Flash.

For some a great problem solver, equaliser and creative gateway, for some, too much trouble to do well and far to easy to do badly.

Once a regular user of flash (early film TTL), I stepped away from it naturally when I started to shoot more landscapes and more when I switched to digital.

I need it now. I probably don’t need it really need for my normal shooting “style”, but I want it to be mastered so I can control my environment better. The reality is, photography is light dependent (quantity and quality), and when the subject’s situation is fixed, you have to be flexible.

I am turning to two masters for info and inspiration; Neil Van Neikerk through his books and at neilvn.com and Joe McNally, mostly through one book, “The Hotshoe Diaries”. Both of these guys generously offer all the instruction you need, both technically and creatively.

This is enough. More opinions and things start to get confusing, any less and I become a mirror of just one mentor. I would like to think I am just “brushing up”, but the reality is I have ignored flash for over a decade, so realistically I am starting from scratch technically and I am well rusty aesthetically.

The big learning curve for me is the way flash now works compared to my long memory of past techniques. I have been falling back on old thinking, which turns out to be well out of date.

TTL with digital pre-flash and manual, just using output fractions rather than the old “GN divided by distance = aperture” stuff is sooo much easier.

Gear.

I have a couple of excellent, manual only Yongnuo YN560 III and IV units and the TX off camera controller for a few years, but have not up till now been interested in using them and I have now added a Godox TTL 685. Straight out of the box, the Godox gave me predictable results. The very first image I took, of the news paper, was given a tiny -1.7 TTL blip, producing about what I had hoped. Daisy’s second image shows reduced strength in the black stripes and slightly softer light at about -.7 (if only she would hold still). Magic!

The YN’s will be used on light weight light stands with Neewer 16” circular soft boxes (2x set on Amazon for au $45), giving me a neat little portable studio, the Godox will be used for TTL bounce flash with the $2 “black foamie thing”*, possibly with a large Neewer reflector on a stand in lieu of a handy wall.

This latter is for speed as manual fill on the fly is indeed possible, but needs some time put in to perfect.

I also have a pair of tiny Oly flash units I can always carry for direct outdoor, gentle fill or possibly to trigger the Godox in slave mode.

The “Black Foamie Thing” allows you to flag or block stray flash light, giving you maximum control of light direction. The images above (thank you my long suffering wife), were taken indoors, using a wall as a giant soft box, with the light looking directional and natural (a little post was added). The second image shows the base exposure at -2 ev without flash. Too easy. I forgot to take the image that makes this necessary, the brightened non-flash image with a blown out background.

I will of course fall back on a reflector and natural light as often as possible, but I fully intent to get this mastered. The motto going forward is “keep it simple stupid”, using less first, more if needed only.

*Neil Van Neikerks “Black Foamie Thing”, https://neilvn.com/tangents/about/black-foamie-thing/ is a revelation that, in his own words “lets you throw out the over priced Tupperware” commonly used for flash modification.

I will also experiment with a white foamie thing to reflect light in when the ceilings are too high.