Why would you zoom with your flash?

Wednesday 21 December 2022, 15:51 by Liesbeth van Asselt | 4,514 views | 1 comment

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

Your flash has a zoom button, often marked 'Zm'. With this button, you can set the zoom from, for example, 20 to 200 mm. Many photographers hardly ever use this zoom function, usually without realising it.

You may use it without realising it. In automatic mode, with your flash pointing straight forwards, your flash automatically zooms in line with the focal length of your lens. This means you do not waste flash power illuminating something that is outside the frame anyway.

What you are actually doing when zooming is moving the flash tube forwards or backwards inside the flash head. When the flash tube is at the back of the flash head (200mm), the light has to pass through a tube, the flash head, before it leaves the flash.

This bundles the light. If you set the zoom to, for example, 20 or 30, the flash tube is right at the front of the flash head, so the light can spread in all directions.

This is something I always use when combining light painting with flash. I do not want the flash light to hit the painting, because the light from the flash would then wash out the light from the torch.

By zooming to, for example, 200mm, I can direct the light very precisely at the model's face.

If some light still falls on the light painting, I attach a grid to the flash, which bundles the light even more.

So you can use the zoom setting to direct your light more precisely without immediately attaching all kinds of accessories to your flash.

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About the author

Liesbeth fotografeert met haar bedrijf stapfoto.nl voor websites van bedrijven. Daarnaast verzorgt ze al sinds 2004 (vooral creatieve) workshops zoals lightpainting, flitsen in de natuur, fine art, frozen flowers, paintsplash, infrarood, icm en multi exposure. Daarnaast is er een Stapfoto vakgroep voor de meer gevorderde fotografen.

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1 comment

Ytos wrote on Saturday 24 December 2022 at 17:18 | reply
Interesting article. My experience, incidentally, is that some photographers unconsciously disable the automatic zoom function by sliding out the built-in wide-angle diffuser. If you do that, the flash head automatically moves to the wide-angle position. People do that because they think that wide-angle diffuser functions as a kind of omnibounce to make the light softer. Or it is a matter of "It's on there, so we'll use it."

I can remember that I once explained that zoom function, but it just wouldn't work for one participant. At one point I removed the omnibounce from the flash, only to find out that the wide-angle diffuser hadn't been slid back properly. You can spend a long time searching then
Translated from Dutch.

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