When you are in the right place at the right time you can just compose and shoot making what is commonly called existing light shots. These happy occasions may require nothing more than Essential Shooting Techniques and a tripod if the light level is low. Other times you might wish you had a little more gear on hand.

Indoors Without a Studio

Small flash units are built into many cameras now, but they are notoriously under-powered and inflexible. You may get away with using them for convenient snapshots if you stay close enough to the subject, but their flat lighting, red-eye tendencies and the nasty little black shadows created around everything can hardly be called natural looking. Nevertheless, I do find them perfectly suited for one purpose; outside in full sunlight! That's right. You must have noticed how nasty people can look when squinting into the sun and having all their wrinkles accentuated by the harsh light. With many cameras, you can simply push a button forcing the flash to fire when you shoot. Then you can turn your subject away from the sun. Some cameras will even kick in the flash automatically if they see too many dark areas.

Anyway, back inside we go. If you want greater flash range, more even corner-to-corner output, and the much more natural looking bounce light capabilities, your only choice is a separate portable flash unit similar to those that accompany most pros on the go. Manual-only units are the cheapest, but you will make up the difference in headaches and heartaches at shooting time. Traditional automatic units need a mount that keeps their built-in sensor eye pointed at the subject while swiveling and tilting for bounce. True TTL units only need their expanded pin connections to the camera because they determine their exposure times through the camera's lens.

Light Modifiers

Electronic flash is color balanced to match full daylight when the sun is high and bright. In the morning and late afternoon, your flash can be too cool for a natural looking fill-in effect. One way to guarantee a consistent color balance is to use a neutral reflector instead to bring up shadow detail and lower the lighting contrast. This applies to other existing light sources such as windows and tungsten lamps as well.

Conversely, overcast skies can make things go dull and flat. Occasionally, you might use intense, shiny reflectors to actually increase the lighting contrast for better three-dimensional rendering. Metallic gold rather than the more neutral silver can also add more pleasing warmth under these conditions. Speaking of flat, overcast lighting; it is not unheard of to even use black "reflectors" to subtract light from one side or the other.

Diffusing or softening the light is another solution when you have too much contrast. For this you need translucent material large enough to shade the entire subject area or, when indoors, large enough to fully intercept the light from the source. This technique is especially doable and effective for delicate subjects such as flowers, which rarely photograph well in full sun.

For completeness, I should also mention the art of using most anything opaque for what is called a gobo or "go-between." In the studio, they are invaluable for shading the light since they can be moved closer of farther from the source for harder or softer gradations. In the sun, of course, they simply make sharply delineated shadows and, thus, have much more limited use.

Into the Studio

Whether it's a dedicated room or not, the studio environment is what you set up when you want even more control of things. Flattering, lifelike portraits, for example, can require three to five lights (main, fill, background, hair and kicker lights). In any event, the lighting requirements quickly become more adjustable and less portable. Whether you start with one light or a kit, you will be committing to either continuous lighting or flash. They don't mix well, especially in color. There are advantages and disadvantages either way you go.

If you go with studio flash units that have modeling lights (so you can see what you're doing), your human subjects will be much more comfortable and there are only two potential problems to consider. One is cost, which you may or may not be able to justify. The other problem can be making a safe connection to your state-of-the-art camera. Steer clear of direct connections to older units. Old film cameras had well isolated mechanical sync connections which could handle fairly large trigger voltages and currents. Modern solid-state standards are much lower and some of the old stuff can fry your expensive camera in an instant. You can, of course, trigger the units with a camera's on-board flash and a slave sensor if, and this is increasingly rare, there is no pre-flash involved. You might also get away with a radio or infrared control hooked to your camera; not cheap either. I also recommend getting a flash meter even though you can do a lot of trial and error with digital. Remember, your camera cannot automatically set the exposure with these lights like your portable or built-in flash. So, you either have a meter or you do a lot of testing and calculation.

Continuous tungsten lights (photofloods and spots) can make things much simpler and affordable. The disadvantages are, of course, heat and glare. These potential problems can usually be effectively mitigated by right-sizing your bulbs and using reflector housings designed for better cooling. Since I usually do my studio work on a tripod even with flash, I find 250W bulbs to be adequate. It is worth noting that modeling lights for studio flash units typically need to be about 100W anyway. That being said, the advantages of continuous light should not be underestimated. With digitals, you don't have to change to tungsten film when doing color. You just change the white balance setting. There are no cords or gizmos to connect to your camera. No matter how complicated the lighting scheme may be, you can still meter it directly from your camera. You are good to go for mini-movies that many digitals can also do. And, finally, what you see is truly what you get. With studio strobes, the constantly aging modeling lights are really only an approximation of the relative flash intensity.

Summary

Indoors, your built-in flash is necessarily limited and its primary virtue is convenience. An auxiliary portable flash unit can extend your range and virtuosity considerably. Outdoors, direct sun can be deadly, but simple reflectors and diffusion materials can save the day with very natural looking results when you can't move into open shade. Acquiring studio lighting might require some extra thought about what type is appropriate for your needs. If you do commercial portraits or twitchy fashion models regularly for money, electronic flash is a no-brainer despite its cost. Otherwise, a retro approach using some venerable old photofloods has some advantages worth considering.