What is Flash? For those who haven't tried it, it can be many different things. Finding out about it can be remarkable, challenging, or terrifying. Sometimes all three can exist simultaneously. It may take some time to fully understand how everything works once you get going. Knowing when and why to flash, on the other hand, will greatly improve your flash photography.

Today, we'll discuss using flash on site and the reasons why you would want to bring all that bulky gear with you. Of course, flashes are also utilized in studios and even on top of cameras, but in this case, we're focusing on employing your lights in a dramatic manner when on site. Here are a few reasons you might think it's worthwhile because this has the potential to be really effective.

To Provide Direction

An overcast day might make for excellent portrait photography conditions. With no need to worry about how the light will fall precisely, the warm, encompassing light creates a flattering space to position a person in so that you can concentrate simply on their expressions. Take the same subject and day again, but this time place them close to a window. You get the same gentle light this way, but with direction. When positioned to the side, the window shapes the face.

Instead of using a window, we can get the similar result by positioning a flash close to our subject. Using a flash and a huge modifier, we can create window-style light anytime, wherever. In fact, because we can change the flash's power, it gives us an additional level of control.

To Establish Separation

Contrast is one of the fundamental strategies we can employ to create the appearance of three dimensions and enable our audience to comprehend depth or distance or separation between items. There could be a difference in conceptual clarity, sharpness, or even focus. It might even be light. Separation is produced by both hard light in a soft scene and warm light in a cool scene. Our audience may be able to distinguish our subjects from the background thanks to the hue and contrast of the light that we use.

To Create Some Drama!

Flash can offer you an additional level of control, as we have already indicated. You may have a lot of control over how bright your background is with just one flash. As we all know, boosting contrast makes an image more dramatic, and we can utilize this to give a picture a completely different vibe.

Let's imagine that a couple is standing in an open field with storm clouds in the distance. We blow out the clouds and lose that drama if we come out for the pair. If we let the clouds in, we cast our couple in darkness while maintaining the drama. Let's assume we apply a flash to this "underexposed" photo to light up our duo. We now have a really dramatic image that sets itself apart from both reality and the potential crowd of photographers there on that particular day.

To Freeze Movement

Here is a flash feature that we may take advantage of, particularly when we're using speedlights or bigger flashes with brief flash durations. You can freeze movements that you couldn't otherwise freeze since the light burst that the flash unit emits can be significantly faster than your shutter.

This can be put to both creative and practical use. You can enable motion to initially record on your sensor by 'dragging' your shutter (creating a lengthy exposure) and letting motion in your frame blur before firing a flash, which will then freeze the objects of your choice at the last second.

Final Word

Through every one of these scenarios, we are enhancing light quality rather than quantity. Camera Flash is added after deciding how to expose the available light, giving us more control over the scene than we would have with only the exposure triangle.

Of course, these represent only a handful of the options available to us when employing flash outdoors and off camera.