Off camera flash

As previously mentioned; I hungrily consume every bit of information posted on the Strobist blog. As soon as I came across it I realised what it was about all the photographs that I love so much: off camera flash! Though a great deal of the information made little sense to me, the lighting ideas and techniques were thoroughly inspiring and I found myself wanting to explore all the creative possibilities of off camera flash.

I had one main problem: a point and shoot camera doesn't have a hot shoe fitting for an external flash (or wireless transmitter to said flash).

The first thing to come up with was some kind of flash creating device other than my camera, another camera. I could either ask someone else take a picture with a flash where ever I wanted the flash to come from at the exact moment I took a picture, or I could put my own camera into self timer mode and take the flash picture myself. Of course this is near impossible as a typical exposure (the time the camera is soaking up the scene) is around 1 60th of a second or faster (usually much faster), so very precise timing would be required. I got around this by using a longer exposure. My camera can fire at 5, 15, 30 or 60 second exposures. Fifteen seconds proved to be quite succesful.



The drawback to this method of long exposures is that you have to work in almost complete darkness, doing this with even just a bit of light would require shorter exposures and more accuracy. Using a long shutter is fun though, it lets you combine off camera flash with things like light-painting and ghosting, all in one shot.



With control of the aperture the level of apparent flash could be controlled which would help to avoid blown out faces and such. In this system it is only really practical to fire the flashing camera once (for crisp pictures) and something much more doable would be to have a reflective surface of some sort (paper would probably do) held up opposite the flash to mimic a lower power flash firing from the other direction.