It took longer than I’d planned, but I’m now fully set up for some off-camera lighting adventures.

Some AlienBee triggers (the CST and CSRB, if you’re interested) and one of the Starving Student kits from Midwest Photo Exchange saw me right, and while I’m definitely a newbie at this, it turns out that some of what I’d already read made sense when I started to practice yesterday.

My aim (at least at first) with the strobism is to use it to make it look like I haven’t really used artificial light – a simple one light set up, working to support natural light.

My daughter Fionnuala was happy to help out as a model (so long as she got to take some pictures too). And I found another willing model – our loco cat Colin Feral.

Both of these shots have natural light coming from one side, balanced with the flash (through an umbrella) on the other side.

I can definitely see how this will be useful in some of the more challenging interior locations I find myself in (and outdoors, too I’m sure).

© Matt Roth - mattrothphoto.com

I’m a natural light guy. Or have been until now.

Hugely unimpressed by almost all uses of on-camera flash, and fascinated by the challenge of capturing the quality of real light in my scenes, I used to swear I’d never use a flash.

And for most of my work – on location children’s portraits – that works well, most of the time.

I choose the right time of day, and a good location in possible, and chase after the kids always trying to maximise the catch-lights in their eyes, and get some flattering natural light falling across their faces.

But sometimes that’s just not possible.

A little flash light bounced off a nearby wall or ceiling might open up their shadowy face and cut the chance for motion blur. Or used outside, it could open up some opportunities to work with the sun to get some good effects.

David Hobby’s great site Strobist.com had been tempting me over the last while, but it was two recent posts that pushed me over the edge into doing something about learning some new techniques.

First, he linked to a post by Robert Seale, which outlined how he shot 4 different setups of Lance Armstrong in four minutes flat in the basement of Armstrong’s bike shop. Obviously Seale’s a lighting ninja with a bunch of kit, and assistant and talent to burn, but you can’t argue with the results.

Then I caught a blog post by Matt Roth, a staff shooter at a small Maryland paper who got the assignment to shoot local star high school athletes, and really went to town on it. Again, I don’t see work like this in my near future, but I’m definitely going to put some time in to get me comfortable with the basics at least.

There’s a Canon Speedlite 430EX (and Stofen diffuser) in my bag now, and the minimum stands and brolly setup on the way from Midwest Photo Exchange (or MPEX). I went with the 430EX over the Strobist-approved manual flashes so that I could use metered E-TTL on-camera if I had to.

Resources

I’ll be blogging my through the learning process as I go, but if, like me, you’re looking to get started with some guerilla lighting techniques, there’s a lot of good information out there. As well as the Strobist, Zack Arias’ blog has some good advice, and he teaches the OneLight Workshop (and has DVDs you might like).

And David duChemin, who knows his stuff, recently recommended the Seeing the Light eBook from Mitchell Kanashkevich. I’ve not read it yet, but David says, ‘if you don’t like flash because you “don’t like your images to look lit” then you need to check this one out’ – which sounds good to me.