Advanced Photography: Flash

The right kind of natural light casts an attractive, comforting glow over your shooting location. It's easy to favor this kind of lighting over flash, which, when used poorly, shines a harsh, unflattering light on your subjects. But with the right skills and equipment, you can use flash to artificially create any kind of lighting in nearly any location—instead of having to wait for Mother Nature to set the scene. In this course, Ben Long goes beyond the basics of flash, diving into the intricacies of studio lighting. Learn about the behavior of light, how to leverage modifiers like umbrellas and softboxes, and even how to shop for the right flash and studio strobe. Plus, Ben shares real-world shooting scenarios that can lend these concepts a real-world context.

Learning objectives
Why use strobes instead of continuous light?
How to think about light
How light bounce works
Learning lighting from existing photos
Using a flash meter
Simulating sunlight with shadows
Using softboxes and umbrellas
Calculating and using lighting ratios
Shopping for studio strobes