Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography with Available Light (Tiffaney Watts' Library) by Ibarionex Perello

Author:Ibarionex Perello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Riders
Published: 2011-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Using fill flash to control contrast

Though I primarily use available light, this doesn’t mean that I won’t or don’t use flash. Electronic flash—whether from a built-in flash or an external one—provides a great tool for controlling contrast and revealing detail in the shadows. Though I prefer to use a reflector, that’s not always a convenient choice, as was the case when I photographed this man and his horse.

I was in a van traveling with a group of photographers when I glimpsed this man washing his horse. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get out of the van and run down the road in time. He was already walking out of the washing area, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to make a photograph.

The background was too distracting, so I decided to shoot them from below, using the sky as the backdrop. However, the bright sky resulted in the faces of both the horse and the man being thrown into deep shadow. So, I simply attached my auxiliary flash and allowed it to provide the fill light I needed.

The use of the flash limits my top shutter speed—normally, I can’t exceed the top flash sync speed, which in this case was 1/250th second. This resulted in my having to work with a very small aperture. If I hadn’t been so close to both the man and his horse, this might have posed a problem, because the small aperture limited the effective range of the flash, but in this case it was perfect.

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