Lessons
Class Introduction: How to Shoot with your First Flash
05:59 2Defining Flash Photography
09:08 3Camera Setup: Metering
03:48 4Camera Setup: Exposure Mode
04:27 5Camera Setup: Flash Synchronization
06:26 6Camera Setup: Shutter Speed
04:46 7Camera Setup: Aperture
06:31 8Camera Setup: White Balance
09:20Lesson Info
Flash Settings: Manual
so I love manual manual flash setting. I like it because I am in full control. Not that I have control issues, but I like being in control, especially when the client is paying me money. Or like this grandfather I was talking about just a few days ago. You know, this is a He's gonna photograph this family. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, and he wants to make sure he gets it. So in those cases, you know when it's your butt on the line line, use manual mode, so manual mode requires it aeration. Manual flash mode requires that you take a picture and you take a look. There's ways around it. You can use a light meter and all that. But my guess is, most of you watching today don't have light meters. So I'm not even gonna really go into light meter usage. I'm gonna show you that you could just take a picture and take a look literally. It's that easy. A lot of times just Oh, look on the back of my camera. My subjects to bright. Well, then we just reduce the brightness on the flash manua...
l mode is repeatable. Is consistent. And in my opinion, it's the best way to learn flash photography. If you really want to learn this, be shooting manual mode. All right. So let me show you how we set up the flash in manual mode so that in manual mode, the flash has multiple power outlet output levels, and almost every flash is the same. Canon Nikon, inexpensive third party flash that almost all work the same here. Okay, So here's a test. How do I get to manual mode? Push the mode button. Good. All right. So I push the mode button and there we go. I'm in now, in manual mode. Okay. Next, most flashes have a little plus and minus button, or like a little lightning bolt button or something along those lines. So in this case, this flash says lightning bolt plus and minus M. Oh, that means I can change the compensation of the flash output by pushing that button. All right, Cool. So now I rotate some flashes, you rotate other flashes, you push up and down other flashes, you push left and right. But here you can see there on the very top. Oops. There you see it says 1/8. 1/8 but 1/8 of what? Well, that's 1/8 of full power. Okay, so what's full power in most again? Most flashes. Full power is 1/1. But gotta push that button again. There we go. So there's there's 1/1 1/1 means all the power that the flash can produce will be shot when I take the photo power. Full power, all the energy out. So your job is a photographer is to wrangle that. So we're gonna take a picture. You're gonna look at it on the back, your camera, and you're gonna go, huh? You know, that's that, Like, that's way too bright. So what do I do? Reduce the power. Well, but how much? Well, I don't know. Let's take a guess. So here we go. So that was full power. Let's take another shot here. We'll go down to half power. So again, take another shot. Oh, it's still blasted out, you know, still too much. Well, how much I reduce it from there. So you over time you're gonna really quickly go. Oh, I get a feel for this. I know that I need to be down to 1/16 of a power 16th. So I'm just gonna pick that 16th quarter, eighth 16th. Take that picture and we look at that. Oh, cool. I know this is not a great photo here, but I can see the flowers. I can see the wall, the Wallace white, the flowers look illuminated. And another tool that you have available to you. It is even see the blinky screen that screen on your cameras that blinks at you. That's a great tool for flash photographers. Um, if you confined, that screen is called the highlights screen. Here we go. This is the highlight screen. Okay, so there is the previous shot, and you can see that like the whole screen is blinking at me. That means you've blown out. Those highlights is probably too much flash, just guessing. And then I re re took the picture at 1/16 power, and now we don't have any Blinky, is there any highlights? So that little highlights screen is actually a very useful tool for you to learn how to make the settings for flash par
Class Materials
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Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Great fast-class! Mike Hagen got straight to the point and made it super easy to understand!
user-182390
Great course very informative and so easy to understand.
Craig
The class covers exactly what you would expect. Very good basic information about how to set-up and operate a flash on any camera. Mike was extremely personable and communicated very well.
Student Work
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Fundamentals