After you get comfortable with one light, you might get the extra shine more than one. That's great. But let me give you one piece of advice that will really help you just take it one light at a time. So say your one light up, take your picture and see what it looks like. Once you get that under control and you know what that light is contributing to the exposure. Now you add your second light.

Take a picture with the second light and see what it's looking like. Once you're comfortable with what that looks like. Now you can add a third and a fourth and a fifth and so on depending on how many lights you want. But my point is understand what each one of the lights is individually contributing to the picture. Instead of just turning four lights on and taking a test shot, because when you do that, and you start that way, you have no idea what's doing what. It's also helpful.

Even if you set your main key light up and get that what you how you want it, you might want to turn that off, and then turn on the second light, see what that's doing by itself, and then try them both together. And it's going to be a little bit of back and forth. It's an iterative process, you tweak one light, the other one might need to go up or down a little bit a little moving away, that's fine. But if you ever start to get overwhelmed, and you start to feel like I cannot get this out of the way I want, stop, turn them all off, start back with just one and build a back up. It can very, very simple process as long as you don't try to bite off too much at one time. So one light at a time.

Understand each one and sometimes less is more. Six light setup is not always better than a one light setup. It just depends what you're shooting and how the look of the photo is supposed to be overpowering ambient light is pretty similar to what we were talking about when we take the photo at sunset with the speed light letting our subjects except sometimes people will do it. In midday when the sun is at its brightest. And you kind of take control the outdoor light by having your artificial light be the key light and your the sun be your secondary light source. This is tricky to do only because the spotlight is not as powerful enough to overpower the sun on its own.

So a lot of times people use studio strobes for this because there are a lot more powerful and you have to have battery pack and all this type of thing to make it portable unless you have a power outlet nearby in a field, which you usually don't with speed lights. You might think well maybe use two at once at full power and you have double the light. And yes, you do have double the light. But in camera world and the way cameras work and the way light is perceived is that it's exponential. So two lights is actually just one stop more of light which means that you would just increase your aperture, one setting. And that would account for the extra light.

It's a little bit difficult to think about because you would think that two lights is just going to be like way more light, but really, it's not. So you may be over overpower the sun, but it would probably take four or five speedlights. In midday to do so so becomes a little bit impractical. That's why the sweet spot for using a light like this is sunrise or sunset, or it can be an overcast day, in which case the whole ambient light level outside is a lot lower, and you can probably match it with a speed light. So studio strobes are the way to go if you're trying to overpower the sun during the day. But for everything else, the speed lights are great.

So it's the thing with flashes called recycled time. And what that is is the amount of time that it takes after you fire the flash for to be ready to be fired again. And what happens is Feed lights is that you've usually got four double A batteries. And then in the speed light is a large capacitor. And so the double A batteries charge the capacitor, when you fire the flash, it dumps the energy from the capacitor into the flash tube. And then that capacitor needs to be recharged from the batteries.

And that's what the recycled time is taking into account. So if you fire a flash at full power, and you dump that capacitor, completely, and now it has to charge up all the way again, and that takes usually depending on the flash manufacturer, and the the model that you have, it can be two to three seconds. But if you fire the flash at say, a quarter power, then you're not going to dump that entire capacitors energy only a quarter of it and suddenly has to recharge 25% as much as it would if it was a full power flash. So this is a reason why you might want to keep your flash power lower than full, depending on the kind of shoot you're doing. If you're doing a fashion shoot and you have a model and they're moving around and doing different looks, and you're shooting shooting, shooting, shooting While full power is not going to give you the type of cycle time that you need to do that shoot properly.

So something you can do, if you do need full power is take two flashes and put them both at half power and put them together. And now your recycled time is cut in half, but you still have the same intensity as one flash at full power. And if you really wanted to, you could do eight flashes that an eighth of the power and they're going to recycle really fast and you still have that full power pop every time you take a picture. It's a little bit impractical to use eight speed lights to do that. You probably want to move over to studio strobe at that point, but just so you can understand the concept and how it works. And if your batteries are wearing down and they're getting low and that recycled time is going to increase and increase until it just doesn't recycle at all.

So you may notice that your flashes taking six seconds to get recycled. Well, your batteries are probably dead. So pull them out, charge them up and get new ones in there. And the recycled time should go back to two or three seconds on a full power pop. Have you ever seen the photographs of a water balloon and there's something that goes through and pierces the balloon in the skin, the balloon has already kind of retracted off of it, but the shape of the water is still the balloon shape because it hasn't fallen yet. Or how about the photo where there's something that goes into a area of water or maybe milk and there's the drop coming out and it's kind of frozen in midair, anything like that while you're freezing motion speed lights are a great tool.

