Week 8 Preview: Flash

This upcoming lesson we'll have an in-class excercise with flash photography. So this entire time we've been focusing on low-light photography and haven't mentioned perhaps the most commmonly used feature in low-light: flash!

And for good reason. Typical uses for flash churn out hundreds upon hundreds of pictures that all look like this:

As these examples show, flash causes a number of problems: flat lighting, intense reflections, inability to illuminate background, etc. In a lot of cases, if you can take a picture without flash, it's better than a picture with flash, which is why we've been focusing on low-light photography without flash so far.

Miso Salmon at the Cheesecake Factory: flash, no flash

KW @ Pimentel: flash, no flash

Watson and the Shark: flash, no flash

Flash isn't always a last-resort tool of desperation, however. Most of the time flash photos look terrible because of the use of "direct flash" - firing a burst of light directly at the subject. Used correctly, however - for example bouncing the flash, or diffusing the flash, end up yielding great results that would be impossible to achieve with natural lighting.

TZ @ Berkeley Thai House: flash, no flash

We'll explore various ways to utilize flash effectively in next week's class, with essentially an hour-long experimental flash photography session. Feel free to bring your cameras next class (yes, you can get creative with the built-in flash on your point and shoot camera too!), and bring your flashes, if you happen to have any. I'll bringing a couple of manual flashes and a couple of Canon-compatible flash units.