for some of our shots (especially for how overcast it was here in Virginia yesterday). Boy, the results are awesome!!! I highly recommend adding a speedlight to your camera bag. So freeing to just slap it on, shoot, and get great lighting (that doesn’t look as flashy as the on-board camera).
can you tell which images were taken using flash and which are natural light?
for all of these shots, i had my 35mm 2.0 lens on (it caused a bit of facial distortion for the up-close shots), but this is what i had on my camera and i literally just grabbed it as i saw cute stuff happening around the house. i need to make a point to put my 50mm 1.4 back on the camera.
in a moment of desperation at target the other day, i had to put this animated valentine’s character in the cart to appease baby girl….not one of my better parenting moments. i didn’t realize that the doll dances and sings to Kesha’s Tick Tock. Naturally, we had to purchase it (baby girl would have flipped out if i had taken it away). Now max is running around the house repeating the lyrics….”don’t stop, make it pop, DJ blow my speakers up…” NICE. REAL NICE! It is her new favorite toy…and i’m sick of that song. It was cute the first 100 times we heard it.
little dude is at it again…this time he constructed a snowman out of blueberries during lunchtime. i cannot make this up….he seriously can build out of ANYTHING i’m convinced!
someone LOVES to pull tissues and baby wipes out of their packages.
the first five are natural light, the rest are using my flash with it bounced off of the wall next to me or off of the ceiling.
some willette tips (though i have to admit that i am in NO way qualified to do tutorials on speedlights/flash)….there are MUCH more qualified people who can instruct you on it.
what I did (in willette photography terms):
- bounced the speedlight off of the ceiling (or the wall next to me). make sure it is a white or neutral wall. there is nothing like some red wall flash bounce color cast!
- used the flash in TTL mode (through the lens)
- my settings for all the images were an aperture of f/2.8
- for the flash images, i have my flash synced to 1/60th of a second.
- and, with the flash, my ISO was low (between ISO 100-400).
- these are shot in RAW using my RAW presets for Lightroom that you can download for free (along with all my other willette actions/presets) on my facebook fan page.
- i processed the images in Adobe Lightroom (as i do all my images). Any final touch ups i do in Photoshop.
try it out! have fun!!!!!! I’m LOVING the freedom that using the speedlight is giving me. I’m not missing key, cute moments around here because of low light situations.
here are some flash tutorials and articles:
- eHow to use a Nikon Speedlight
- all things photography article on flash
- Ken Rockwell’s article
- Under the Sycamore’s awesome flash post
if you have any speedlight/off camera flash articles you’d love to link to, please do so in the comments section!