Don’t curse that flash recharge time!



Manual Mode; ISO 1600; Shutter 1/60; F-stop 2.8; Focal Length 108mm. Flash on, but not recharged, did not fire.




Manual Mode; ISO 1600; Shutter 1/60; F-stop 2.8; Focal Length 108mm. Bounce Flash.



When you bounce flash your flash normally has to fire at full or near-full output. It depends on several factors, but bounce has to travel farther and work harder than direct flash. The result is a slower recharge time. Use fresh batteries and an external pack if you can to minimize this, but don’t call it a blankety-blank-blank under your breath when it doesn’t recharge fast enough.


The settings on both shots above are the same. The only difference is that the flash was recharging from a previous frame in the first shot and did not fire, and it did fire in the second. This was a traditional Indian dance at a wedding in West Virginia on Saturday. The room was light enough that I was getting a lot of ambient at 1600, 1/60, 2.8. I used a bounce flash because I knew I could pull off quite a few with the flash firing to freeze the motion and quite a few in-between flashes with some blur. Win-win. I look like a genius by getting two completely different looks without changing a single thing.


One of the great things about bounce flash off a wall behind you is that it dramatically increases the distance from light source to subject and background which dramatically decreases the light fall-off from subject to background. Let that sink in. The sun lights your house and the one down the street pretty much the same because the relative distance between the sun and your house and the sun and the neighbor’s is essentially equal even though their house is 100 yards farther from the sun (at sunrise, or at midday if you live on a mountain). The farther the light source is from two subjects, the less the relative lighting difference between the two subjects.


Let’s do the math. The subject was probably 20 feet away from me in the second image. The background on-lookers were probably 40 feet from me. Draw a line from me to the subject to the background. The background is twice the distance from me as the subject. The relative difference in the distance from source to subject and source to background if I had used direct flash would have been 100%.


Now let’s compare the math of bounce flash. The wall I bounced off of was probably 80 feet from the subject and 100 feet from the background. Now the relative difference in the distance from source to subject and source to background is not 100% as it would have been with direct flash, but merely 20% with bounce.


Look at the videographer and guests in the second shot. They are pretty well lit (a little better than the background guests in the first shot) and some of that is due to the bounce flash hitting them as well as the subject. As a Photographic Observer, you need to light up and tell the story of the on-lookers, not have them groveling in a black cave.


So set that sleek machine in your hands to high speed firing (the Canon 1D line can fire at 8 frames per second), smile when that bounce flash fires and doesn’t fire, and find the beauty in-between flashes.


OK, I should have split this post up into two different tips, one singing the praises of in-between shots and one extolling the relative lighting virtues of bounce flash, but I just got carried away.


BTW, I met with a couple on Friday about shooting their wedding next summer. The groom-to-be looks at a tent shot at dusk and says “You call that Sweet Light, right?” The blog works! The blog works! Thanks for reading, Johnathan!


QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” - Sir Winston Churchill

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 4:14 am and is filed under Photographic Observer Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.