While visiting my brothers Francis and Apollo in Vegas I decided to try out a different approach to flash photography. Mind you, I’m only experimenting and these shots are simply point and shoot with a little tweaking of the exposure to get the effect I was after. It was late in the day where the sun was about 35 degrees from the horizon. Colors at this stage of the day are more saturated. Shadows are longer and stronger. I opted to underexpose the scene by first taking a picture of the environment (without the subject) at a normal exposure. Then I stopped down -2 to get a feel of how much underexposure I wanted but still get detail in the shadows. On a Canon 5D, this is very achievable. Then the flash is turned on. I used a Canon Speedlite 580EX II for these shots. Then it was time to get my victims. I had my family pose at different places in the back yard. I actually liked these shots because it gives a sense of surreal look to it. I set the shutter at 125th of a sec. The aperture was set between f/13 – f/16. This is important to achieve greater dept of field but also import so that the subjects don’t get washed out from the strong flash. I also positioned the subjects in direct sunlight and made sure that the background were also in direct sunlight. This will not work in shadows as you would only get darkness in the background. So position them in the well lit areas as well as making sure the background is too. I took the photos and only increase or decrease the aperture to suite my taste. I didn’t have to make changes to flash settings. Overall, if the lighting situation doesn’t change, I could theoretically take the photos on the same settings to get accurate exposure, however, in different spots of the scene light isn’t so consistent. So I still needed to make minor adjustments to exposure, aperture, as well as flash settings since distance from the subject is also a variable.
