Lessons from Rozov: What’s a Flash? Part 2

I first encountered this phenomenon when I started shooting with studio flashes. A happy young dad held his daughter by the arms in his weight and rocked from side to side. It wasn’t a super quick movement, but it made the baby look a little blurry. As I gradually become more and more experienced in the studio I came to realize that shooting any kind of movement there is a risk of shake, sometimes even more noticeable with some zooming in.

Picture 1. “Footballer.”.

Nikon D2X camera,

AF-S Nikkor 17-55/2.8 ED lens,

The sensitivity is 100 ISO,

Timing shutter speed of 1/200 seconds,

F/5 aperture,

77mm focal length in film

This shot is a great example of the studio generator light smearing the water that falls from two meters above. The drops look like tadpoles flying upward: thick and bright at the top, getting narrower and darker at the bottom. It felt as if the rain overcame the laws of gravity and was coming from the bottom up.

The reason for this is that flashes light up and put out their main power very quickly, but they go out slowly. The droplet leaves a sharp tail tapered downward on the matrix. Vladimir Smyshlyaev’s flashes create roundish blobs in such situations. It is possible to smudge a trail of drops if you illuminate them with a long lightbar, whose burn time is many times longer than that of a standard generator lamp.

Slow and fast flashes

That sounds strange, doesn’t it?? Can lightning be slow or fast?? But if you happened to watch flashes of light on a thunderous night, you must have noticed that some discharges shine for longer time than the others. If the electricity discharge strikes vertically from the cloud directly into the ground, the flash of light is short, if obliquely, it is long. The arc inside a discharge lamp is basically the same as lightning and follows the same laws. The flash illumination time depends on the length of the bulb and the energy of the discharge itself. A long bulb means a long arc and therefore a long flash. If there is more energy in the capacitor, it takes longer to discharge. If you use part of the energy, the charge is shorter.

I first encountered this phenomenon when I started shooting with studio flashes. Happy young dad held his daughter by the arms on the weight and rocked from side to side. Not God knows how fast the motion is, but the baby looked a little smeared in the picture. As I gradually become more and more experienced in the studio I came to realize that when shooting any kind of movement there is a risk of shake, sometimes even more conspicuous, sometimes only noticeable when you zoom in.

I wanted to get a consistent sharpness, at least as sharp as a reporter’s flash can be. These babies never “smudge” anything. Called Vladimir Smyshlyaev and after a while got two 300 joule monoblocks. These flashes are unusual, you can’t buy them in a store. Volodya, a wonderful engineer and inventor, once made for me the first light brush in America, and now, when I needed to freeze motion in studio conditions, he invented studio flashes with very short pulses.

The small pulse lights of the flashes built into soap boxes, 1 cm long, burn short – about 1/5000 of a second. Sometimes even shorter. The bulb of a normal discharge lamp for a studio flash is about 10 cm long and burns ten times as long as a soapbox baby – 1/500 second. Smyshlyaev’s idea is obvious: he mounted many small lamps around the pilot lamp of the monoblock and made them go off simultaneously. When you want to shoot a fast-moving subject in artificial light, such as a child jumping for joy, 1/500 second is not enough. I am not saying that it is impossible to freeze the flowing water in the light of a standard studio monoblock photos 1 and 2 .

On-camera and on-camera flashes

Modes of operation

Have you ever seen a bunch of people jump out of a tour bus in broad daylight armed with soapboxes?? While the tour guide tries to shout down the hullabaloo of the crowd, his flock uses little digital cameras to light up the surroundings. The built-in flash units are almost always on. On a sunny day, the soapbox’s tiny little light has no effect on the picture at all, just draining batteries and rechargeable batteries. At night on the street, the same built-in flash on “auto” mode roughly over illuminates the foreground and fails the background. Indoors it makes pancakes that are disgusting to think about. In my opinion, these lights are of no use but detrimental. But they’re still made for something.

Babies are sometimes useful if you read the manual to the camera and understand the modes of operation.

