How to Make Flash Look Like Natural Light

one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to using flash is that it can look natural and this couldn't be further from the truth so in this tutorial I want to walk you through step by step on how to get your flash to look like natural light and all you need is your off-camera flash we're also going to pair it with a mags here let's go [Music] hello my friends my name is pie welcome to another magma tutorial if you all know me you know how I like to do get straight into things and not waste time which we're going to do that so all you need for this shoot an off-camera flash which you're going to place onto whatever stand of your choice this is a man photo nanostand this is the profoto A1 any flash will work totally fine I'm going to pair it with the mag Sphere for a bit of diffusion which you're going to see in just a moment wait for it wait for it wait for it oh yeah so this is our lighting setup and then just grab any camera any lens com of your choice so I'm using my trusty R5 this is my Workhorse camera and the 28 to 70. but honestly for what we're about to do I would say like just any camera and a basic 50 millimeter Prime would be fantastic now I want to go through this process using the camp framer Camp stands for composition ambient light modified then photograph because in doing so I can kind of talk about where we often mess up this process like usually when it comes to getting natural looks out of our flash we mess up in the step two the ambient as well as the modify step three part of this overall framework so let's get straight into that let's start first though with composition and what we're going for and do that I need the help of my lovely model Kiara step on in I feel like I don't need to introduce QR we work together all the time but we're gonna introduce her anyway and we'll wake her up so you guys can give her a follow okay so just standing here I'm gonna take a basic shot just not thinking anything about composition let's go to 1 4 000 F2 and ISO 100 and we get this now basically the only things that are working for me in this photograph is Kiara and uh the sun the sun is nicely backlighting the scene but as you can see we have tons of Road we're gonna get cars and also I probably can see your shoes Kiara why don't you just show off those lovely shoes of yours yeah we don't need that we don't need that right no cars and no shoes so what we're going to do is I'm actually going to lower the camera but the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to work off angle because if I position here I'll just show you I can actually frame Kiara right between these trees I can not only create a foreground but I can also have this beautiful background as well just compare that to the first shot already we're doing so much better right from that second angle we positioned Kiara between the trees which allows us to kind of make her pop against that clean background we've also added a foregone element we've concealed the shoes we've concealed the road it looks fantastic but as we're looking at the shot I'm kind of like you know I really want a little bit of light just from this right side to accentuate her face I could do this in a number of ways like you might ask why not use a reflector yeah you could use a reflector but reflectors tend to make people squint you also need an assistant to hold them and when you're working in the shade you don't have that option right so my favorite option is to Simply use a flash so I'll place the camera where our composition is going to be I'm going to go to the light and we're going to bring this into the scene so I'm going to paste it right about here I'll raise the height just a bit and I'm going to turn this towards Kiara and just for demonstration purposes I'm also going to take off the the spear for just a moment with that light set up I'm going to go ahead and grab my remote and I want to talk about step two and step three so step two is your ambient light exposure step three is modifying your light adding your light source and adjusting the power now for this demonstration I've left that at full power because I want you guys to see the mistake that we often make right when photographers are like flash can't look natural this is what's happening we get our remote onto the camera we go for the same composition and I dial my settings to my flash sync speed which is one two hundred I adjust my aperture to compensate so I go to F14 or f11 and like say low ISO now there's nothing wrong with this dramatic image right except when you don't want that look like right now TR is dressed in this beautiful sundress it's this light and Airy look and Vibe and I want to match that Vibe with my light the reason that we're going wrong right now is because our ambient balance to the flash is off see when we want a dramatic shot what we're going to do is we're going to pull down the ambient light exposure and we're going to raise flash power so darken the ambient exposure in camera raise your flash power for more light that gets you dramatic when you want a more natural look you're going to raise the ambient light the ambient exposure in your camera brightens and then you adjust your flash power and you're going to use a lower flash power so what we're going to do instead when we get to the ambient light piece I want you to either turn off or just simply take off the remote remote and I want you to dial in your exposure for how you want the image to look so I want this to look like a beautiful kind of soft background so I'm going to go down to F2 we're going to widen out the aperture all the way if you're on a prime lens we've got a 1.4 1.2 1.8 whatever you got this would look beautiful because you have so much depth in the scene it's going to look fantastic the next thing is I'm going to go ahead and just speed up the shutter to probably one two thousandth of a second ish I don't want to go too high because I don't I want it to be kind of blown out and light and Airy in the background so I can go to 1 1000 that would be here which is going to be even brighter or I can go to one two thousandth right here which will be a little bit darker keep a little bit more of the highlights but still have a really nice natural light look so I'm going to go with one two thousandth F2 and low ISO for my exposure I'm gonna pop the remote back on now and this is where we need to modify so we have ambient light dialed in step three is to modify our light source what I'm going to do is go ahead and add that magspear what it's going to do is kind of allow that light to bounce around and we're not going to get as much reflection or specularity back in the camera so it'll be really nice now we're going to take a shot and just kind of see where we're still at full power I'm at one two thousand that does mean that you're gonna be using high speed sync and because of that we're automatically getting less flash power anyway so might as well kind of just test it out and see where we're at that looks nice but I still feel like it might be a little bit too much light so what I'm going to do is go ahead and back it off we're gonna go down one stop and that looks absolutely gorgeous but I want to show you even one step in kind of the more natural Direction so I'm going to bring my shutter speed down to 1 1 000 we're just going to leave everything else where it's at and I'm going to bring my flash power down another stop so we're going to go even on the brighter side to kind of show you what that would be now just for comparison purposes I'm going to take the flash off we're going to shoot at one two thousand just so we can see what the direction of Light added to the image now let's put all three of these side by side so the first image is just our standard exposure no flash second image is with flash that same exposure third image is the brighter exposure with flash as well now with that first shot I love the look but it feels like we're missing a bit of light Direction on the face like it's a bit too flat I could fix it in post but why do that as opposed to just adding a little light on a stand and having it done right in camera now the second shot is to me kind of this beautiful balance between having a natural light look but just a little kiss of highlight and directional light to the face the third shot I think for my taste personally is just a bit too bright but honestly this is a very much stylistic thing I still love though the direction of light that we get on the face even in that third shot that Brighter Image it adds a lot of Dimension to the shot so I'm going to go ahead and get back to just shooting more images now but I hope this tutorial was helpful what we're going to do is link up all the gear that we use in the description of the video if you guys have any questions I'm going to see in the comments I read every one of your comments so if you have any questions thoughts ideas for other tutorials let me know and I'll see you all in the next tutorial peace

Channel: MagMod

Views: 122,687

Keywords: MagMod, MagGrip, MagGel, MagGrid, MagSnoot, MagBounce, MagSphere, MagnetMod, Speedlight, Speedlite, Flash, Canon, Photography, Modifier, Magnets, Magnet, Magnetic, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, Camera, Digital, DSLR, off camera flash

Id: eBcTFRFcZWU

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023