The last entry basically introduced off-camera flash. I would like, at this point, to clarify that I said that I was not going to show you what to do. I’m literally wanting to show you what I use, why I use it and where I got it from. I’ll repeat what I said last time, there are a million articles out there to show you what you need to do to get started and trust me, once you have the principals down-pat, you’re going to be well on your way to injecting a little bit of flash into your images to compliment, and hopefully, improve them.
Enough of that, though, on with the post…
For no reason at all, I’ll start with the Swivel. The Swivels I use are “Manfrotto 026 Lite Tite” Swivels, and I got mine from here, for £14.95. A Swivel basically sits on top of your light stand allowing you to move the flash and also lets you to attach an umbrella.
Also included with the Swivel are these little brass things, called Spigots. I only use the ‘male’ variety, which sits on top of the Swivel and allows you to attach your flash to it.
Below is the Swivel, swivelled, and with the male Spigot attached.
Next up is the Swivel attached to the light-stand. The light-stand I use is from here, costs just £24 and is simply named “2m medium duty light-stand”. There is also a “heavy-duty light-stand” but that only reached 1 metre high, whereas the “medium-duty” one reaches 2 metres. Very handy. So, you attach the light-stand to your Swivel via the turn screw you can see on the right-hand side (the one with the 4 ‘points’ on it). You can use the ‘female’ Spigot, if you like, as the light-stand has a ‘male’ screw on it, but I find this way to be less fiddly and easier to do. Personal preference is always king.
And then we have the flash ‘shoe’ attached to the ‘male’ Spigot on top of the Swivel. It simply screws in like so.
Then you attach your flash to flash shoe and you’re laughing.
All that remains to do now is get your umbrella and slot it into the hole on the Swivel. I got my umbrellas from here. I purchased 2 ‘shoot-through’ umbrellas and 2 ‘bounce-off’ umbrellas for about £12 and £14 – not much at all. Links are here and here. They’re both 43″ so are fairly large and produce quite soft shadows. And you know what the best thing is? The next time it rains at a wedding, I’ve got at least 4 umbrellas I can use for the Bridal party!
Voila! All set-up and ready to shoot!
If you’re interested, the set-up for the photos above was this:
You can see the backdrop – simply a black bed-sheet hung over a drying rack. The umbrella to the right and the reflector – a pad of white paper – to provide a bit of fill from the left-hand side. Nice and simple.
Very soon after getting all this kit, I put it to good use shooting head-shots for a local football team. The shots were taken in the shade from the bright sun at f/8, iso100 and 1/250th and the flash was at 1/4th power. I placed the flash very, very close to the subject and ever so slightly off to the (camera) right-hand side. I thought I would use the flash as a main light and have the ambient-light lift the shadowed areas ever so slightly. I think it worked, anyway.
by Matt
Show Hide 4 comments