The last big monster category in photography is flash. And I'm not going to go into extreme depth on flash, mainly because it's such an expensive topic. It's a class really all on its own. I actually have another class that specifically talks about flash and flash only, and lighting photographs. So I'm not going to go into it in great detail here. I'm just gonna give you some high points, give you a little taste of the basics and, and then you can experiment a little bit and if you want to go more in depth, check out my other class on lighting photographs.

Flash is a great tool to have in your arsenal. It lets you take control of almost any situation that you would otherwise have to make some compromises on and not get great photographs. You may be indoors and the light is just poor. It's low, light situation, location. Quality light, and you can take your flashes out and make it look beautiful. Sometimes you're outside and you've got a great sunset and you want to take that photo, we talked about it in dynamic range section, you need your flash to light up your subject.

So a couple things about flash. Some cameras have pop up flashes on them, and you may have used them and you've see the dreaded red eye in your subjects. Pop Up flash is pretty much the worst type of flash you can use. And it's because of the angle of the flash how it hits your subject, and because it has no diffusion on it, so it's a bear flash, very strong, harsh, small light source going directly at your subject from the front. And the red eye effect is because that lights going into their pupils and you're actually seeing the blood in their eyes reflect back out at you. So the way to avoid red eye is to have your flash source be not on axis with your subject.

So just being able to take your flash and move it over to maybe like 30 degrees, that reflection from their eyes is going to go away from your camera, and you're not going to see the red. Obviously, you can't do that of the pop up flash, but you can do it with speedlight mounted on top of your camera. And now you have control the direction that light you can bounce it off the ceiling, you can bounce it off a wall, you can put modifiers on it. So that gives you some more control. The other thing you can do is have a completely off camera flash. So you'd have a trigger on your camera, that would pop a flash that's just on a light stand wherever you want to put it.

And now you can put on brella is on it, you can put softboxes you've got all sorts of modifiers to diffuse that flash and make that a larger light source. Think about sizes of light source light sources is that the smaller the light source, the harsher the shadows are going to be. And the larger the light source, the softer those shadows are going to be. And light sources. The light source itself may be big but if it's really Far away from your subject, it's effectively small. The most gigantic light source we have is the sun.

But for photographs, it's a very hard small light source because it's 93 million miles away. If the sun were a few feet away, it'd be a little bit warm. And also, it would be a hugely gigantic light source and there'd be no shadows because that light would wrap around your subject. So it's all relative, you can get a two foot by two foot softbox, which is not huge, but really up close to your subject. And that's going to be a soft, large light source is may I'll be confusing, and it's just because I'm skimming the top of the flash world. Again, this does require a lot more in depth information to kind of make sense of it all.

But one other thing I wanted to mention is that you have manual control of flash where you set the intensity of the light yourself. All the way up from full power all the way down to usually one 128 power, and then a bunch of settings in between. The other option you have is TTL, which stands for through the lens and what's happening is the camera is looking at the photo you're about to take and this all happens within a split second look at the photo says to itself, Okay, I'm gonna need this much extra light that's not in the ambient. And it says, Hey, Flash, I need half power. Flash at half power when I take this photo and then the photo gets taken the flash pops, and you have a theoretically properly exposed photo. Just like white balance, auto white balance.

It's not always perfect. It's doing the best that it can do with what it sees, but it can't always get it right TTL is handy. Personally I use manual flash all the time for everything because I prefer to be in complete control. In a studio setting, you'd always want to use manual flash because you want consistency. Generally the light in the setup is not changing, so your flash intensity shouldn't change. And when you're on TTL, the camera could possibly modify the flash brightness, a little bit from frame to frame, but you just want it to be the same all the time.

So manual, set it, get it properly set and then take photographs. Flash allows so much creative control over your photographs, so many interesting things that you can't do with just ambient light. It's an entire world that I definitely recommend you explore. But I'd also say maybe stay away from it a bit until you get all these other basics down cold, because flash is just another layer of complexity. It's not it's not terribly hard, but you can't do it. But if you have all these other things down and then you Add flash, you'll be able to figure out what the flash is doing and how to control them and how to change things so that your photo comes out the way you want.

The last thing I want to leave you with with flash is that your shutter speed doesn't affect the flash intensity. So when you take a normal photograph with ambient light and you increase your shutter speed, it's going to get darker. If you decrease your shutter speed, it's going to get brighter. Well, if you have a flash photo, then that exposure from the flash is not going to change as you adjust your shutter speed. And that's because you could have your shutter open for one minute. But that flash is only going to pop for a millisecond and you can have your shutter open for one 60th of a second and that flash is still gonna only pop for one millisecond.

And so you're gonna get the same amount of light out of that flash whether your shutter is open for a long time or a short amount of time. So your shutter speed is only going to control your ambient light is not going to control your flash and that key concept allows You to balance light because now you have an independent control of ambient, while your flashes are independently controlled by the intensity on the flash. This lets you do really awesome things. Your aperture is going to control both simultaneously because it's controlling how big the opening of your lens is and how much light it's going to absorb. So it doesn't care so much about length of time, it's only saying how much light is coming through my lens, and how much am I going to let through with the hole that I'm opening up. And then your ISO is also going to affect both because it's the sensitivity of the sensor to the light that it sees.

So aperture and ISO are going to affect ambient and flash exposure. shutter speed is only going to affect ambient. That's a lot on flash. The lights have taken in a short amount of time. But again, you know, watch this again, you might pick up a few more things and if you really want to dive in, check out that other class on fly