All right, so you know what to buy, you know how to put it together, and you know how to make it work. So what's missing is how to actually use this to take really great photos and bring your photography to the next level. And that's what I want to talk about. So take a step back from the details about how to press buttons and set things up and make everything talk to one another. And just talk about a little bit of high level lighting information. And so what I want to start with is the quality of light.

And there's all different types of light that you can utilize to take your pictures and they're all going to give them a different feel and a different look. So some basics are you might have heard terms like soft light or hard light and what that's referring to Essentially is the definition of the transmission of shadow to light on your subject. So for example, if there's a very hard light source on me, then where the shadow hits, if the light is coming from this direction, then I'm going to have a shadow on the other side of my nose. And if I have a very defined line, where it's extremely dark over here, and very light over here, in the transition area is extremely small. That's a hard light source. And a lot of times that's not a very flattering light source for portraits.

But it can be used for certain things, it depends on what you're doing, and if you're trying to be creative and things like that. But in most cases, for a portrait of a person, you would have a softer light source, and that's where the umbrella comes in, and we're going to be diffusing the light. So rather than the light coming from this little flash head, it's going to go through the umbrella and it's going to spread that light out. And what you have as a result is the transition of the shadow to be a lot larger and a lot softer. It's much more graduated. So rather than seeing essentially the lines Have my nose on my cheek, you'll see that it's darker darkest here, and then it starts to get a little lighter, a little lighter and a little lighter until we are out of the shadow area.

And it's you don't have a distracting shadow line. So why does the light control that? How do we control that using lights in different ways. And the way that you have hard light sources is when either the light source is small, or the light sources really far away, which essentially makes it small. So the sun is really huge, but it's also 93 million miles away. And for that reason, because of the distance, the sun becomes a very hard light source.

So during a day when there's no cloud cover at all, and you have the sun, middle, the afternoon, very high up in the sky. You're gonna have hard shadows on the ground, you can see yourself on the ground, your shadow, very definitively outlined, but on an overcast day, which are the hazy and there's cloud cover in the sky. Your shadow may not even be there. Or it's there, but it's very, very, very subtle, and there's no definition in the shadow lines. And so we're taking our local sun if you will, which is a very small head on the flash, a very small area where the lights coming from. And we're going to put our own diffuser in front of it, which is the umbrella which does something similar that the clouds do to the sun during the day.

And we take that the light hits it and the light starts to go all different directions, and the light switch becomes bigger, and we have soft lander subject. You can see in this example right here that there's a soft light source close to the subject, and it's giving you soft shadow transitions. Now if we were to take this light and go 30 feet away, and put the umbrella on it, you're not going to have a soft light source anymore because the distance of that light to your subject is so large, and even though our light becomes it's two inches to start with and then we have maybe a 24 inch umbrella. And that 24 inches 30 feet away. It might as well be the Bear flash head, because the proportion of distance decides the light is too large. So those two things are always working in combination with one another.

And you have to keep them in mind when you're picking your diffuser and you're picking your physical location of your lights. If you want soft light, your best bet is to get as close as possible. And you also are going to want to defuse this, you can't really ever get a soft light with a bear flash head unless you bounce it. And so bounce is a way to take your flashlight this without using an actual diffuser like an umbrella or a softbox. But still get a nice big light source. And you can bounce this off of a ceiling if you have a white ceiling that's low enough.

Or you can even bounce it off walls or other objects that are large enough to reflect that light back onto your subject. So for example, if I was standing here and I had a white wall right about here, I could take this light, position it so that the light is pointing at the wall and then it's going to bounce off that wall. It's going to Hit me. But what happens is this tiny light ends up hitting this large wall area, and that bounces and now this wall is the light source. And that's a much larger area than this flash was. So we have a very soft light on me hitting me from this direction.

