How To Blind Someone With Flash

Here's the book I've been reading ... the Flash Book by Scott Kelby.  There are probably many more technical books out there, but Scott has a great sense of humor.  There's a good reason people need to look good in their photos.  They all want an awesome-sauce Facebook profile picture that makes them look 300% better than they do in real life, so they can snag a boyfriend who looks 300% better than HE does in person.  If you can take that photo, you'll be swimming in riches.

Not really true, but you get the idea.  I have always hated my flash (even though I have TWO of them).  I never knew what settings to use and believe me, there are hundreds on the back of that very expensive piece of equipment.

And lots of equipment there is!!  All of this stuff works without being plugged in to the wall, meaning batteries are a MUST-HAVE, along with the corresponding battery charger.  Since the cardinal rule of flash is that it NEVER be attached to your camera, you need a Commander which does.  It sets the flash off wirelessly and requires a specialty type of battery, which of course I didn't have.  A trip to town was required.

After reading the first three chapters and spending an hour trying to navigate all the buttons on the commander AND the flash to Manual settings, I thought I was ready to shoot my masterpiece.  Here's the first shot.  If this were a person, I'm pretty sure they would be blind by now.  Think Nancy ... how can you adjust any one of ten knobs so this looks better!!

The thing is, I'm reading a book about portrait flash and trying to turn it into low light landscape images.  So far I'm failing miserably.  Next shot ... too dark.  Back to the book.  Seems the flash needs to be on a tripod.  While thinking about all that, my too-old batteries died a horrible death.  RATS!!

Three chapters later I discovered the flash is too close, it needs a cover to diffuse the light (more $$$$) and I have the CAMERA adjustments all wrong.  I decided to try a picture of Jessie, since she's a little closer to human.  Again, WAY too much light, as proven by the schnauzer puppy shadow behind her.   Poor girl blinked for five minutes after I took this one.  

I read a couple MORE chapters to discover each setting changes something different.  Even though I've taken class after class, I had no idea that when it comes to flash, changing the shutter speed changed the lightness of the background.  Moving the F-Stop changes the light on the person.  This STILL isn't what I'm looking for, but it's much improved over the first couple of images.  

I learned one more important thing, other than how NOT to blind someone, and that is it takes time.  There's no point, shoot and run to the next spot (which I tend to do) with flash photography.  It takes lots of time to set up, shoot a couple of test shots and make adjustments, not to mention battery charging time.  

I have a long way to go.  Good thing it's the age of digital images so I can just DELETE DELETE DELETE!!!  I hope by the time I get to Arizona, I'll be a little better at this, having read the entire book and purchased the light diffuser.  And more rechargeable batteries.  The light stand I have in stashed in the garage ..... somewhere!!