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At this stage Teddy is pretty bored with posing the way I've had him posing. So let us change things around. For the next series of shots, I'll place Teddy side on to the window, so that this time, one side of his face will be illuminated by natural light.
Placing Teddy beside the window, I use my hand held ambient light meter and meter for the lit side of his face. This is to ensure that I expose for the highlights and avoid blowing out any detail.
The problem we have here, a problem faced by most photographers shooting outdoors or with ambient light, is that there is quite a bit of contrast between the lit side of the face and the shadow side, approximately 2 whole stops! For some photos, this contrast can add to the mood, but normally we would like to reduce it.
A simple approach we can use is to use a reflector, off to the subject's right/cameras left to throw light back on to the shadow side of the face, reducing contrast.
This method is extremely effective and more importantly, easy to control. In fact, I would always recommend that people start off with reflectors, so as to understand light a little more, before introducing flash into their arsenal.
The reflector has done a really good job here to reduce the contrast and lift the shadows. It's easy to control the amount of reflected light that you want by simply moving the reflector closer or further away from Teddy.
One disadvantage of reflectors though, is that the ratio of available light to reflected light is always going to be less than 1:1. This is due to the inverse square rule! However, by using flash instead of a reflector, we can control the ratio precisely.
So now, with an off camera flash, placed on the opposite side of the subject to the window, we are able to light the scene as we desire.
Flash to available light ratio: 1:1
Flash to available light ratio: 0.75:1
Flash to available light ratio: 1:0.75
Ok, Teddy is bored and the batteries in my flash need charging, so I'll finish this tutorial here. Hopefully I've given you just a little bit of insight into the technical issues with flash as well as some of the practical uses. Remember, once you get more into flash photography, the creative possibilities are endless.
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