The name speed light is basically given to it because the flash duration is very fast. A studio strobe are is oftentimes more powerful than a speed light, but the flash duration is much longer. So when you're trying to do motion, freezing speed lights are the way to go. Now again, the camera to take the picture at the right time is a whole different subject. But there are triggers that are used for the camera. which will then trigger the flash which will freeze the motion.

Now you could set your shutter speed really high, but then you start to really reduce the amount of light that comes into the camera. And so that's not usually a practical way to freeze motion. And a lot of cameras maxed out at maybe one 4,000th of a second, where a flash duration is actually shorter than that. So if you have anything fast that you want to capture without any motion blur, then you'll usually want to set your camera to eliminate all the ambient light and just use the flash to make your exposure and that way, nothing will actually have any motion blur to it. There's two main modes of flash on a camera, and one is called front curtain sync and one's called rare current think the terms are from a while back when cameras had a different shutter mechanism. But that's kind of irrelevant.

The concept is in what's important and the difference between the two is when in the exposure does the flash fire So with the front curtain sync setting, when the shutter opens, the flash will fire and then the shutter will stay open for the duration that you set it for, and then it will close again, when it's done on rare current sync, the shutter will open stay open for the duration you set it for, and then right before that shutter closes, the flash will fire. So the difference is when in the exposure does that flash fire. And the reason why that actually matters is there are some situations where you have subjects in your photo that are its own light source. And then you'll also have your external light source, meaning your flash that is going to contribute to the exposure as well. So a good example and the probably the most common thing that this is applicable for is if you're taking a photograph of a car at night and it has headlights and tail lights on.

And so as that car drives by, you're going to take a picture and if your shutter speed is say one second, that car is going to move through the frame a little bit in that At one second of time, the lights on the car are going to burn into the exposure for that full one second. So you're gonna have a streak seen streaked headlights in photographs before the car itself say the doors and the hood and everything like that they're not lights, they need to be lit and that's what our flash is going to do. So if you do front curtain sink, let's think about what happens, the cars coming along and the pitcher gets taken the flash fires. So now the car is frozen there because the flash frozen at the beginning of the frame. Now for the rest of that one second, that car is going to move through the frame.

And as it does, those headlights and taillights are going to burn into the exposure. So what you have in your final image is a car here and then you'll have streaks that continue along. So it's going to look it's going to look like the light streaks are in front of the vehicle and the taillights are going to actually go through the back of the vehicle a little bit if that makes sense. Now if you do rear curtain And then you can have the car and it's gonna open the shutter. The car's gonna come through, the headlights and taillights are burning into the exposure. And then at the very end of that second right before that shutter shuts, we're gonna have a flash pop.

And now the car is frozen on the other side of the frame, and the headlights are behind the car and the taillights are behind the car. And so they're that gives the sense of motion forward, whereas the front curtain thing is going to give the sense of motion backward because of the streak of the light. And so you can take that concept and you can apply it to other things. But that is what's going on with front and rear curtain sync. And just keep that little bit information in your back pocket because it might come in handy if you're in a certain situation where you actually care when in the frame that the flash fires. I want to give you guys one little trick that I learned the speedlights really just in the last year, we photograph a lot of weddings, and sometimes there's not really a great place to take a picture of the rings and couples usually tend to have a photograph of the engagement ring and the two wedding bands together.

You might have seen pictures of rings hanging on flower or whatever it might be, but sometimes there just isn't a good spot. And I was in that situation at one wedding and I wasn't quite sure where to take the photograph. So I took the rings and put them on the floor. It was just a regular hardwood floor and I took my speedlight and I laid it down on the floor and I pointed it bare flash from the back of the rings toward them toward the camera. I set my camera on the ground, and I put the macro lens on got nice and close and I focused it up and then took the picture. And the result was this really strange looking floor and the rings lit up in a very cool way.

And what I realized what was going on is that the flash was raking across the floor. So all the texture all the dust everything was getting hit with light. I don't like a completely A 90 degree angle to the camera lens. And it was lighting up in a way that we don't normally see with our eyes. And what I realized is that you can use flash in ways like that, to let us see things the way we don't normally see them. And when we see things like that, sometimes it just doesn't look good at all.

But sometimes it can be really interesting, and it can have a really pleasing look. So don't be afraid to use your flash in a non traditional way. The worst that can happen is the pictures look good. And you just take another one, get out there and put it in different angles, use different modifiers shoot the flash through things, get strange shadows, pointed up pointed down, bear flash all over the place, two of them, three of them, gels, anything, put all these things together. And you will find that you can create so many more types of photographs than you could with just the ambient light that's available to you