Hi guys
I was wondering if you ever use a flash outdoors and if so what situations may you use it?
There's a lot of info in this thread, some great, some not so..... anyway, I suppose the use of flash is very personal to what the photographer wants to achieve and what they want to convey. It shouldn't be a case of just using it because you can, more a case of using it because you know how it will help both the image and you as a photographer.
I find myself using it in two forms; the first as some form of accent to natural light (mainly as fill), and the second as a main light source.
The fill stuff is usually with soft boxes to work with harsh light from the sun, although now and then I do use one or tow bare flashes if I'm after harder light. However, I'm a sucker for diffused might so most of my flash work is done with either a 40cm soft box or a 28" Apollo.
The majority of the latter is either 'portrait-style' suffer with the ambient dialled right down, or close-quarters stuff where I'm shooting with macro kit and I want the light I'm adding to the shot to be the dominant light source. I do a lot of open shade shooting and use portable soft boxes (again, the 40cm box).
RE: overpowering the sun - there are the folk who utilise natural light really well, adding flash in small doses to utilise a lot of what the sun has to offer....I see a lot of folk shooting into the (sun)light and then filling in the shadows with soft flash, which is a nice dreamy look that seems to work really well. I'm of the other 'camp' where it's all about subduing the ambient light to underexpose it by a stop or so (increasing saturation in blue skies, bring out cloud detail) and then using flash to give the subject a kick with some flash. I rarely shooting with mega-shallow DoF so 1/250th at ISO 100 is enough to seriously affect the ambient, but I do use ND filters for gaining shallow DoF when I need it.
Although there's still a place for on-camera flash, especially where HSS/AutoFP is still required through TTL exposure, I found that as soon as I started taking flashes away from the camera I was getting more creative. It's daunting when multiple flashes are mentioned in the same breath as kickers, fill, rim lights (etc) and I found that a simple cross lighting set-up worked and is probably still one of my favourite ways of lighting because it's so simple. And I'm sometimes too lazy to crack out loads of lights
I do find that instead of using flashes on stands - I use a handheld 40cm softbox - and aside from the fact that I'm generally getting light from the (camera) left, portable flash in your hand allows you to quickly make changes. It's a personal thing and I'm sure there will be exponents of static flash who'll state their case, but for close-quarters portraiture I just prefer the light in close because creates nice fall-off and really make the subject react to me as I'm pointing the lens at them.
This was one where there's enough balance between the ambient so the flash isn't dominating. It's just adding enough fill into the face that detail isn't lost in shadow. The cloud detail was nice on that day too, so giving it a bit of mood.
Peter by
Pat MacInnes, on Flickr
This is probably one of my have shots using my big 28" soft box - you can see from the EXIF that I'm nearing maximum sync speed to add some depth to the sky but thankfully, f/6.3 has been enough to give me a nice DoF to work with that helps focus on the guy's face yet throw the falling pellets out of focus nicely.
Pellets by
Pat MacInnes, on Flickr
It's great for fill-in, less so for action unless it's happening close to the camera. HSS at something like 1/1000sec or higher has feeble range.
