Flash isn't just for darkness!
I did an outdoor portrait shoot in the bright sunshine at the weekend, so used a number of natural-light photography techniques, such as diffusers (to calm the harsh sun falling on the subject) or reflector to bounce light into the shadows. This post is about the use of flash though. But... it's sunny, so why do we need flash? Well, it's about shaping the light and balancing the ambient/background light with that falling on the subject. In the image 1, this is what it looks like with the camera set to make it bright enough to see the subject (F6.3 1/250s) which is all fine, but the background looks a bit washed out and the sky is boring and white. Looking at image 2 , this is exposed to get that brilliant blue sky by increasing the shutter speed by 3 stops (keeping at F6.3, but the shutter is now 1/2000s) putting the subject in darkness. I wanted to use flash to fill in those shadows, but regular powerful studio flashes only work for slowis