‘Club style’ flash
If you’ve ever been to a club and had your photo taken by one of their photographers, or seen photos of your friends taken in clubs and plastered all over Facebook, you’ll be familiar with this kind of image.
Generally speaking a club photographer wants to be able to move around quickly and not be constantly adjusting and repositioning the flash head to get a nice bounced light. The easiest option for most is to use a bracket, which allows the flashgun to be moved far enough off camera to stop it being direct on-axis flash which is never flattering if used as the main light. Brackets can be cumbersome though so a common alternative is to put the flash on the camera, aim it about 45 degrees up, and use a diffuser dome/sto-fen/Gary Fong/piece of plastic to spread the light a little more. This will still get you a little bit of bounced light onto the subject, but the majority of the light hitting them will be direct from the flash head (a small light source, so hard shadows – as you can see above).
Most of the time I tend to use bounced flash, particularly where the walls/ceilings are a neutral colour, but sometimes I like to use the ‘club style’ of flash photography just to make the images a little bit different. This is the way I do it:
1. Get the exposure right for the ambient light. I would suggest getting into manual exposure mode, choosing a shutter speed which will allow for enough ambient light to be captured (1/60s or so should be fine for most situations, remember that the flash will freeze your subject rather than your shutter speed). Your choice if aperture would depend on how much you want in focus, so for one person I would say f2.8 is a good choice, for two f4-5.6 and for groups f8-11. Finally, select an ISO speed which gives you a decent exposure, such as 1600 or so.
2. Once I am sure that my ambient light looks good (by firing off a shot and seeing what it looks like) I can power up the flashgun, point the head in the right direction and shoot off another test. TTL generally gets it right on the first attempt but if it doesn’t you can fiddle with the flash exposure compensation.
3. You should then have a photo that looks pretty much like a club photographer took it.
There are a couple of downsides to this technique. First, because of the harsh light, bad skin will show up. You can get around this a bit by slightly overexposing the flash, but if you go too far it looks like you made a mistake. Second, if you’re not using a bracket then you can’t shoot portrait, otherwise the shadows will go off to the side – not pretty.
I like to use this style especially where you’re in a dark setting and want to keep some of the ambiance – bouncing flash around the room tends to kill that, but as with anything this is a personal choice.
