Here's another good example of bringing up the shadow side of the subject so that we can balance the exposure with the background. This is not a speedlight shot this was done with a Paul buff Einstein strobe and the reason we were using this is because this was midday, and the sun was extremely bright and a speedlight didn't stand a chance to illuminate the subject enough to get the exposure properly done. So this is a studio strobe and this is at full blast, and we were shooting this bear. So if you're doing fill flash, which is basically what we're using this for to fill the shadows You can oftentimes get away without using a modifier and not have it look really harsh, as long as you don't overdo the flash power. So if you keep it subtle enough where you're bringing the shadows up enough to expose properly, but not so much that it looks like you're letting the photo then you can get away with a hard light source.

The reason we didn't put an umbrella in front of it or anything to diffuse it is because every time you put some diffusion material in front of in front of the light source, you're going to lose a little bit of the power. and in this situation, we couldn't afford to lose any any of the power because we were already maxed out and just barely had enough to overcome the sun. This next photograph is from the same scene, just a different angle, a couple other people. And you can see by the framing of the shot that the the light has to be a considerable distance away from the subjects So again, this was a bear studio strobe shot, and we're just using it to blast the shadows and bring them up so they exposed properly, otherwise that sky would be totally white. And one thing to note in this photo is the tablecloth is, is pure white.

And that flash is really hitting it hard and bouncing off. And it's kind of overexposed. But in a lot of these situations, there are trade offs. And you kind of have to capture what you need to capture and let the other stuff do what it does and then try to kind of fix it in post if you have to, as much as you can. I'm not advocating for not getting it right in camera. But sometimes there are trade offs and you have to sacrifice something and you have to choose what is most important and what's not.

This photo is a detail shot at a wedding. And we've been using this technique pretty often lately to do the detail photos. A lot of times the rooms the reception rooms are dimly lit and so in order to get Photos, it's much better to light them and so we'll bring a speed light around on a stand and backlight it. And you can tell that we're backlighting because if you look at the flower vase base, you can see the shadow coming off to the left and toward the front. So we're backlighting at an angle and it's probably it's roughly a 45 degree angle from the back camera right. And the clock face and the flower front are technically shadow side of the camera but because of the light is pretty close and it's bouncing around off the tablecloth and off other things in the room.

And because of where exposure is we're still getting some light to bleed onto the front of the subject. And then we have some nice rim light highlights that are being produced by the light hitting it and this is a bare speed light. And so this is really nice. This takes a little bit of experiment and to get the right angle and the right intensity. But once you get it, it can look really nice. This also will change pretty drastically with the angle of the lights.

If you move the light more toward the rare or bring it closer to the camera, you're gonna get very different results and you might like them better, you might like them worse but it's definitely something that you should spend some time to experiment with. You can do this very easily in your house, put some things on your kitchen table and move the bare speed lead around the different angles, different heights, different intensities and see what different looks you get and see what you like best. This photo was shot in the pitch black of the night, it was in the middle of a field a wide open field, and there was nothing but the lights that we brought. So behind the subject, or for speedlights their bare speedlights no modifiers pointing directly back at the camera. And that's all that's lighting this particular photo right now. So we silhouetted her against a completely black backdrop, and that was the result and you can see the speed lights are lighting up the ground, but there's nothing above or behind or on the side.

For them to bounce light off, so it's just complete darkness. And in this case, for artistic reasons or just stylistic reasons, we decided we wanted to have the lights in the frame. So that was purposeful to have the four lights set up behind her like that. Another backlit example, this night, there was a very heavy mist in the air. It wasn't raining, but it was pretty close to it. And so when you have particulate in the air, whether it be fog, smoke rain, mist like this, any light that shines through that from a rare angle, it's going to have a really interesting effect.

