Flash photography is a great skill to learn as a photographer. It allows you to create mood, emphasis, and cleans photos. I’ve been a natural light shooter only because it always seemed so daunting a task to learn how to shoot with a flash. I’m writing this in part, for my younger self so as to not be as afraid as I was regarding flash photography.
As we discussed in our previous 101 write up, HDR has been used to great effect in interior photography and real estate photography when requirements state no flash, or conditions didn’t allow for flash. I’ll argue flash modified interior photography executed right will beat HDR any day. Flash photography allows for cleaner more accurate reproduction of colors, cutting harsh shadows from incoming ambient light (through windows and light fixtures), allows you to light rooms with little to know ambient light (closets, nooks, etc). All in all, flash photography gives you more flexibility in the worst of lighting situations. In a wood cabin with little to no available ambient light? Bring a white reflector and an AD200 or Wistro 600 and you’ll be able to accurately capture the correct colors, light the interiors, and save yourself from pulling your hair out from dealing with trying to merge an HDR bracket and keep colors correct.
What You’ll Need to Start Shooting with a Flash
To start adding flash into your interior photography all you need is a flash unit with a wireless trigger. The great thing is that you probably already have one in your bag and all you’ll need to do is pick up a wireless trigger. I started with a basic flash unit from Godox (Godox tt685s) and while it took a little longer to get through a house it served me well — I still carry it with me to help light rooms when my Godox AD200pro doesn’t have enough reach. In addition to the flash unit you may want to pick up a good set of c-stands to hold your flash. I don’t, but you may find it helpful.
Let’s Get Shooting
The Ambient Shot
The ambient shot is, simply, a shot with no flash. Typically, I expose to the right of the histogram—this is called Exposing-to-the-right (ETTR). Without getting too much into it, when shooting RAW the highlights data is usually well preserved. This means that you can easily pull blown out highlights back down and preserve the detail. Your camera typically struggles to capture and preserve shadow detail though, so that’s why I ETTR when shooting my interior ambient photos — to get the most data I can for post processing.
Let’s take a look at the ambient shot we’ll be using. You can see in the histogram that we’re slightly right of center in our histogram and the highlights look a little blown out. But again that’s fine, we can just pull down the highlights and boom, we’re back in business.
The Flash Shot
The flash shot is just the shot with the flash fired. Instead of shooting TTL you’ll be shooting in manual and adjusting power output to create a well exposed shot — if you’re looking at the histogram you’ll be in center. Before firing the flash you’ll want to set your camera’s exposure to expose for any window. If there’s no window start with a 1/125 of a second shutter speed and adjust again to get a centered histogram when the flash is fired.
Yes, it’s not the best explanation but them’s the breaks. There are no hard and fast rules so you can just set it up and go room to room, you need to develop an eye for lighting to build your ability to quickly move room to room with a flash.
Blending The Shots
With the Ambient and Flash shots loaded into Lightroom, we can make minor corrections before starting to blending the shots in Photoshop. I’m going to apply a lens correction and remove chromatic aberration. With distortion and CA corrected, I like to adjust the white balance and exposure as needed and tweak the overall image of both the Flash and Ambient shot.
Alright, so I can send the shots over to Photoshop now to do the blending by selecting the shots, right-clicking, and selecting “Open as Layers in Photoshop…”.
Before I start, I select both layers and auto align them.
Now that they’re aligned, I set the flash shot as the bottom layer. Then apply an inverted layer mask to the ambient shot.
With the layer mask selected, I select a soft brush tool selected with white as the primary color and set the flow to 5-7%.
I’ll just start brushing in the Ambient shot to bring back the natural luminance of the room. You don’t want to be heavy handed in brushing in the Ambient shot. I’m looking to make the shot look a bit more natural than the flash shot gives us.
Once I’m happy with the results, I’ll save the layers and close Photoshop. Back in Lightroom I’ll make any final adjustments and crop if I need to.
There you go, now you know how to shoot and edit a Flambient photo. The technique takes a bit to get used to but the post processing is usually a breeze when you dial in your shots. Hope you learned something, and if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com