Tips and learning resources needed please! Studio flash

[Dman]

first things first, your little boy is far to close to the wall.

As said earlier, pick an aperture and shutter speed and stick with it, changing it will just confuse things.

How far away is the light? on full power these should be way over exposed. Even with my old B series elemental lights 50% on the main light was enough.

Are you using the radio triggers or relying on the on board flash firing the optical sensors?

They were only about 3-4 feet away in those examples, and not on full power as I thought! Not by a LONG way!

I'm using the radio triggers.

 

[Garry Edwards]

I think you're starting to get there now.

Just a couple of pointers:
1. Don't try to get rid of shadows, shadows are part of real life and look natural. The trick is to control them so they are acceptable to you, not to get rid of them.
2. Try shooting from your subjects' eye level. If you look down on people with a camera to diminish them and make them look unimportant.

 

[Dman]

I think you're starting to get there now.

Just a couple of pointers:
1. Don't try to get rid of shadows, shadows are part of real life and look natural. The trick is to control them so they are acceptable to you, not to get rid of them.
2. Try shooting from your subjects' eye level. If you look down on people with a camera to diminish them and make them look unimportant.

Thanks. These are all still without PP as well so hopefully within a couple of weeks I'll be getting there, although my kids might be walking round with flashes in their brains! Just need to start experimenting with the rest of the kit, at the moment I have another lamp, umbrella and reflector that I need to learn how to incorporate into it.

 

[HoppyUK]

^^^ Lovely pictures Well done.

Take a careful note of exactly what settings you've got, especially regarding power and distances.

I'll just say this when setting up lights: there's a thing called the inverse square law which means that when you double the distance from the light to the subject, the brightenss falls to one quarter - which is two stops. That's the difference between bright white and mid grey. Flash light falls away very quickly so if you don't position the lights exactly as before, the exposure will be out. Of course, you can use this to your advantage and adjust the exposure by moving the light a bit.

Bigger lights give softer illumination. So it's soft with a big softbox or umbrella, and much harder and more directional with smaller reflectors, ie stronger shadows. Moving the light closer makes it bigger relative to the subject, so softer, but beware the inverse square law here because if the light is only a couple of feet away for lovely soft light, moving it only a few inches, or if the subject moves a bit, will alter the exposure. The light will also fall off very rapidly so the background will be much darker.

Juggle these two factors - size of light and distance to control the softness and light fall off.

You are already finding that you need a lot more space for studio photography than you might think. Space certainly makes life a lot easier, especially when you need to fit in background lights or effect lights, but there's usually a workaround with a bit of ingenuity. Time to work in that background light now