Part I

Flash And Available Light Photography. Camera and Film.

What stands behind a successful picture?

A) Lighting and Exposure

1. Lighting and Exposure.

It is always available light, electronic flash, or a combination of both lights, that suggest the mood and reveal details in any photograph.

It is very important not to underestimate the power and the role that light plays in any subject or scene to be photographed, especially when it is the only source of the scene/subject's illumination.

This photograph of a boat was taken by me during the early twighlight hours in Tel Aviv. I used a Kodachrome low speed film, Minolta 700 camera with a Tamron Telephoto zoom lens, which helped me to isolate the subject from nearby vessels. Zooming up on the subject itself at the shutter speed ASA 125, I had the lens set at f. 5.6 because the reflection of the water allowed for another stop of light to reach the film via the lens' opening in order to make this photo available.

Available light is a general term for a relatively dim light that exists, or is present at the scene, or your subject's location where a photograph is to be taken.

Taking pictures in available light is called available light photography, and is often used when the mood of a scene/subject needs to be emphasized.

Flash light, on the contrary, is a brief illumination of the scene/subject by an electronic flash bulb, and is called flash photography. As you can see it in these two photographs below, a combination of many light sources was present at both locations.

I had to make a tough choice in between such factors as the presence of the natural light, flourescent, mercury and tungsten artificial light sources, deciding whether they all should have an equal value in the final photo, or one of them, or only some of them should predominate in the final appearance in these three photos taken in the Mall, a grocery store's meat department and outside of a church.

I used the same low ISO film as in the previous photos, Bogen Tripod and Metz Flash set at 100 feet , wide angle lens f = 28 - 70 mm set at the apperture of 3.5 at 1/60 of a second speed for these photos.

Electronic flash is used to illuminate, reveal details, and blur (if a brief duration is combined with a long exposure) or halt the motion of the subject (if a brief enough
flash duration is used) when needed, and is utilized as an electronic source of light, since one cannot always rely on sufficient available, or natural light.

To make this photo that you see below, I used almost the same equipment setup: Metz Flash set at 100 feet , Tamron telephoto zoom lens set at the apperture of 3.5 at 1/60 of a second speed.

The light behind the subject helped to outline the figure of a religious leader of this community.

As I have mentioned, often, a combination of both, available and electronic flash lights is used to preserve the natural mood in a scene, while revealing the details of the subject, which are often hidden by the presence of shadows cast over it. Different volume of the flash output is vital to the final image's appearance, it can easily alter the mood in your picture. The more flash light is used in your exposure, the more artificial will your final scene look and vise-versa.

All the flash lighting units are either built-in electronic flashes, portable add-on, hand-held or photo-studio flash units. All the flash units, just as any other equipment, have their advantages and disadvantages. While it might be convenient for carrying purposes to have a built-in flash light source, its limitation in strength and volume of the poured out light, as well as its non-changeable front facing direction, which produces a harsh and flat unappealing light, are such that require a photographer having the unit so as to be close to the subject. A built-in flash and lens are located too close to each other causing the subject to have red pupils of the eyes in the picture.

There are also units, which can be connected to cameras either via hot-shoe adapter or cord. They are add-on and hand-held flash units. These units are located farther away from the lens and do not cause red eye, more versatile, allowing photographers to be in control over the flash light output's direction that could be adjusted by angling it to bounce light off a ceiling, floor, a wall, or a photo-umbrella, in order to produce a softer, as well as more natural subject's appearance in a photo. It is advisable to bounce flash only off of the light-colored walls, since the light bounced off of the colored walls tends to produce a color-cast as in this photo, shot with a hand-held flash unit.

Nevertheless and just like anything else, this property of the colored-walls could be used into your advantage too in a sense that this method of the bounced illumination could also be used to create special effects as in the photo above. Most of these units could also be mounted on a photo-stand and be triggered via synchronization cord and hot-shoe, or slave-hot-shoe connection. Since, they could be employed as a studio lighting equipment also. Having said all that, it is important to understand that these flash units are still not powerful enough to be of a sufficient lighting volume for a serious studio photography. They are much less expensive than a specially designed studio lighting equipment. There are two types of studio lighting equipment, and studio flash is one of them.

There are two kinds of flash units that are available too. There are lighter compact units, that can be used in the studio and on location, and have one or several flash heads, which are supposed to be attached to a power source that also consists of a control unit, allowing you to employ portable heads of different strengths, and those that are heavier, bulkier, not portable, and are used for studio work purposes only, giving you much a stronger light output.

These units require to link the flash heads to the power pack and camera shutter or a flash meter via synchronization cord, though, they can also be triggered manually for such special effects as multiple exposure.

Some models you can plague into an electricity outlet, since their flash tube and power pack are combined in one flash head unit, where the tube is located behind a plastic sheet with a modeling lamp in the center. Usually a control unit can be set according to a desired power level to control the intensity of the flash, since most of them are provided with the switch that allows you to do so. Having a built-in modeling light, that could be adjusted to the selected setting, this flash unit lets you preview shadow effects. Such features make these flash units to be extremely versatile.