Flash or No Flash

We’re going to play a little game of “flash” or “no flash”.  Flash gets such a bad reputation for being harsh or unflattering. I often find that flash CAN be softer than natural light as it reaches into the crevices to bring up the shadows in a way that natural light sometimes does not have the power to do. It can also bring out richer colours and tones, and make editing much faster. At the end of the day, it’s a personal choice, but I think many people don’t give flash a chance. So here we go – flash or natural?

Round 1:

The first image with the giant catchlights is the image with flash. The light carries further across the blanket allowing some of the bright teal to be preserved rather than having it fall into dramatic shadow.

Round 2:

How about this one? If you guessed the first one was flash, you are correct. The light wraps a bit nicer on the chair image than one might expect from natural light, but that is because our deck was under construction and there was a GIANT white tarp across the entire thing acting as a bounce board for the sky.

Round 3:

The harsh shadows on the vertical image might feel like poorly utilized flash to some. This is actually the natural light image. Window light can be quite harsh sometimes, especially if it is coming from very far away across a 20-foot room like it is here. The depth of field was also a giveaway with these images. In the highchair image, the power of my flash allows me to stop down and keep those baby toes in focus. I had to shoot much more wide open in the growth chart image so my husband is out of focus.

Round 4:

Do you see the tiny catchlights in my youngest son’s eyes with the soother and three brothers on the couch? In the close-up, reading image, even with their faces being more visible, you can see the natural daylight wasn’t strong enough to light up their eyes. Sometimes my images are window light AND flash together like in this situation, but the flash usually doing more than half of the work.

Round 5:

This one is probably obvious. In the natural light image, the sun was so strong it was blowing out parts of our skin, and I added light rays and a dust overlay to try and draw attention away from how unevenly lit we were. I waited for the sun to go away and brought out my flash for the second image. It lit us evenly and got rid of some of the harsh pillow shadows from the sun.

Round 6:

These large windows are north facing so, on a bright, sunny day, if I pull the chair close enough, I get pretty good light from them. However, on cloudy or dark days, they’re not super helpful. If you look carefully, you can see the sun is so bright in the cat image, that it’s bouncing off my orange stained fence and creating colour casting on my son’s face. It’s subtle, but it’s there. The dark, rainy day, hair cut image has perfectly clean skin tones from the direct light of my flash.

I hope you guys enjoyed playing this game with me and I hope it challenges you to be more open to ALL kinds of lighting in your photography journey!

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