While I have always enjoyed photographing people, I very much dislike the effect of on camera flash. You know, a strobe or popup flash on top of your camera. To me, the people look washed out and flat. We never see people the way they are recorded in a flashed picture, so they look unnatural.
So I am what you call an "available light" photographer. Was.
Last year my friend Dayna and I planned to shoot a wedding, and a lot of it would take place at sunset, then in the dark. I wasn't going to reduce myself to typical flashed shots, but what to do? Luckily, I came across One Light Workshop, put on by Zack Arias. Another clever guy with lighting is David Hobby, whose site Strobist has a huge following.
They have perfected techniques for natural looking images, lit with very simple lighting, often a single strobe, with some type of light modifier. Luckily for Dayna and me, a workshop was coming to Berkeley shortly before the wedding. We attended, learned and had fun. I ordered some lighting equipment the next morning. I practiced a couple of time on my kids, then it was showtime.
And here is one of the shots from the wedding. We took pictures outside as the sun was going down. This picture was not in total darkness as it appears, that is due to balance of natural and strobe lighting. In fact, using the techniques we learned in the workshop, you can make an image that looks like night - in broad daylight.
The basic idea is for the artificial light to be above and to one side of the subject. Then you learn a slightly involved process for manually exposing the image (i.e. camera is not on auto!), with several factors: strobe power, distance to subject, shutter speed, aperture.
Zach is a heckuva photographer, and a good teacher. The link to his site is listed in my Photography Sites in the right hand column. I'm glad to have these skills now!
