I’m finally getting down to writing up the Flash Bus that happened a week ago. In short, it’s amazing. Between David Hobby and Joe McNally is over 50 years of photography experience, and they are both masters of their respective crafts. David spent time out of mind as a newspaper photographer, and when he saw the way then industry was going, he packed up shop and found a new way to use his skills. He also started writing Strobist, a guide to off-camera flash. He believes heavily in using the manual modes, and building up the light in a photograph in carefully controlled and measured layers. Joe, on the other hand, spent the last three decades being a freelance photographer for National Geographic magazine. He strongly believes in automatic settings via the camera’s Through The Lens (TTL) flash metering – which allows him to play fast and loose with the flash settings, and wing it a little often.

I can’t say I like or dislike either approach. The fully manual approach makes you think out every light and every level in a way that builds the technical discipline of off camera lighting. It’s also a lot cheaper, as you can get $179 LumoPro 160’s with optical slave triggers, instead of $400 Nikon speedlights, and get the same results. It does mean more walking back and forth between the light stand and the shooting position, but there’s nothing wrong with exercise. It also means that you learn to trust your judgement faster, and build in layers. The TTL approach makes heavy use of Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (or the PocketWizard TTL transceivers) that allows control of the remote flashes from the camera. It lets you set the ratios between the various lights, and work much more quickly. (As an aside: if you have the expensive Nikon CLS-enabled flashes, you can still set them in manual mode. This is what I’m doing, as I’m lucky enough to have two CLS-enabled Nikon speedlights.) For now, I think I’m going to stay with the manual methods, ala David Hobby, as I really need to put in the hours learning the technical aspects of the lighting process.

I think the most important technical thing I learned in the seminar is that when use manually set speedlights, your aperture controls the power of the speedlights, and your shutter controls the power of the ambient lights. This is because the duration of the flash firing is about a 1/1000th of a second, and that exposure is almost always more powerful than the ambient. So you walk the background up and down with the shutter control dial and the relative power of your lights with the aperture control dial. You can then use the ISO speed to act as a global exposure compensation system. It’s pretty amazing what you can do once you realize this (like overpower the sun in the middle of the day).

There are two other things that I learned at the seminar, other than the raw volume of lighting information. The first is to register your photographs with the government, so you have the ability to sue if people use them without permission. You can send in DVD’s of images to register them en masse. The US Copyright Office maintains a lot of helpful information on their website.

The second thing is that shooting with less lights means more complications and less control. This is counter intuitive to many, as you would think that the more lights you have to set up means the more settings to change and the more things to balance. This isn’t true for two reasons: first, light is additive. As you layer more light, it will only add to the light on the scene. As long as you are going manual, you will never create new dark places in the photo you make by adding new lights. The second is because there are four generally established types of lights in a photograph: Ambient, Fill, Key, and Accent. You can create all of them with speedlights, but if you only have one light, it means it has to do double duty (as a Fill and an Accent, via a bounce card, for example). This makes it harder on the photographer to figure out how to balance the needed elements in the scene. I’ve only got the two lights, and while I want more, I think I’ll be ok for now. Though I’ve already run into situations over this last weekend where I’d wished I had two more lights for honest reasons, not just gear envy.

Anyway, this is getting to be a long post, and I’ve got dinner to cook. See you guys next time, where I actually try to get a human subject in front of my camera.