Lighting a sunflower

I attended the second night of the Commercial Photography course last night, and we started talking about the gear that a working photographer uses.  Very quickly the discussion got into the use of flash, and how to control it to get it to do what you want.  Ronnie, our tutor, advocates using flash in manual mode rather than in iTTL mode and he performed some useful quick experiments, photographing against a white wall and then a black wall, to show why that is.

Having set out over a year ago to understand flash photography, particularly off-camera flash photography, and having tried to put my speedlights to use many times since then, there wasn’t much that Ronnie explained about flash photography last night that I didn’t know already, but it was good all the same to have it validated all the same.

One of the participants, a wedding photographer, explained that she very rarely used flash and didn’t like its look, perferring instead to shoot available light.  For a wedding this is often necessary anyway, particularly during the ceremony, and I understood where she was coming from, though it struck me that there was  a vicious circle between her rarely using flash and not liking its look.  I was once of that opinion too until I discovered that understanding how flash worked, and how to use it, meant its look need not be as horrible as you get if you just stick a flash on the camera  and let it do its thing.

All of this conversation was timely because yesterday morning, before any of that, I had performed a little experiment in the dining room with a sunflower (a present from Donal’s parents on Sunday) that was looking particularly photogenic.

It was sitting on the table adjacent to a set of glass doors looking out on the back garden.  The sky was overcast and a little dull, but still providing some soft light to illuminate the sunflower.  I first took an available light photograph of the sunflower.  I wanted to get a shallow depth of field, so went with an f/2.8 aperture.  I needed to dial the ISO up to 800, and even at that could only get a shutter speed of 1/15th, which was very slow when I was using a 50mm lens.  I know that above 800 I begin to not like the level of noise from the D300, so I stuck with these settings, steadied myself, and managed to take a reasonably sharp shot, which you can see on the left.  You can click on it for a larger view in a new window.

I like the image, but one issue I have with it is that the center of the sunflower is getting very little light and it’s hard to make out detail in there. Also, I got lucky with a sharp shot at 1/15th second, while the ISO was at the upper limit of what I’m comfortable with.  So how could I overcome these issues?

The answer was to take control of all the lighting in the shot and overpower the ambient light with flash.  This is what I did to create the image you see at the top of this post.  This was taken using an SB-800 at camera right (in my hand in fact) with a mini softbox mounted on it to soften the light a little.  I like using that softbox for quick impromptu photoshoots.  Had I more time, a shoot-through umbrella (or if I had one, a larger softbox) would have given even softer light, more evenly distributed across the frame, but this was a quick experiment and the mini softbox was in my camera bag so I went with that.

I put my shutter speed at its max sync speed of 1/250th.  This killed any ambient light.  I could have tried to balance the ambient and flash, but remember I wanted to achieve three things – I wanted to light the shadows, get the shutter speed to the hand-holdable range, and get my ISO down to noise-less levels.  If I simply added fill flash to the ambient shot I would have achieved the first aim, but at the expense of the last two.   Once I reduced the ISO to 200 the ambient light was going to all but disappear anyway, so it made sense then to just overpower it completely with a 1/250s shutter speed.

It’s interesting to look at the two images and to pick which one I prefer.  I think I prefer the flash-lit one, even though there are a few spots of specular highlights in the center of the flower that I don’t like – these would be easily removed in software.  I’d like to try this shot with a second light used to bring up the background a little more.  You can hopefully see though how using flash need not ruin an image, or give results that aren’t as aesthetic, once you learn to control all the elements.