So you just went out and bought the $6000 Canon EOS 1D X Mark II, along with the $1600 Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L, thinking you’re going to be the next hotshot photographer in a line tracing back to Ansel Adams, right? Wrong!
Sure, you have great tools but if you’re building a ship and don’t know what goes into making a great ship the dude who’s using nails, a hammer, and a handsaw is going to beat you every day despite you having a chainsaw and a nail gun. You may have much more invested in your equipment than I do, but my $1200 Canon 6D Mark II with external lighting ($120 Godox speedflash and a $400 Godox pocket flash) and a $150 Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens will likely beat you 8 times out of ten in terms of image quality.
We’ll need to go into a lot of details here to make sure you know what you’re doing, so this will be very high-level.
ISO and Aperture
Knowing these two topics are fundamental in the age of digital photography. ISO, in its previous form with film photography, referred to the sensitivity to light that a given strip of film had. The higher the ISO, the higher the sensitivity. Simple, right?
In the age of digital photography, ISO refers to the sensitivity to light of the internal image sensor (that thing that converts light into your photo for you). With digital photography, we can adjust this in the field unlike with film where it had to be treated with chemicals prior to leaving the factory. However, there is a trade-off to having high ISOs with the predominant issue in your photos being noise which usually takes the form of looking like an analog TV station not coming in 100%. While this can be acceptable in situations such as a church service where flash photography is usually prohibited during the service or in museums where the intense light from a flash can cause displays to degrade faster than normal, using a high ISO to compensate for underexposing subjects in your photos isn’t the best idea as most cameras tend to have issues with contrast at high ISO settings. Fortunately, we still have a few weapons to mitigate needing high ISO settings.
Aperture refers to a hole that allows light to get through, and most cameras refer to how open your aperture is in terms of f-stops. (I’ll go into how this affects depth-of-field in a later post.) F-stops are inversely proportional to how large your aperture is, with a lower f-stop meaning your aperture is open more. The more your aperture is open, the more light that can hit your image sensor lessening the need to have a high ISO setting. Of course, opening your aperture all the way may not fix things enough and you still end up needing a high ISO anyways. But is there a better way? Yes, use a dang flash (when you can, of course)!
Flash Photography
Most low- to mid-range DSLRs such as Canon’s EOS Rebel series include a built-in flash, and while that can help a lot it isn’t a great solution in my experience and has a bad habit of washing out details to the point where you might as well have went high-ISO anyways and causing subjects to have red-eye a lot. Case in point:
As you can see, the flash on my Canon EOS T6i really helped here but some colors are washed out and that red eye in his eyes though… Fortunately, a little bit of work in Lightroom (~3mins these days as I know what I’m doing) fixes most of the issues I had. Two weeks after I took this photo at Pla-Mor in Lincoln, I went out and got me the the Godox TT685C from B&H Photo and Video for $110 and the results… The results speak for themselves:
As you can see, no pesky red eye effect (caused by light bouncing off the retina) and while a bit overexposed, it’s nothing that can’t be handled in post-processing. My rule with exposure (which I’ll go into in the next section) is that you shouldn’t have to adjust it anymore than 2 EVs (exposure values) or you’ll begin to see noise that will affect the quality of your picture (underexposed) or see details completely washed out (overexposed) with the best results being no more than 1.5 EVs. As you can see, a flash can be a good thing and good ones aren’t very expensive either unless you go name-brand and with that you’re not gaining much for the price.
I still have my Godox TT685C, and recently got a Godox AD200 “pocket flash” (an external flash that is supposed to be able to fit in your pocket) from Rockbrook Camera (shop local homies!) that is even more powerful and can be used to turn the sun into a secondary light source! You’ll see what I mean in the next section.
Exposure
I’ve been ranting and raving about this for some time, and one of my biggest pet peeves is seeing beautiful shots be completely washed out lacking no contrast between the subject and the background because the photo was either super-overexposed or super-underexposed. I’m getting angry thinking about it!
Notice how I took a highly underexposed photo and when I edited it I lost a lot of the pop the colors had in the sky behind the subjects, but when I used my Godox AD200 that I got not only the subjects to pop but the sky too where everything is now properly exposed! I could’ve used more lighting equipment to minimize the shadows behind them (and I’m planning on getting more, don’t you worry), but other than that look at the difference between with and without flash for low-light situations. Of course, not all is lost if you get creative with underexposed photos and don’t have an external flash (even though you can get decent ones for relatively cheap)! For instance:
I took the same image from above, and turned it into a silhouette instead of bringing out details in the subjects which is good because the girl on the right blinked as I took the photo so the silhouette made it better for two reasons!
Conclusion
Don’t fear using a flash. Know when and where you can and need to use a flash. Don’t buy the most expensive main equipment thinking that’s all you need as the cost for all the equipment I use these days is between $1000 and $2500 with a lot of it invested in things like a flash.
Sure, it’s extra equipment you’ll need to carry around on a shoot but I think it’s worth it. Also, let me know what you think in the comments and anything I could improve on!
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