The Flash | |
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Gresford Flash | |
Location | Wales |
Coordinates | 53°04′34″N 2°58′36″W / 53.0760°N 2.9767°W |
Type | artificial lake |
The Flash (Welsh: Y Flash or historically Pwll Gwenllian)[1] or Gresford Flash is a lake located near Borras and Gresford, in Wrexham County Borough, Wales.
The Flash is an artificial lake which is commonly used for sailing and other recreational pursuits. The lake covers just under 50,000 square metres in an area between Gresford and Borras.[2] Gresford Sailing Club based here, training and racing in small dinghies. [3]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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The right flash exposure values for your outdoor portrait photography
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Winter At The Flash - Pennington Flash - Leigh - Greater Manchester
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Lighting at the lake - outdoor portraits with flash or reflectors
Transcription
Hey fellow photographer, how is it going? I'm Michael Zelbel. In today's video I would like to share with you how I am setting up my camera and my flashes for outdoor portraits. I'm leveraging a double exposure with the available light, the ambient light, lighting the scenery and a flash is lighting my model. This gives me this slightly, slightly supernatural look where the model is popping out. I'm setting up very fast which allows me to work quite fast. If we have a look over here in Lightroom then we see: we started this particular shoot at exactly 2 O'clock and the last photo we made was at 14 minutes past two. So it was a quarter of an hour shoot which was actually long enough because the weather was too cold for the model and it started raining. This is how things are over here in good old Germany. Why do I make this double exposure? Well, if I would just expose for the model then the background would be way too bright for my taste. It would burn out, it would look washed out I don't like that. I like the ambient to be exposed in a certain way and the model exposed by flash in the way I want it. The first setting I care about is Aperture. I'm choosing an aperture depending on this scene. In this example, I was shooting at f/11 with quite some depth of field because there is water in the background and I wanted the water to look like water. If I would have shot with shallow depth of field let's say f/2.8, then the water would be blurry and it wouldn't look like water. It would probably look like hole in the ground. The next thing is I'm dialing in my ISO value. I'm outside and it's bright and I know I want maximum quality and I want shutter speed to be below my sync speed. So I'm going down. I'm choosing ISO 100 which is lowest real ISO value on my camera. If I would have very little light I would go up but in this case, a lot of light, ISO 100 will be just fine. Next thing is I'm metering because I need to know my shutter speed. In this case I'm metering the water which represents the ambient, and then I go once stop down I want to under expose the ambient by one f-stop. For me this gives me richer colors in the sky and the water and so on but that's really a matter of taste. In this particular case my subject which is standing in front of me will be two or three stops underexposed And that is awesome because this way the flash has got some room to grab her and make her popping out. I want her to be underexposed without flash. So the next thing I do is I choose in a light modifier for my flash. I can for example choose a softbox. This way I get very soft and charming light but it doesn't look real because in nature there are not many charming soft light sources. I can also choose a standard reflector. This is giving me hard light. This is much more like sunlight so it's looking much more realistic but it can also look less charming. In this case model Veronika, she's is looking beautiful so she can take hard light but I know a lot of my friends and clients they wouldn't be happy with hard light. They want it soft. The next step is that I "guesstimate" the flash setting I just estimate it. In this case here I've got two speed light in the soft box. At f/11 ISO 100 I know from experience that my speed lights have to be on 1/4 power. But couple of years ago I would not have known that. I would have had no clue whatsoever what settings would be right for my speedlights. So what would I do then? I would just shoot a test photo. I would set my speedlights to a value like 1/8th if there would be one speed light or 1/16th if there are two speed lights because that's always a good starting point. Then I would go close to my model and shoot a test photo. Next thing I would do is looking at my histogram. The histogram on my camera goes from total darkness on the left to total brightness on the right. I memorize that by just thinking of this phrase "black and white". In this phrase black is on the left like in my histogram and white is on the right, just like in my histogram. Then I tested out that on my camera one column in the histogram represents 1/2 f-stops. Since I was very close to the model with the test photo and she is filling the frame then most of the values in the histogram represent exposure values of my model. That bis great. I see the bulk of the values about one and a half columns to far to the left. They are too dark. So in order to shift the values roughly one and half columns up, I would have to go up two stops on my flashes. Now, I decide to dial up my flashes by exactly two stops, from 1/16 to 1/4. Then I make the next photo. And sure enough that is correctly exposed. If you have this double exposure technique under control so you can dial in your flash light and your ambient light very fast with one test photo then you've got a technique to make photos on which your model is popping out and the colors are rich. I think that's really beautiful. I hope you try this out and for that like always I wish you good light!
References
- ^ "Pant-yr-Ochain: the chief house in Gresford by CHRISTOPHER J. WILLIAMS" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 May 2012. Retrieved 23 May 2022.
- ^ Wrexham County Borough Council
- ^ Gresford Sailing Club