Nils is 365 Days Old. Fill Flash Challenge.

What's in that box?
1/640s F2.8 ISO 100, Fill Flash

Nils is 365 days old. We celebrated his 1st birthday yesterday!

This was a party! I was a bit afraid how this little young man going to take it but he went through it with strength and dignity.

Happy Birthday Nils!

Such events are fantastic opportunity for photographers. Kids are so absorbed with their new toys and people around them that they completely do not care about cameras and simply enjoy every little moment. I tried to capture as much as I could. I shot lots of photos but they are more family ones and having Nil's mother permission I am sharing just few with Nils to explain the techniques I used.

The party started at 2 p.m. with the sun relatively high and very little clouds. We were outside so I was facing the situation of flat hard shadows pictures. I had my two strobes with me including radio transmitters.... taken just case. I wanted to capture my today's "model" so to speak in the sunlight with relatively good colours in the background but he should be well lit, especially when I was shooting into the sun. You have to use fill flash. I quickly gave up an idea of off-camera flash as there was no way to follow this man with camera and light stand (I did not have an assistant).

WOW, It is Fire Department Truck!
1/640s f/2.8 ISO 100. Fill Flash

Throughout most of the day I shot with flash mounted on the camera. Sometimes with white diffuser and in very hard sun without.

There are few things you have to have in mind when using flash in sunlight. When you take meter reading of the scene in such conditions most probably your shutter speed will be calculated to way above of 1/200s or 1/250s, which are common flash synch speeds. If you want to stick with those speeds you need to close down the aperture to f/8 - f/11, again depending on light situation. But closing the aperture will increase depth of field and I wanted to have minimum depth to bokeh (blur) the background as much as possible. So I left my lens fully opened, in my case f/2.8.
Then even at ISO 100 I had shutter speed calculated between 1/500x to 1/1000s. Sometimes to have a little larger depth of field I was closing to f/3.2 or f/3.5. In terms of lenses I only used two today 24-70mm and for close-ups 70-200. (Like the picture below).

It was with orange balloons!
1/200s f/2.8 ISO400, flash with diffuser.
Nils has sparkles in his eyes.

Here comes the benefit of using system strobes or at least system compatible ones. You have to put into High-Speed synchronization mode. Set the camera to manual with for example shutter speed - 1/640s, apperture f/2.8, ISO 100 and let the flash to the magic. You get nice background with vivid colours and your subject is perfectly lit. Of course if I had time I would have setup of camera flash on the stand with a softbox, and then use second flash or reflector... but as I said, we are talking here about 1 year old excited little man.

Another thing beside the technical aspect is point of view. If you look at the pictures I tried to get capture Nils' moments from his perspective or even lower. In fact most of the afternoon I spent simply crawling around the floor or simply lying on the floor or ground. Camera on and me being on stand by waiting for action to take place. 90% of the pictures and 80% of best ones have been taken from low angle.

Anyway it was pure fun. I am sure the family will love the pictures and definitely some of them will end up as large print-outs and in photo book.

Not only little one had fun...
1/2500s f/2.8 ISO 100 Fill Flash

So to summarize - low angle of view, on subject's eye level or lower, manual mode, flash high-synch speed mode, and magic happens.

Do not worry to much about front flash illumination in this case.

Cheers

Jerzy