Off Camera Lighting

Speedlights and Off-Camera lighting are one of those things that you don’t realize you are missing until you see all you can do with it. Last week, we finally got to dive into one of the most important aspects of photography (especially portrait and event photography like I’m interested in!). We learned how to use our speedlights on our camera, off-camera on a light stand, and syncing multiple speedlights.

One of the most important lessons I learned is how to properly bounce the light off walls to get the look you’re going for. I already knew that you shouldn’t point the speedlight directly toward the person from my camera, or else the photo looks “flashy”, but I wasn’t totally sure how to bounce light. Turns out, it’s all about geometry. I love geometry! The above two photos are used with an on-camera speedlight bounced off the right side wall.

Above is the set up for the photo below – off-camera speedlight synced to the camera.

Then we went outside and started working with two speedlights. It was a super dark and gloomy day outside but you would never have known! We had one speedlight lighting up her face and the other giving her some hair highlights with a backlight.

On the final day of the module, we had a mock event – an art gallery viewing. It was awesome to put the skills we learned from the week into practice and I learned a lot from the experience!