Portrait photography tip: Take your flash off camera

Thursday 11 February 2021, 21:12 by Elja Trum | 4,315 views | 0 comments

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

You get the best results with a flash when you take it off the camera. You can then fully control the direction of the light. In fact, taking your flash off the camera allows you to create a kind of studio environment on location, with full control over the final result.

Erika - f/3.2, 1/30s, 400 ISO @ 40mm
It often works very well to use the flash as your main light and the available light as fill light to prevent harsh shadows.

For the photo above, I placed a flash in the derelict toilet cubicle to cast extra light from the cubicle onto the model. This makes the light from this cubicle much brighter than in the other cubicles, drawing extra attention to the model.

When you take your flash off the camera, you need a trigger that tells the flash when to do its job.

Some flashes can use the camera's built-in flash as a trigger, but separate radio triggers are already available for just a few tens of euros.

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About the author

Elja Trum is the founder of Photofacts and online photography course website Photofacts Academy. He has been writing about photography since 2006. Elja is also the author of (Dutch) books on composition, black-and-white photography, flash photography and portrait photography.

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