Rick’s Rants and Raves

This Christmas, I attempted to use remote flash to help better light the photos I took during the events. I was inspired by this article from a couple of years ago. I’d contemplated using this sort of technique in an informal event photographer concept, like I described here. The article about Christmas (and the nearness of the date) helped bring the technique back to the foreground of my gray matter.

Today I came up for a term for this technique: Augmented Ambient.

I put it to best use at a Christmas Eve event at the Jacksons’ residence. To say that the room was dark is a bit of an understatement. Here’s what the room looked like at ISO 400, 1/40th, f/5.6.

So, there really wasn’t too much ambient to augment. Fine. I still like the name. Anyway, I put a flash on a wireless trigger on my clamp-pod, attached to their fireplace mantel. The flash was pointed at about 45 degrees toward the white ceiling and into the middle of the room. This meant I was mostly limited to staying in this room, but that generally isn’t a problem at the Jacksons’.

Of course, with that big white ceiling and a wee bit of directionality from the flash, it made for a gorgeous portrait light.

In this case, the flash was just behind my right shoulder. There’s a bit of shadow on the background left to demonstrate just how much I was augmenting the ambient.

When I took this shot, Rob, who was sitting next to the subject, was surprised when he realized I was the one taking the pictures and triggering the flash. He noted that having the flash on the other side of the room, and not generally pointed directly in your face, made it wonderfully non-intrusive.

Without augmented ambient, a shot like this would have been either a) impossible, or b) deer-in-the-headlights-harsh with on camera flash.

In this case, the flash was about ten feet away, camera right. The light is bouncing so beautifully, if I didn’t tell you it was flash, you’d never know. This image is the one that made me think “Ah hah! Augmented Ambient! That’s what I’ll call it!”

As the kids got more wound up (it was Christmas Eve after all), they were dancing to the tunes Uncle Theo was jamming through his laptop-connected-stereo. And then they started jumping…

These pictures make me grin wildly. They were having such a blast, and I’m really pleased I was able to capture it. From this perspective, the flash is camera left. They were shot at 1/80 second, which might not have been fast enough to capture that kind of motion. But the flash froze it for me. And the rest of the space is lit pretty well so it doesn’t look like a spot light.

So this is why the standard Rick camera bag has a super-adjustable flash (Lumopro LP120), the clamp-pod, wireless trigger set, and an umbrella swivel.  They don’t add much weight or bulk, but give me almost as much flexibility as a light stand without the  trip-hazard.