Front-curtain sync – The flash fires when the front curtain fully opens the frame window. It usually comes on when you take pictures in fully automatic mode P and aperture priority mode A . The camera automatically sets the correct shutter speed for handheld photography, usually between 1/60th and 1/250th of a second photo 3 .

Slow sync – using slow shutter speed and flash at the same time. Used for low light photography when you want to bring the foreground subjects to life with the flash and get the backgrounds to life with the slow shutter speed.

Slow Sync Mode is used with a tripod or stop not to get a blur in the background. Slow-speed sync shots, where subjects that move quickly within the frame and vice versa move vividly in the same frame, look very effective. This mode is available when fully automatic exposure metering P or aperture-priority exposure metering A is turned on photo 4 .

Rear-curtain sync – The flash fires after the main exposure time has elapsed, before the second curtain goes off. Used to make the trail of lubricant left by the moving subject behind the subject, not in front of it. A typical example: a car with traces of headlights not at the front but exactly at the back. You can use it with shutter priority exposure metering or in manual mode. Rear-curtain sync mode is not always compatible with the use of studio flashes photo 5 .

Red-eye reduction: a second before the main pulse is emitted a preliminary service pulse is emitted to constrict the pupils of the person being shot. It is the reflex from the mucous membrane of the ocular fundus that makes the pupil red. The pause between the main flash and the auxiliary flash makes it impossible to use this mode for any kind of dynamic shooting.

In order to consciously use built-in and on-camera flashes, a photographer has to keep in mind two very simple laws: the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and the law of incidence.

The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection

The law of propagation of light – the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.

The light ray striking the mirror surface will bounce off it at the same angle it struck. It’s clear that the photographer is surrounded by more than just mirrors. The ceiling above his head doesn’t look like a mirror and neither does the wall. But if you use your imagination and turn all the surfaces around you into mirrors, you can easily predict the path of a flash light beam wherever you point it. It’s as easy as picturing the path of a ball in a child’s game of dodgeball.

A ball is thrown in your direction, it hits the sidewalk, and you intuitively catch it, because the ball obeys the same law as the beam of light, though with a correction for the change in trajectory due to gravity. Light, on the other hand, always travels in a straight line. But one should keep in mind the small details like the structure of the reflective surface. For example if you have a flash head pointing at the mirrored ceiling of a limousine there really are such limousines , then such a surface gives a directional reflection of the light.

The ceiling of an ordinary living room, whitewashed or painted with a matte water-based emulsion paint, reflects light diffusely, that is, it scatters it. And a ceiling made of plastic can be slightly glowing and therefore has a mixed directional and diffuse reflection. You have to keep these reflective qualities in mind when you think about the effect of using an object as a flash bounce.

Finally we should always remember that ceilings and walls can be painted in different colors. For example, light reflected off a red wall will act as a red filter on the flash head. It will affect the coloring of the subject, and the bride’s white dress won’t be white anymore. A wooden ceiling in a restaurant, painted with a stain and varnish, will eat up most of the light flux, and the pitiful remains will also repaint.

My favorite pastime when I was still learning the basics of photography was watching the light beams. I’m still fascinated by the bizarre results of the over-reflection. The adventures of the photon flux may itself be the subject of the photograph photo 6 .

The law of light incidence

The law of incidence, or the inverse square law, dictates that the reduction in light flux that occurs due to light scattering is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. For example, if a candle at a distance of one meter from the subject creates illumination of 4 EV, then at a distance of two meters from it the illumination will weaken not by 2, but by 4 times, i.e. the light will remain only 1 EV. In practice:

When the distance from the light source is increased by a factor of 2, the illumination of the object decreases by a factor of 4, or by 2 divisions steps of the aperture

If you increase the distance from the light source by a factor of 3, the illumination of the subject decreases by a factor of 9, or 4.5 divisions of the aperture

When the distance from the light source is increased by a factor of 4, the illuminance of the subject is reduced by a factor of 16, or 8 aperture steps.

Bringing the light source closer to the subject has the opposite effect.

