Master the flash

Join us on a journey on the art of creating light – not just recording it – with our essential guide to flash, from your Nikon’s pop-up unit to advanced multi-speedlight setups…

The flashgun is an endlessly handy piece of kit and it’s high time you learned how to use it! We show you how…

Photography is all about capturing light and shadow. Essentially, we have a box with a hole in it to let the light in. The light is focused by placing shaped glass over the hole, and inside the box is a light-sensitive medium, traditionally in the form of film, but these days an electronic sensor.

Most of us, when we first get our camera, learn about its controls and grasp the fundamentals of exposure – determined by the size of the hole and how long it is open for. But getting any kind of exposure means that there needs to be enough ambient light in the first place. So if light levels are low – such as at night – there may simply not be enough to record an image. Similarly, if the light is in the wrong place, then the interplay of light and shadow might not fall where you’d ideally like it to. In these situations, what you really need to be able to do is create your own light. And this is where flash comes in.

When you hear photographers say “I only shoot natural light”, what they’re often saying is “I don’t know how to use flash”. But it isn’t the mysterious beast it’s made out to be.

A flashgun – or Speedlight – can be simply thought of as another small box, but one that outputs light, instead of recording it. It’s a convenient, portable, lightweight light source that tucks away in your camera bag, and since it’s battery powered, you can use it wherever you happen to be, indoors and out.

It can be as simple as aiming flash directly at your subject, and letting the camera automatically figure out its power. Or, if you want to take a little more time to craft your light, you can decide on the power level manually, position the flash away from the camera, and use modifiers to spread or concentrate the light, or even change its colour, for the exact effect you want.

There are only four main pillars of flash photography that you need to remember – quantity, quality, direction and colour – which we’ll explore over the following pages, starting with the simplest, that most of us already have access to: the pop-up flash…