Some things to watch out for when you're bouncing light, is that light will pick up the color of any surface that it bounces off of. So you might remember earlier I said, a good white ceiling is a good bounce source. But if you have a color ceiling or more likely a colored wall, then be careful because if the wall is red, and you bounce your light off of that wall, you're gonna have red light hitting your subject and you're gonna have a hard time in post production, getting your skin tones to look right. Once in a while, you might want this for artistic effect, or whatever it might be. But in most cases when you're taking regular pictures, then that color is going to cause you a lot of headache. So be careful what you bounce your light off move.

Remember, it's always going to pick up the color, even if it's just a brown or like a 10 color it's going to warm the light up. If it's a light blue color, it's going to cool the light off and you're going to have skin tones be very different than they would if you just use the light source as it was. So be careful when bouncing. But it can be a really handy thing, especially with event photography. If you do have a waist anything above you that's low enough, then you can put your flash on your camera, and now you have mobility and you can move around, bounce that flash off the ceiling and get a really soft light source coming down to your subjects. But remember this also is that the distance of the ceiling is going to make a big difference.

If the ceiling is 20 feet up, then your flash may not be powerful enough to get 20 feet up in the air, bounce off that ceiling and come 20 feet back down and still provide a strong, soft light source on your subject. So a lot of things come into play, but keep bouncing mind because it can get you out of troublesome situations when you don't have access to a diffuser, but you still need a good light. One huge advantage of shooting with flash is that it allows you to capture Great looking to sunset and have your subject be properly expose. This is the only way to get that money shot where the subjects are visible in the sun and the colors in the sky and everything going on the background is not blown out. What happens is if you take a picture without a flash in this situation, you're going to either have to expose for the sky behind them, which will turn your subjects totally dark and you have a silhouette or you expose for your subjects and they'll be properly exposed, but the background will be completely blown out and you'll have no color in the sky will be totally white.

So you kind of can't have both, but you can use the flash. The idea is that you set your camera to take the picture of the background because you don't have control over the brightness of the background. So you set your settings keeping a few things in mind. Number one is that you need to stay within your sync speed of your camera which is usually one to 50th of a second for a shutter speed. I would recommend to stay at one 200th or below because some Things can happen at one to 15th depending on your triggers and your flashes and all this kind of stuff because you're right on the edge of what it can do, and you may miss sync and then you don't get all the flash in the frame. I'd say stick with one 200 is a lot safer, and it's not too much of a difference.

So you set your camera to one 200th you sell your ISO to whatever you need to set it to maybe 200 is a good place to start. And then you set your aperture for what it needs to be to expose properly. So get that background look exactly like you want. Make sure you maybe underexposed just a little bit to retain that color in the sky. If you have a good sunset going on or sunrise, whatever it might be, and then leave your camera alone. And now you have to take your light, you probably want to use an umbrella.

We do this very often at events. We'll take our couple out at a wedding, put them in front of the sunset, and we expose to the sky and then we take our light with an umbrella and we get as close to them as we can without actually being in the photo. We're usually on full power with the speed light in this situation because this is about as powerful as a sunset sky would be at dusk, it's just about the same intensity level. So one flash does the trick. Get that as close as you can, and test it, take a shot you back with us as it looks when you just set your camera up for it. And now your subjects instead of being a silhouette should be completely lit by your light source.

Now, if they're overexposed, back your light up a little bit, or turn it down a couple steps on the flash power. If they're underexposed, the only option you really have if you're on full power already is to get a little bit closer, or you have to tweak your settings and let the sky go a little bit brighter, and let more light in from the flash. But it's just a balance. And just remember that the two things are pretty separated. So you have control over both in a sense, you have control of the background with your camera settings, and then you have to control over your subject with your light power and proximity. So that's all that picture is, it's not as intimidating as a lot of people think it is, it's not as complicated as a lot of people think it is.

So please give this a try. All you really need is to take something outside, it can be an inanimate object, go out at sunset, sit your object down, exposed to the sky, light your object and take it on the picture. And just get it right, you will get it it's not hard, and the results are really, really great. They're eye catching, because a lot of people don't attempt this type of photography. And they think it's extremely complex, when really, that's all there is to it. So I definitely urge you to go out there and give that a try and master that concept.

