Flash Tuition

Normally since moving to digital I have not bothered to do much flash photography as I much prefer to gentle tones of natural light and even when the natural light is poor you can always crank up the ISO to get a reasonable image. Most of my previous still lives hava been done with the very soft lighting given by a north facing window and if there are areas that need a boost you can always use a reflector.

However, I am having to do a crash course in multi-flash photography in order to do my water droplet photography. So I thought perhaps I ought to dabble in some ordinary flash photography just to learn the basics. As, after the sunshine of the past few days, the sky today is a murky grey I thought this would be a good time to start.

I chose three contrasting shells each with different patterns and textures and bundled them together on a neutral coloured cloth and started blasting away with my two speedlites. After much manoeuvring of the flashlights and the shells I have come up with a rather dramatically lit still life. Not entirely satisfying and I did need to tweak it in Photoshop as the shadows on the left were far too harsh and the squirly end of the shell on the right was veering towrds 'burnt out' but I am only at the very early stages of my learning here. Please bear with me as no doubt I will burden you with further attempts in the future.