Basically all of my photography up until now has been with ambient light; that just means using whatever light you happen to have in a scene without introducing or controlling any yourself. It’s bugged me for a while that I don’t have any experience with flashes so I decided recently to try to educate myself.
The online bible for this stuff is a website called Strobist, run by an (ex?) newspaper photographer called David Hobby. It advocates off-camera flash as the most creative and effective way to light many setups, and has so much information on the site that it will blow your mind. It’s well-organized too, and if you’re starting out just read his “Lighting 101” followed by “Lighting 102” and the “on assignment” section. Even if you know nothing about lighting, like me, you’ll learn quickly almost despite yourself!
Here’s the equipment I bought to get started:
Canon 430EX II flash – you can get by with a manual flash but I wanted something general-purpose for non-strobist stuff too.
Westcott white satin shoot-through umbrella – you use this to diffuse and soften the light from your flash.
Manfrotto Lite-tite umbrella adaptor – necessary to mount the umbrella.
Stroboframe mounting shoe – The Manfrotto umbrella adaptor needs this to be able to mount the flash to the top.
One thing I forgot to get was a collection of gels (coloured covers for your flash head that help your colour-match the ambient light or to create effects). Also, I was able to skip any wireless or wired remote flash triggering devices as the 7D I’m using has a built-in remote flash trigger (it works as an ST-E2 which is the Canon wireless [preflash] triggering system).
Today I set things up and carried out some experiments. To prepare I bought some stuff from the local Michael’s, which is a craft store here in Canada (I’m pretty sure they’re in the USA too). I got a foam core board for $5, which I planned to use as a base as well as a reflector for fill light. I also got a couple of rolls of paper, the one I ended up using today was a roll of banner paper that cost $15 for 30″ x 75′, which I thought was more than reasonable. I was worried it might be too thin but it worked great. Here’s what my setup looked like:
The camera went on the tripod to the left, I’d removed it when taking this photo. I moved the lightstand around during the shoot to try out different angles. Notice the foam core on the left of the chair which I used as fill (the light from the flash bounces off it and reflects back onto the subject). Note also the super-nerdy Canon mode dial decal on the Macbook that I was testing out tethered shooting with 
My first subjects were my older SLRs, the 10D and the 40D. here’s my favourite shot from the day:
It came out pretty nicely I thought! Getting the right exposure was a bit trial-and-error but I’m sure I’ll refine that as I get more experience. Who knows where I’ll go next with this, but I’m looking forward to trying more shots and getting better at this area of photography that’s new and fresh for me.
#1 by Justin on April 19th, 2010 - 3:10 am
Great start! Any interest in carrying out the Boot Camp assignments? We could knock these off fairly easily at lunch times, and find some great locales downtown. http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/06/lighting-boot-camp-archive-page.html