And once you decouple your ambient light from your flashlight, you now have a really powerful technique. This is blending, utilize sources and when you can master that you're in really good shape. So definitely give it a try and keep at it. If you have trouble, please send us a message. Ask us what the problem might be. And we would Be glad to help you.

Sometimes when you're blending your light sources, your speed light is a totally different color than the light that you're blending with. And this can happen a lot if you're indoors, and you're in a venue or a room where there's incandescent lights or fluorescent lights or whatever it might be. And those are not going to be daylight balanced because speed lights are typically anywhere between 5006 thousand k for color temperature. And if you don't know what that is, when you are white balancing your photo and post production, you have that slider in Lightroom or in Photoshop wherever you're editing and that will allow you to change the white balance of the photo and that scale is in Kelvin. And that's just a reference for the color temperature. Mid Day outdoor outdoors with full sun is usually about 5500 K to maybe 6000 k depending on the time of year and the flashes are manufactured so that if you use them in conjunction with that type of outdoor light, then the color temperature of both are great.

To be similar enough where they can blend very nicely. But if you bring this inside and you have an incandescent light, which is usually about 2700 K, which is a lot warmer, it's a lot more orange, then you're going to definitely see a difference. If you white balance for the incandescent, then your flash is going to appear like a blue light. And if you wipe balance for your flash, then your incandescent is going to appear very, very, very orange, almost red. And if they mix, and you have a person in the picture, it's pretty bad and you're going to end up having to make that picture black and white pretty much or else you're not going to be able to save it. So what's the answer besides black and white photography?

Well, there's something called gels and they're basically a little pieces of plastic that are colored, and you can put them in front of your light and the light blast through it. And like we talked about before, when light bounces off the sources, when light goes through sources, it also will change the color of it. So the idea is that we take our 5500 k light weave Put an orange gel over it. And when the light passes through that orange gel, it turns orange. And if you put the right amount of orange on it and the right type and all that, you can match your speed light to your incandescent ambient lights inside. And now they are the same color temperature.

And now you can very easily white balance the photograph just like you would if you only had the one light source. So that's balancing your color temperatures with gels. gels can also be used creatively where you might want a green light coming out of somewhere and maybe a blue light and a red light. You can mix them all together, you can do just different effects. That's creative use of gels, but for color correction, they can also be used. CTO is color temperature orange and that's the one that you would use to balance with indoor lights.

And if you have fluorescent lighting, which is a pretty prominent in a lot of places. Now, that light actually tends to be a little bit green. And so you can put a green gel on the flash and you'll have to wait The amounts, you can stack more than one, if you want to stronger, you can just use one if you want to less. But you might need to put a little bit of a green into your flash to match the fluorescent. And then again, you'll have the same color temperature. And you can easily balance in post production or in camera if you prefer to do it that way.

So that's a little bit about gels, color correcting with gels, very important when you're shooting indoors, and you're mixing your flash with the existing lights in the building. So now you might be wondering, when I take a picture of somebody, where do I actually position the light? Should I put it at their eye level? Should I put it below them pointing up? Should I put it above them pointing down? And the answer is more times than not, you're going to want to above them pointing downward.

And the reason for this is that as humans we're very used to seeing people lit from above whether they're in a house in a building, even outdoors with the sun, the light source is almost all the time above them coming down toward them. And so when we light from underneath, we have Have shadows on the faces that we're not used to seeing, except maybe around a campfire. And people are telling ghost stories and they have a flashlight below their face. And if you light somebody with a flash from below, it's going to have that campfire look. And most of the time, it's not very flattering. So you want to almost mimic the natural light that we see in our day to day lives with artificial light.

So you'd want to have at about a 45 degree angle. And this can vary depends what you're doing pointed down and your camera is straight ahead and you want the light either to the right or to the left of the camera just a little bit. The more you end up coming around to like the 90 degree mark, the more dramatic that shadow is going to be on the face, and that has its purpose. But again, for a traditional portrait or headshot, you're going to want it not too far off camera axis and a little bit above the person pointing downward.