As requested, I’ll take some time now to go over the basics of off camera lighting.  While it may seem intimidating, with patience and a lot of practice it’ll be impossible to separate you from those flashes!

Why move the flash off the camera?

Having the flash on your camera really limits your creativity as a photographer. Remember, as a photographer it’s all about the light. So being able to control the intensity and direction of light, you now have a lot more options. Another plus of off camera lighting is that you don’t have to worry about the dreaded red-eye any more!

So now we know the advantages of moving to off camera lighting, how do we do it?

Well first off, I’ll write up a list of what I have in my bag. You’ll be surprised at how basic it is.

• 3 Flashes (Vivitar 285, Vivitar 285HV and a Canon 580EX)
• 2 Lightstands with umbrella holders
• 2 white umbrellas
• Cactus V2s trigger and receivers

Very simple. So let’s go down the list and make suggestions for your shopping list

Flashes 

The main requirement in a flash for off camera lighting is that it needs to should have a manual mode. This is so you will have full control over the flash and it’s not deciding what power to shoot at for you. A commonly recommend flash is the Vivitar 285, which explains why I have two of them. But I’m going to recommend against them. Why you ask? Well because after using them I’ve hit a lot of limitations with them. First, their recycle rate is quite slow. This means that it will really slow down your shooting. Not good if you’re shooting a model dressed in summer wear in the cold of winter or if you have a model that poses really fast. It gives the potential for underexposed frames and missed shots. So look for a flash with a quick recycle rate! The second thing I hate about the vivitar 285 is that manual mode consists of full power, 1/2 power, 1/4 power and 1/16 power. This becomes an issue when trying to balance with ambient light as the flash doesn’t go low enough for me and ends up over powering the ambient light. 

So with that said, I recommend to you the nikon SB-24. A relatively cheap flash, it’s a little more than the vivitar but you’ll get a faster recycle and more power level settings.

One other note: Don’t be like me, buy matching flashes! At the same power level, my vivitar 285 and 285HV both output a different amount of light. Very annoying when trying to balance lights.

Lightstands

I bought mine off ebay. They were cheap and I’ll have to say that the quality isn’t the greatest. But hey, they work. What I do dislike about them is their lack of weight. While it’s easy to carry around, they get knocked over way too easily. But your best bet is to carry around something to weigh down the stands. Hopefully your stands will come with hot shoe mount and an umbrella holder. I’d suggest one for each flash. I’m missing one but I improvise and mount my flash on my tripod.

Umbrellas

There are many different kinds, all with different effects. For starters, I’d recommend a white umbrella. Again, I got it off ebay. I’m glad I did because I don’t care as much if my stands get knocked over. White umbrellas are used to diffuse the light source and soften the light, you can use it a shoot through or bouncing it off the umbrella. Silver umbrellas will give a slightly harsher light, but not as harsh as straight on flash. Gold umbrellas will be the same as the silver but will give a ‘warmer’ light. Good for warming up skin tones.

Triggers and receivers

Few options here, but I recommend going wireless (less to trip up on and more freedom to move around). So you can either go optical or RF. While optical triggers are cheap, they do require a ‘line of sight’ to the triggering flash. This does limit you in some cases. So your best bet is to go RF. The cactus triggers I use are decent, I’ve had a few mis-fires/no-fires but compared to the price of radio-poppers or pocket wizards, I’ll live with it for now. 

Ok, I bought the gear I need, now what?

Read, practice, experiment, repeat. The best way to learn is to get out there and start making mistakes. What I will start you off with are a few things to get you thinking and a basic lighting setup.

First things first. Throw your camera and your flashes on manual. Because you’re not using a continuous light source, your camera won’t know how to expose the scene correctly. So now that you’re in manual, you need to decide how to light the scene. What do you want lit up? What don’t you want lit up? Harsh or soft lighting? These are some things you need to think about when setting up your lights. But with experience and developing your personal style of shooting, it’ll soon become second nature.

One key thing to realize is that making something 2D look 3D is all about shadows and highlights. How do you make a circle into a sphere? Add some shadow. This is important to understand, I like pictures that have a 3D feel to them instead of something flat. So think about ways to arrange the lights to create those shadows and highlights that will make your subject pop off the page.

Hopefully your brain is going now, so I’ll leave you with a basic lighting setup and send you off to play! (Excuse my poor diagrams.)

Two Light Setup

So here we have the camera facing the subject with two flashes on either side at 45 degree angles to the subject and have the ratios the same (is that right? anyways…just look at the diagram). Very basic setup doesn’t look great but it’s a good start and can be very versatile.

This look can be drastically changed by

• Varying the ratios. For example, having Flash 1 at full power and Flash 2 at half power (assuming at similar power levels the output of light is the same)
• Varying the distance between flash and the subject.
• Varying the angle. Even go as far as putting a flash behind the subject for a rim light (Look forward to future posts, I’ll do a case study on an image with rim lighting. If I don’t remind me.)

Wait, how do I know what ratios to use?

Hopefully you’re shooting digital, in this case, just take a look at the back of your camera and adjust until you see something good. Again, with experience, you’ll quickly learn to dial in the ratios. 

What’s the main light and fill light all about?

I totally forgot to go over this. But essentially to create those shadows and highlights, you’ll need a main light. The fill light is then used to bring back some detail in the shadows, because we all like detail in the shadows don’t we? So the above lighting setup, while a good starter, will give boring flat light. To spice it up, keep one flash at full power and turn the other one down to half.

What about ambient light?

This is where that exposure meter comes in. Turn your metering on to average so it calculates exposure based on the full frame, then depending on how much ambient you want to let in, play with your settings. But you’ll want it somewhere above -2 and 0ev. But then again, I’m not you so you decide =) Then once you get that dialed in, you’ll then adjust your flash levels accordingly.

A little tip to help decide if you should change aperture or shutter: Aperture will affect the amount of light from the flash coming in where as shutter speed won’t affect it at all. Shutter will just affect ambient.

So that was a long read, I’m not the greatest at writing so hopefully I brought it across decently. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them and I’ll do my best to answer them! For further reading, I’ll direct you to www.strobist.com