What Equipment You Need For Off Camera Flash Photography [With Links]

For many years I put off working with a flash.  The few times I did the photos looked kind of .. bad.. and unnatural and I just couldn’t get the results I wanted so I pretty much just avoided it.  One day  I was thinking about how other photographers get stunning photos with a flash and that there is a way to do it, and I wanted to figure out how.. and so began my journey into learning off camera flash.

A lot of others are in the same position I was in and don’t know where to start.  For this reason I’d like to share my “start up” kit.  This is valuable information to be sharing because it was no easy task to figure out exactly what I needed and what is compatible with what.

What do you need to do off camera flash?

1.  A flash
2.  A Stand
3.  Triggers
4.  A diffuser

This is it!  This is the bear minimum to accomplish off camera flash (well for the bear minimum you can remove diffuser as you don’t “need” it but.. trust me, you really want it..).

1.  A Flash – $259.00 – I started with a Canon Speedlite 430 EX II.  I love this light and it is a great place to start.  You can shoot in manual or ETTL, you can rotate the flash to aim it in any direction you want – behind you, up to the ceiling, against the wall, or straight on.  This is great because  it’s nice to  have the option to bounce the flash vs shooting it straight on, but that’s a topic for another day :).  This flash is a slave only so if you ever want to shoot with 2 flashes you will need to get the Speedlite 580 to control the 430 but if you only need one flash the 430 does the job.
A great (cheaper) alternative to the Canon Speedlites is the Yongnuo brand (around $70).  I haven’t used these yet but I frequent many photography forums and a ton of people have great things to say about them!  I may get a Yongnuo as  a master flash to connect with my Speedlite.

2.  Light Stand – $27.95 – that is the light stand I bought.. it’s a great stand :).  It goes up to about 6′ high and as low as maybe around 2′.  It comes with an umbrella attachment which is essential for the softbox I use but also good for using umbrellas which are nice to use when you want something light and portable.  It also comes with an umbrella 🙂 although I rarely use it.
Another option for a light stand is buying a simple hot shoe stand – about $10 including shipping.  this is a very simple way to move the flash around the room!

3.  Triggers – $82.89 – These are the triggers I use.  I have a Canon Mark II 5D and a Canon 430 EX II Speedlite.  These triggers seem pretty universal but you’ll want to verify that they are compatible with your camera and light.  They are wireless and are compatible with the Speedlite.. I have no complaints :)!  It took me a lot of research to figure out which triggers to buy!  I didn’t start with wireless triggers.. the first trigger I bought was a cord which connected to the flash from the camera and it works very well, but I am liking the freedom of wireless (although dislike how many batteries I’m going through nowadays).  There are cheaper cords but I wanted something long enough to be able to move around away from the camera so I invested in a longer cord.  I really like having a cord and wireless trigger in case the wireless trigger ever stops working I have a reliable backup.  Or if I don’t want to set up the wireless triggers I can use it faster :).

4.  A Diffuser – $169.90 – A diffuser is something the light shoots through to make it softer/more spread out and less harsh/direct.  When you shoot straight on it can be too much light and very harsh so a diffuser really  helps.  I started out using the umbrella that came with my stand and upgraded to one that is a 50×50 softbox.  There are tons of diffuser options though and different shapes and sizes.  You can choose circular ones, octogons, squares, rectangles.. the shape you choose will affect your photography so maybe do some reasearch on this before you pick something.  This diffuser I chose attaches to the light stand via the umbrella port.  There are also translucent umbrellas, silver umbrellas, softboxes, and PMS or you can simply aim the flash towards a white wall and bounce it.
If you buy a 5-in-1 reflector (we’ll discuss that in a minute) it comes with a diffuser in it so one option would be to shoot the flash through the diffuser that comes with the reflector.  I haven’t tried this, personally, but it seems like it would work well.

That’s all you really “need” to start doing off-camera flash!  However if all your light is coming from one direction you will find some shadowing occurring at times.. for this reason it’s really nice to have 2 flashes or a flash and a large reflector.  This is the setup I use.. (flash + reflector).

What you need to add a reflector to your off camera flash setup:

1.  A Reflector – $14.80 – I use a 48″ circular reflector but there are many different sizes and shapes to choose from.

2.  A Light Stand – $27.95 –  I use the same stand for my reflector as I do my flash, I just added a boom onto it :).

3.  A Boom – 29.95 – It’s essentially an “arm” that attaches to your stand and you can add a reflector to it.  The arm is adjustable and accommodates my 48″ reflector as well as my smaller sized one (22″).

I was taking some practice shots tonight and these are taken mostly with 1 430 ex speedlite behind a 50×50 softbox off to my left side.  There is a reflector off to the right and it did reflect some light but I didn’t have it aimed to directly reflect light, so while it made some fill, it didn’t make it to its maximum capacity.

^  this photo was just taken with a softbox and no reflector.. I am sitting in front of the diffuser (you can see my reflection in the eyes!).

So there it is!  Everything I needed to really seriously get into off camera flash.  This is a great place to start however as you “master” the art of one flash, you’ll want to start adding in more 🙂 and upgrading equipment.

