How To Begin Using Off-Camera Lighting

How To Begin Using Off-Camera Lighting

by William Lulow

At some point, if you wish to improve your portraits, you will have to use some kind of “off-camera” lighting. The best way to begin to do this is to get a light stand and a hot shoe on which you will mount your flash. Now, with Canon equipment, there is a way to fire an external flash using your camera’s built-in flash.

Follow these steps:

• First, set up your Canon flash as a slave unit. (This means that it will flash when the camera’s shutter is released, but the camera’s built-in flash will not fire).
• Second, enable your camera’s built-in flash.
• Third, make sure your external Canon flash is on the same channel as the camera. (Refer to the manual)
• Fourth, adjust exposure.
• Fifth, take the picture.

When you use the flash on the camera, or the camera’s built-in flash, you are fairly limited with the kinds of lighting effects you can achieve. Take the flash off the camera, and you open up a world of different images you can make.

So, you can use your system’s external flash components or you can begin to investigate the world of radio-controlled flash systems. Probably the most popular one these days, is the “Pocket Wizard.”

This is a series of radio receivers and a transmitter that inter-connects all of your external flashes. You can start with just mounting the one unit you have on a light stand and connecting the receiver to it with a wire, and the transmitter is mounted to your camera’s hot shoe. This will allow you to move the light around so that you can have the light coming from various other directions. Then, you can move to buying a second flash with a second receiver. Now, you will have some control over the kind and amount of light you can use.

So, it takes a modest investment in some equipment, but this next step will help you to be able to control your lighting a bit more. I believe the package above is around $300.

The results you can achieve will be similar to those you can get by using a continuous light source. You have to experiment with the various lighting setups I have written about and explained in previous articles. Go back and study the lighting setups and diagrams. Or, ask me about them and I will send them to you. 

Here are a few:

1. The Hollywood Light
2. The Rembrandt Light
3. The Side Light

Hollywood Light

Rembrandt Light

Side Light

So, these are three of the classical studio lightings that will help you not only understand what light can do, but how to use it effectively as well.