BEGINNERS GUIDE TO OUTDOOR FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY

WHAT IS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY

Flash photography simply means capturing images with the help of external artificial light. The light source can be any including a basic Speedlight or a professional studio strobe.

INTRODUCTION

If you are just getting started with outdoor flash photography, there would be many challenges that you might face. Mainly because you’ll be dealing with two types of exposures at the same time, one is the ambient light which is obviously the sun in this case and the other one is your flash. The entire outdoor flash photography is based on one single rule i.e., “Expose for the background”, which I learned from my teacher, Mr. Arun Kumar and I can’t thank him enough for the same. We’ll discuss the same in the upcoming paragraphs.

THE BIGGEST QUESTION

Now, the biggest question which arises in the minds of many people that why do we need an external light source when shooting outdoors, its already so much sunlight out there then why do we need a separate artificial light source? Once you know how to photograph using flash at outdoor locations, you’ll be stunned by the quality of images that you’ll be able to create. Let’s look at some of the images below.

Image courtesy- Francisco Joel Hernandez

From the above images, it is evident that what impact can an external flash create on your images. Now let us understand the rule of “Expose for the background”.

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