I came across Dave Hobby's very popular photoblog Strobist a few days ago and have immersed myself in his approach to small flash lighting. What he is able to create with one or two speedlight flashes is amazing. Go check him out!!! at http://www.strobist.blogspot.com
Over the course of the past few days of reading his blog I've had so many a ha moments which have really changed my way of thinking about flash photography. Perhaps the biggest was his concept of thinking of flash photography in conjunction with ambient light as creating 2 separate exposures superimposed on each other one for the flash, and one for the ambient light.
WOW...REALLY!!! Its that simple!! Yes, it is that simple. When you get that concept and start to apply it you have so much control over the light, and when you can control light you can also create light how you want it.
Yesterday afternoon I started playing with some of these concepts and boy did I have fun! I actually started out thinking of what I wanted to do and was inspired by a photo on the Strobist blog of a toy car. So I went that route. I made a quick trip to Home Depot for a 12x12 piece of shiny black, granite tile total cost $5. Everything else I had at home.
My vision was to make this toy car look as real as possible and capture the reflection of the car in the shiny tile. I was wanted a completely black background and since I have no backdrop that was going to be my ambient exposure. I had to kill the ambient light so it went completely black and have the flash as my light source. I also knew that I needed to have the flash directed and concentrated over the toy car so the light would't spill into the background. That required a snoot or basically a tube over the flash head to keep the light from spilling out into the background. Well I didn't have a snoot so I made one out of a piece of cardboard I cut of of the cat food box. I also knew with the flash so concentrated over the car that it wouldn't need much power so I dialed it all the way down. Here is the first shot.
I liked it and was pleased with the result but wasn't really what I wanted. It still looked too much like a toy car. So, I made a quick decision to change my white balance to tungsten which would give more of a blue glow to everything.
Ahh...much better! It really looks like a real car parked on the road after its just rained. Perhaps the blue glow is from the neon bar sign where the hipster driving it is having a gin and tonic. Ok, that was too much, but you get the idea.
So for me this was a huge deal. I was able to have a vision, set it up, light it and get the result I wanted in less than an hour. WOW! So much fun an so cool!