For example, when shooting a medium-sized man indoors from a distance of one and a half meters distance from the flash to the head of the portrait will be 30% less than to his feet. The difference in illumination between the top of the frame and the bottom will be about two-thirds of an aperture, resulting in noticeably less light on the legs than on the head.

Practical application of the laws of light propagation

The flash is used if you can’t get an image at all otherwise lack of light , and experienced photographers use it in three additional roles: as a source of fill light, as a source of top draw light, and as a source of side draw light.

To get an image in any unfavorable light conditions the artistic properties of the future photo are not important – what is important is to get an image. The built-in flash is set to fully automatic by default, ensuring that it will do the job when shooting a medium-sized subject. Photographer’s skill can be zero, just read the first pages of the camera’s manual.

By the way, most users stop there. Many people get so used to the look of pancakes that pictures taken without using flash are not accepted, considering it a marriage. In my opinion, full automatic on-camera flash mode only makes sense if you use your camera as a notebook for capturing events, text, photos as a keepsake, etc. p.

As a fill light source, the flash is used to illuminate shadow areas in the foreground when there is a risk of gaps in the shadows. You just need to master the button for negative flash output adjustment to enjoy the results. The technique is popular among wedding photographers, reporters, fans of street and travel photography. Slow down your flash so it’s almost invisible, so you don’t alter the pattern of the shadows created by the master, drawing light source. This is the case when the flash goes from being a nemesis to a helper.

As a source of overhead light for soapboxes with built-in flash this method is not available – swivel head camera flash is directed to the ceiling. Rarely used in its pure form because it makes for unsightly shadows in people’s eye sockets. Experienced photographers refocus part of the light pulse directly on the subject, thereby illuminating the shadows that form. Re-reflecting light is done either with a plastic reflector built into the head, or a homemade paper shovel.

The spoons have a larger area and therefore diffuse light better. Depending on the height of the ceiling, the tilt of the head and the angle of the head relative to the flash head, you can get different pictures. I, for example, like to use a tilt of the head when the foreground is very close. A variation on tilting the flash head forward by thirty or forty degrees allows light to be reflected from the ceiling, redirecting part of the flash light into the depths of the frame to illuminate the background of the picture photo 7 .

As a source of side-drawing light for soapboxes with built-in flash, this technique is not available – the flash head is turned to the right or left and aimed at some surface a wall, the junction of the wall and ceiling, screens, light disk, piece of absorbent cotton, the door of the refrigerator, etc . p. . This light source can sometimes give an unusually expressive side light, but the difficulty is that the walls in our apartments are rarely neutral gray.

They are usually painted and have a distinct color. The second danger comes from the effects of the law of attenuation. If you disregard possible light incidence, it is easy to get a shot with an unbalanced composition – one light side and one dark side.

Photo 2. “Watery.”.

Nikon D2X camera

AF Micro Nikkor 105/2.8 Lens

Sensitivity 100 ISO

Shutter speed: 1 second

Aperture f/8

Measuring the light with a flash meter

Shooting with a tripod

I shot the Waterman in the bathroom. I didn’t expect to capture unclean forces, I just poured water and started testing the flashes I had just purchased. Torturing innocent fruit was boring, so I threw some fasteners like bolts, nuts and washers in the tub for a change. I used Volodya Smyshlyaev’s synchro-trap, which turned on the flash at a set time after the subject had crossed the laser beam string.

The shutter speed was adjustable, and I was able to effortlessly shoot the phase of the iron falling into the water I was interested in. Shutter speed of the camera – 1 second. In that time I had time to throw a bolt and the flash went off. The master lamp of the monoblock was turned off so as not to affect the image, and a small flashlight was lit for orientation in the bathroom. The water guy was the result of a 6 mm bolt falling in the water.

Photo 3. “Boogie.”.

Nikon D2X Camera

AF-S Nikkor 17-55/2.8 ED lens

ISO sensitivity 500

Shutter speed 1/125 sec

Aperture f/2.8

The exposure compensation is -0.67 EV

Focal length of the film standard 33mm

In the restaurant, the light is just enough not to confuse the bride with the bridesmaids. In this case, the standard Nikon flash did the trick. Used in the most trivial way, point-blank range.