So that light is blasting through and it's hitting all the water droplets in the air. And so rather than how it was in the last photo where the light didn't really have anything to bounce off of or shoot through, it's now going to hit all the water and that's going to light up because it is material for that light. bounce around and change shape. So we put the bare speed light behind the couple, and it's a little bit lower than their waist and it's pointing upward toward their chins. And it's pretty low power. And we just started to adjust our exposure, ISO and our aperture and all that to to be the way we want to it's a very dark, a little bit of a moody picture, we obviously can't see their faces and we weren't trying to see their faces, we just want to see the shape of their outline.

And we also want to get the light to bounce through the water droplets and give it a kind of a moody romantic effect. And so that's a nice little trick. If you've got something going on in the air. If you don't have anything in the air and you want to. You can use other things like there are cans of a fog that you can use or you can use a fog machine if you have access to one to kind of create that. Here's another picture with basically the same idea.

A little brighter on the exposure for the faces. This one Actually raining. So those little white dots that you see everywhere are rain droplets coming down. One thing to know in this picture is that the light was bouncing pretty heavily off of her dress. And that is what is coming up and letting under their chins and their faces and things like that. So the light kind of got in between them and bounced around a bit and lit their faces up some more.

So this kind of thing is very sensitive to placement and proximity. And little changes will make big result changes. So this is something you should definitely experiment with and see what works best for you. This photo is from the same session that we had the four lights behind the subject, except we did a little bit differently. So these are colored smoke bombs that we lit off in the field and the same four lights are behind her and then we also added a fifth light, which is a speed light through 24 inch softbox And it's to the camera right in pretty good distance away because we didn't want it in the frame we want to get a wide shot and that is just bright enough to light up the front side of her body so we can see her arm we can see her neck we can see a little bit more of what she's wearing and her legs a little bit so that she wasn't a complete silhouette.

And the smoke bombs were lit off in front of the lights but behind her so all the four back lights are blasting through the colored smoke and that's what's given this crazy colorful smoke effect. This was really fun. And you can do all sorts of things with smoke bombs with fog, whatever it might be, you know, just experiment colored water, food coloring and water. You know spraying a mist, use your imagination, set the lights up, put it behind it and you'll get some really awesome stuff. And lastly, this is a self portrait. This is what we do when we can't find anybody to take pictures of But I wanted to show this because this is another use of grids, although this is on a studio strobe.

And you can use grids on the studio strobes just like you do on a speed light. This was taken in, in my kitchen. And so right behind me is my refrigerator. And to the left of me is the hallway and to the right is the kitchen sink and all that kind of thing. But because the grid concentrates the beam of light in a very narrow area, I directed at myself, and the rest of the room didn't light up. And the light was pretty powerful.

So when you expose to the light and the rest of the room is just ambient, it's pretty much black. I did a little bit of work and posted darkened up some more to clean up anything that might have reflect a little bit. But generally, this is what it looks like out of camera with the grid on. So it's a very good way to control where your light is going. If you have certain parts of the picture that you want to light up and other parts that you don't. The grid is the way to do that.

So I hope that looking at these different examples, kind of give you an idea of some of the different things you can do with the lights and the different effects you can get. There's so much more than this. This is just a really small sampling, a few different types of modifiers. There's more modifiers out there, there's more ways to use them. Use your imagination, there's so much you can do. But we don't, if we went over all them, it would take hours and hours and I don't even have enough in my own portfolio to serve them all.

Because just like everybody else, we're still exploring, and we're still learning new things. There's just so much to do. And so I hope that helped. Alright, guys, we talked about a lot of things. I hope that it was helpful for you. I hope you learned some things and hope you got inspired to get out there and use your flash in ways that you might not have before.

And if you don't have any flash gear, hopefully you go out and get some it's a pretty small investment relative to the other things you have to buy in photography and it can take your photography to the next level for sure, and really set you apart from the other people that aren't taking advantage of this awesome technique. So go out there and grab some flashes, practice a lot. And remember, if you need to buy this gear, please use the links on our resources section. And that helps support these projects. And we'd love to come up with more videos about other topics to help everybody out learning some things like camera fundamentals, and Lightroom basics, things like that. So thank you for watching.

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All right, guys, thank you so much. Get out there and practice and I'll see you in the next one.