Flash, Sunlight and Backlight

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

Flash or natural light? You don't have to choose. Combining the two gives you plenty of options.

I've never found flash photography particularly exciting. In my commercial work, mainly commercial photography or portraits during interviews, I almost always use flash.

Nine times out of ten, you end up somewhere where you have to make do with fluorescent light. In terms of both colour and direction, straight from above, it isn't very flattering.

In my personal work, I consciously consider whether I need flash. Beautiful low sunlight often doesn't need anything extra, for example.

A portrait against a white or light grey wall? That gives you lovely, soft reflected light to make a portrait with. There are plenty of options for working without flash.

I often combine the two as well. The sunlight sometimes acts as the main light, the most important light on my model, and sometimes as fill light or mood light. By balancing the two, you still get a 'believable' image without it looking flashed.

Recently, I was in the centre of 's-Hertogenbosch with Emma late on a Sunday morning. There was some lovely sunshine, although of course it was no longer very low towards the end of the morning. We still wanted to use it, though. And there are several ways to do that!

Backlight and fill flash

There is a flash with a small octabox on the left side of the street, just outside the frame. It makes sure that Emma is lit sufficiently.

With the light

And getting Emma to look into the camera doesn't work this way either. You get very narrowed eyes. On top of that, both the foreground and background are lit harshly, which doesn't produce an interesting photograph.

Backlight as fill light

In this photograph, the flash is positioned fairly frontally towards Emma. The stand is just beside the camera. Still with the small octabox, but because the flash is a little further away, the light is harder. The result: lovely reflections from the clothing, while the sun still provides rim light, including on the extra on the right.

The look becomes a little more 'fashion'. To develop that further, a make-up artist could help reduce the hot spots on the cheeks, which you get a little more quickly with frontal light.

This photograph was taken a few seconds later. Emma and I moved two steps to the right, so the light was coming slightly more from the side again.

This means the light comes more from the side and you use the fall-off from the softbox. The result: slightly softer light again, while the sunlight still separates her dark coat from the background.

Or without flash

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