One of the techniques used in off-camera lighting is what can be referred to as 'selective lighting' or 'painting with light'. Quite simply, it's lighting some parts of the frame and not others. I frequently use flags, snoots or grids to accomplish this.
However, a lot of on-camera flashes have a zoom feature that allows them to do basically the same thing. The setup for this is easy, you pop the flash on the camera and set the zoom to a longer setting than the lens you are using. What you end up with is the flash lighting a centered portion of the frame. This is a lot easier to show than explain. In the image to the left, I set the zoom on the flash to 80mm, but the lens was set to 21mm. I under-exposed the frame by 1 1/2 stops so the area covered by the flash would stand out.
This has one advantage over off-camera flash as the flash area will always be centered in the frame.
Try it for a break from the same-old on-camera flash photos!
Note: Depending on the shooting mode (and brand!) of the camera, you may need to adjust the flash exposure to compensate for under-exposing the overall shot.
Shot info: Canon 5D with 17-40mmL 1/200sec f11 Canon 580EXII flash
No comments:
Post a Comment