Macro Flash Photography Technique
We’re here in Big Surge today right by the Big Surge River down in one of the little camp ground areas and I found some really amazing little wild flowers that are blooming, they’re extremely small. They’re like a probably only quarter of an inch across. So I’ve got the, I’ve got the 180 macro lens on here with the lens shade, and I’m filling the frame pretty much with the, with the flowers. But I’m gonna use this powerful camera modification of the standard speed light that just goes right on the camera. It’s the Mets, it’s the Mets 58, which is amazingly accurate with this Fuji S5 and on, on it I put the, kind of luminoquest, kind of a soft box here. So I’m changing it to a fairly, fairly large light source in relative size to the flowers themselves. And I’ve taken a meter reading on the flower and I already shot some without any flash. And now I’ve decided to add the flash to create some direction to the light which is actually pretty flat otherwise. So I’ve gone about a stop under on the overall metering so that the picture taken without the flash looks a little bit dark. And then when I add the flash on it here, I’ve done a couple of tests previously, I’ve got the power settings on this flash to only its, instead of 128 power. Which is nothing, which is a little kiss, you know, you can see that, amount of light coming out of that thing is just nothing really. But when I aim it in close to the flower it’s significant. So I’m not cheating in close here and I can now, now I can make the light come from any direction I want coz it’s so soft to begin with. So I’ll gonna put the flash right here, shoot a couple like this. And they’re perfectly exposed. And then what else I was doing even more interesting than that, is putting the flash under these broad leaves that are behind the flowers, backlighting the leaf and the little, the wildflowers that I’m shooting. And getting this really great backlit right here, you can see all the veins of the flowers. I can see the, the, almost the silhouette of the veins of the leaves and kind of the silhouette of the flowers. So and by experimenting with different shutter speeds, I’ve created some streaking and some nice kind of special effects that you normally would never get without being able to use a flash. So we’re using an off camera flash, it’s tethered with this cord, but it’s not, it’s not being used on TTL, it’s being used on just a regular manual metering and it works perfect. It’s a great, great technique and if you take the first shot, and you think this looks a little bit too bright. Instead of using exposure compensation in the camera, you can just pull the flash back half an inch, two inches, three inches, little bit in, little bit closer if the picture is too dark. And you can vary the intensity, because you’re in so close and fall off this, it’s occurring so rapidly. You can change the brightness level by just moving the flash an inch or two. So, it’s really easy to do and do it on your own, if you have a tripod like I do. And if you can't hold the flash, you don’t have a cable release, you can use a self timer. It’s really a lot of fun.