The highlight of the picture is in the accurately captured moment. The hair, the bride’s smile, and the pretty dress made the shot. The quality of the lighting is important in this situation, too. I had thought ahead and armed myself properly: Stroboframe, Custom Brackets, and a paddle bracket for carrying the flash.

Without this set of attachments, when shooting with a vertically oriented camera, any flash, either built-in or on-camera, ends up on the side of the lens. The result is a black shadow either to the right or left along the verticals in the frame. They probably would have killed this shot, but my flash is always over the lens. Its diffused light casts shadows in the familiar places: under the chin, under the nose, under the elbows, under the folds of the dress. Minus exposure compensation and RAW shooting saved the picture from being overexposed in the bride’s face and dress.

Photo 4. “Bitter!”

From “A wedding is a small life”.

Nikon D2X camera

AF-S Nikkor 12-24/4 ED lens

Sensitivity 400 ISO

Shutter sync speed 1/60 sec

Aperture f/4

Focal length of the 24 mm film standard

The limelight in the window of the restaurant forced the flash to go into slow sync mode Slow . This was the only way to make sure I didn’t blow up the background. The bride’s vigorous hand movements didn’t fit into the sync time I chose. In 1/60th of a second, the glare on the glass managed to leave a bright long tail, and a short flash pulse confidently froze the scene-important elements of the shot. No tripod was used.

Photo 5. “Juggler”.

Nikon D3 camera

AF-S Nikkor 24-70/2.8 ED lens

The sensitivity was 200 ISO

Shutter speed 1/5s

Aperture f/11

Focal length: 70mm

The Aquamarine Circus needed photos for the ad. In this case, I used two fast flashes. I had one monoblock with a softbox behind my head with a slight shift to the left, and another one on the right, also with a softbox, it was supposed to work both as a filler and background, to separate the figure of the artist from the background. I did not need special backlighting, the diffused light from the two sources was enough.

I decided to take a picture that was similar to what I saw with my eyes, which was a circle of fire in the hands of an artist, spinning a black metal cane. The task is not solved head-on, because putting the flash in auto sync mode over the front curtain would freeze the movements of the artist figure, but his hands, cane, and torches would be a bit smeared. What I wanted was for the juggler and his cane to be sharp, and for the torches to have long tails.

This could be accomplished by turning on the camera’s manual mode and rear-curtain sync mode. Slow shutter speeds will be combined with the flash.

Photo 6. “Celebration in an Armenian church”. Jerusalem.”.

Nikon D2X camera

DX AF-S Nikkor 12-24/2.8 ED lens

Sensitivity 640 ISO

Sync speed 1/20th of a second

Aperture f/4

Exposure compensation -0.33 EV

Focal length of 18mm film

Divine light pours through a palpable atmosphere, sweetly filled with incense smoke, plays in the glass lampshades and turns them into a garland of Christmas lights. Because of the intense light scattering, the beam of light itself became something like a huge fluorescent lamp, that is, a source of diffuse light. Usually in churches, the brightness interval is very large. In the photographs, the candles in the hands of the congregation look like wandering flames, unsupported. Exposure to light leads to dips in shadows. But in this particular case, the diffusion of light evenly illuminated all the corners of the temple. Candles in the hands of monks draw the eye to the white robes.

Photo 7. “Happiness.”

From the “Wedding is a Small Life” series.

Nikon D3 camera

AF-S Nikkor 24-70/2.8 ED lens

Sensitivity 800 ISO

The shutter speed is 1/160 s

Aperture f/2.8

Exposure compensation -0.67 EV

Focal length 45 mm

Behind the dancing bride there was a cameraman for a moment. In the dark, he illuminated the picture with a small halogen. A typical contrajour situation occurred. If I hadn’t turned on the flash, I would have gotten a black silhouette of a bride with a glowing veil. Most of the light went to the ceiling and slightly illuminated the background, the burst gently highlighted the bride’s face, without changing the light pattern characteristic of contrast lighting. Flash at -1.5 EV minus correction.