Hope this helps someone [or lots of people..] out!

-Christine Ann

Duluth MN Photographer Website
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Aspect Ratios Diagram Resource

I use this web site all.. the.. time to figure out different aspect ratios.  Usually in the endless pits of the internet, there are 500 articles about the same thing but whenever I search for something like this vs digging through countless bookmarks, I can’t find it!  Nothing laid out this simply and easily.  For that reason I want to dedicate a blog post to it.. both so others can find it easier and also so I can find it easier too:). Here’s the list! [If you aren’t sure what aspect ratios are, bear with me.. I’ll write a blog post giving a more in depth look sometime!].

This is the link to the diagram:

http://www.theposterplace.com/Sizing.asp

And below is just a diagram for a rough idea about what various shapes for some aspect ratios looks like:

-Christine Ann
Duluth MN Family & Senior Photographer
Duluth MN Photographer Facebook Page

Does Resampling / Resizing An Image Affect Its Quality? [With Image Examples & Free Actions].

The question was recently asked – does reducing the size of an image affect its quality? I couldn’t find anything on the internet with image examples (I’m sure it exists somewhere in the depths of the internet; I just couldn’t find it!) so I thought I would make my own so we can see for ourselves what happens when you reduce the size of an image (****I need to disclaimer here that technically when you “reduce the size of an image” to make it smaller for contest submissions or website submissions, you are physically changing the number of pixels in your image (the Pixel Dimensions) and this is called resampling.. resizing is something different and has more to do with printing and the document size than the [pixel] size of your photo, but for all intents and purposes, I’ll speak colloquially, and most people just say resizing when they mean reduce the pixel size). I will upload a full res image, along with 3 additional images which have been reduced in size. Perhaps you already know what happens to reduced images and are about to click that X on the top of the screen – instead, you may want to consider scrolling to the bottom of the page where some nice, free resize/sharpen actions lurk :).

Anyway, the best way to compare each of these photos is to open a new tab for each photo (to do this you can hoover the mouse over the photo and click the scroll wheel or you can right click and select “open in a new tab”). By the end of the comparison you should have 5 new tabs in a row starting with high res and moving towards smaller res. When you get to the last 2 images the photos appear smaller.. to see how they look you may need to zoom in. To do this hold down the “control” key on your keyboard and then scroll your mouse wheel up to zoom in (and then down to zoom back out).

^ Full resolution image. The image is 3744×5616.

^This image has been reduced to 600×900. 600×900 is considered the “ideal” size to post to Facebook and web [update:  within the last couple months of June 2014 Facebook’s ideal image size has changed to 960 or 2048..] It is highly recommended to resize and sharpen on your own because if you upload a huge file to the internet, the internet will automatically reduce the size and quality.. if you do the job on your own, you retain control over how the photo looks. Although compressing it like this makes it lose sharpness so it is recommended to do a little bit of sharpening to anything that has been reduced this amount. Personally I run a high pass filter @ .5 – 1.0 and it’s perfect! While it is easy to do this manually I created some actions to speed up the process of resizing and sharpening. If you are saving in Lightroom there is a simple box you can check to sharpen upon export.

Here is the same file size – 900×600 with a .5 high pass filter applied to it.. it is definitely an improvement from with no high pass filter and looks almost identical to the original file despite being significantly smaller. 600×900 is the perfect size to put on the web without worrying about how the web will change your photo. (If you want a free high pass filter action, I put a download to one I made at the bottom of this page!).

^This image is 267×400. You can very clearly see how much it has been degraded at this point so we already have our answer that reducing the size of an image does impact how it looks and degrades it.  If you cannot tell then hold down “CTRL” + scroll the scroll wheel of your mouse up.. this will zoom into the image so you can see the quality up close.

^This has been set to 134×200. Though uploading that is probably overkill at this point since the point was already made in the above photo :).

I’ve created 2 files I want to share with everyone.

The first one includes 4 actions – Two of these actions reduce your file size to web-sized files (2048 on the longest side) and the resolution to 72 and the other two actions reduce the size to the same size but also apply a .5 high pass filter to the image which helps sharpen it. When you reduce the file you are squishing pixels on top of each other and losing information.. that’s why a little bit of sharpening is ideal.

Please note this actually “resamples” the image but I am using colloquial language and most people call it resizing :).

Resize Horizontal
Resize Vertical
Resize and Sharpen Horizontal
Resize and Sharpen Vertical

You can download this free resizing and sharpening action here.

The second one also includes 4 files. All of these only sharpen images, regardless of their size. The smaller the image is, the smaller HPF you’ll want to apply. For full res images I usually run HPF 3-4. For 600×900 I run at .5. If you want above a 4 you can run HPF 4 and then HPF 1 (totaling HPF 5). Anyway these are the actions included in this set (HPF stands for High Pass Filter).

HPF .5
HPF 1
HPF 2
HPF 4

You can download this free sharpening action here.

Of course there are countless ways to do resizing and sharpening, this is just one of many 🙂 and there is software designed to assist you in resampling the image without hurting the image quality so if you need something like that, programs like that exist!

-Christine Ann

Duluth Senior and Family Photographer
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