Photo recipe: make your subject dance, combining flash and long shutter speeds

Saturday 18 January 2020, 20:10 by Erik van Rosmalen | 9,343 views | 4 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Flash has many uses. The most obvious is, of course, adding enough light to take a photo at all. But you can also use it to separate a portrait subject from the background.

A rim of light can give someone with dark hair or dark clothing just enough of a contour, so they do not disappear into the dark background.

Something perhaps a little less obvious that flash can do very well is freeze your image. Sometimes you have situations where you want to use a longer shutter speed to capture the available light.

The disadvantage is that the subject is then not quite sharp in the image. You can also solve that with a tripod, but if the subject itself is moving, that is not enough. Flash can help you then.

Showing movement in an image

You can take this a step further by photographing your subject in motion. During a shoot with Valentina Rose, I went looking for that movement.

Valentina danced and spun around. With a long shutter speed, I deliberately tried to capture that movement in the image. After all, you want to show the dynamism, not a stationary dancer.

To still get some recognisable detail at that long shutter speed, which I varied between 1/5th and 1/10th of a second, I used flash to keep Valentina's contours or face sharp.

Setting up the photo

We took these images in a relatively dark room. Some light still came in through a large window, but evening twilight had already set in quite strongly. The autofocus no longer worked well either.

I therefore focused manually on the 'pivot point' of the dance movement. I had my 24-70mm f/2.8 on the camera. The light came from a single ELB400 flash head in a small softbox, high on the right.

For the shutter speed and aperture, you then need to see what the available light and the flash light are doing. To get movement in the image without it becoming one big blur, I ended up with a shutter speed of 1/5th or 1/10th of a second at f/5.6. I then adjusted the flash manually so that enough light fell on Valentina's face.

Flash and movement

Valentina spun around and had no specific direction in these photos. Sometimes your subject does, of course. Think of cars, bicycles or other moving objects. If you apply this method to them, it becomes important when you freeze your subject, at the beginning or at the end of the movement.

If you photograph a moving car, for example, the car lights will form streaks because of the long shutter speed. If you then fire the flash, that will (often) happen at the beginning of the movement. It then looks as if the car is driving backwards.

You can often choose on your camera to have your (reportage) flash fire on the 'second curtain'. The flash then fires just before the shutter on your camera closes again. You can read more about this in this article by Elja about the basics of flash photography.

All four photos were taken at an aperture of f/5.6 or f/4 and a shutter speed of 1/5th or 1/10th of a second, at ISO 100.

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