Here is a simple technique which some of you might already know of - shooting from the hip without looking through the viewfinder.

At weddings, when photographing the party and dancing during the reception with a wide-angle lens, I often don’t hold the camera up to my eye.  Instead I rely on the infra-red beam from the speedlight to show me what the camera is focusing on.  Then, using the focus-lock-and-hold method, I keep focus and reframe the shot if needed. This way I can shoot from the hip without looking through the viewfinder, but still have images that are well composed.

Here are a few images from recent weddings I photographed:
(None of them were cropped to post them here.)

When moving between the guests like that, it is imperative that I don’t annoy anyone by blasting flash in their faces.  This is a large part of the decision why I use this particular method to bounce my flash - using a piece of black foam to flag my speedlight.

At the same time also note in this image above, that there was no dodging and burning - yet, the lighting on the guests dancing here is quite even on a number of planes. And the guy in the foreground isn’t more brightly lit than the girls he is dancing with.

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Of course, it is the same technique when holding my camera overhead. 

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It isn’t simply a matter of hoping for the best and blindly firing away - with a bit of practice there is actually a fair measure of accuracy here in framing the images even when not looking through the viewfinder. 

One of the most visited pages on this website is the instructional post on how to repair the foot of the Canon 580EX speedlite.  Since the foot of the original 580EX is made from plastic, it is easy to break … but also easy to repair.

I broke the foot off my 580EX II some time back, by lowering my camera too fast to the ground by the strap.  The camera and lens tilted over, and the flash smacked the ground a touch harder than the gentle soft landing I anticipated.  Because the foot of the 580EX II is now made of metal, there is nothing to give, except the body of the speedlight.  And this is what happened:

That’s right.  The entire foot snapped off the body of the flashgun.  And that isn’t just a quick home repair.  It meant sending the speedlight off to Canon for repairs.  Much more expensive than the same type of problem with the original 580EX.

Funny how the metal foot of the 580EX II seemed like an improvement over the plastic foot of the 580EX .. and somehow it ended up not being an improvement in real terms.

So, sorry, I don’t have good news for you if you break your Canon 580EX II in the same manner.  You will have to send the speedlight in for repairs.  Such is the price for improvement.  :-/ 

[ click on the photo to see a larger image]

I’ve had some questions about images that I have posted which show a lot of lens flare, and specifically the image above.  And the question also arose what kind of Photoshop actions or effects I used on that image.  The answer is simple .. none.  While that image isn’t quite “straight out of the camera”, it is (nearly) “straight out of the raw converter”.

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With the SB-900 Speedlight, Nikon’s flagship flashgun, it is clear that they did their homework.  The SB-800 was a great flashgun, but there were certain things about it that were very frustrating, but the Nikon SB-900 gets all of this right.

• A huge improvement is that the SB-900 rotates 180′ to either side!

Right there in this image is the main reason to get the SB-900 … it now rotates 180′ to the right, instead of stopping short at the 90′ mark like the SB-800. This is a huge benefit in bouncing flash with specific effect in mind.

That the SB-800 stopped short at the 90′ mark when you rotated the flash-head to the right, was a huge downside for me in comparing the SB-800 to the Canon 580EX.  (Although there is the compromise of turning your SB-800 into an SB-850 and forcing it to rotate further to the right than just 90′)

But there are more reasons to love the SB-900 …

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Denver was the start of the next series of workshops that I am presenting into the Fall of 2008, and I had to add a second date when the initial Denver workshop date sold out.  This was my first visit to Denver, and I found it a beautiful city which offered easy opportunities for us to go out and practice flash photography techniques out on the street with our two models. 

These two workshops were the first after I had revamped the material, basing it on the book that I had written on the subject of flash photography.  (The manuscript is at the publishers at the moment.)  These were also the first where I had restructured the workshop as a combination seminar presentation + practical sessions.

For me, the best part of the workshop is when the group goes out on the streets in the early evening, looking for settings in which to photograph our models.  Then there’s the chance to try out the techniques covered in the morning’s seminar presentation.

Thank you to everyone who attended.  I had a great time, and felt energised afterwards by your enthusiasm.  And a big thank you to Andrea and Aaron, our two models.

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Thank you to everyone who played along with the flash photography challenge during the past week. Now, before I get to the answers, I have to say that this was quite a tough challenge. The idea was to use flash so that it appears ‘invisible’ in the final image. Where we have a situation where we have a measure of available light, and surfaces to bounce flash off, it is usually quite possible to mix flash and available light so that the flash becomes much less obvious.

To put it another way, *I* too would’ve had a hard time with this if I didn’t happen to have shot these images and had the EXIF data to check. In looking at the available light, and then taking care with the direction, intensity and colour balance of the flash, we can be quite successful in blending flash with available light.  And this is at the center of what the flash photography workshops are about.

Here are the answers in short:
images 1, 4, 7, 9, 10 had flash in some measure.
The other images were ambient light only.

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