I like the shots containing the play of the light and shadows. I have a small light reflector with diameters of 30 cm (about 12 inches). The reflector has two different colors, silver on the first side and golden on the other side. Such way the reflected light can be hard or warm.
I indeed enjoy using this reflector. It was as much interesting as I forgot to control the amount of the light falling the subject. My first shots taken with help of the reflector were not realistic. Looking at them, you have the feeling of two suns shining on the target.
Later, I improved my technique and I suppose I reached better result. At least, I would like to hope so.
The only problem related to reflector is the some kind of light is required. In my case, the light was the sunshine. Sunshine is very beautiful; but you are not able to control it. I wanted some thing else. I wanted to have studio lights. A real photo studio even for hobby is very expensive and requires much room to use.
I decided to buy a flash as the first step towards to the studio. A flash is small enough to hold it in the cupboard after the photo session. My first flash was Canon Speedlite 430 EX II. I had used the built in flash of my camera. I did not expect such different shots with the usage of Speedlite 430. They were indeed great. Browsing the users’ manual of the flash, I learned that this flash can be used in a flash-network. My wife was on a holiday by her parents. I took advantage of her absence and bought one more flash of the same type.
I met a problem when I wanted to build a flash network. I set the slave mode on one of the flashes and put the other one on my camera and clicked the exposure button. The slave flash did not work. I read the manual. Unfortunately, I did not find anything helpful. A bit later, I had a shrewd idea that maybe some other equipment was required. It was very dubious that every example in the manual contains a master flash and the type of the master flash was Speedlite 580. Nobody said that Speedlite 430 could not be used as a master flash and nobody said that it could be. The answer was found in the Internet. Of course, Speedlite cannot work as a master flash.
I took the newer Speedlite 430 and went back to the shop, where I could change it to a Speedlite 580 EX II. I was able to do it as my wife still did not return home. :)
My new beauties worked together very well. Then I met the next problem. I did not have a tripod or anything to hold flashes in the proper position and one of the flashes must have been attached to the camera. There was also a problem of hard lights. It would have been good to have diffusers to make soft lights.
I used to order books from the amazon.com portal. I remembered that they sold photography accessories, too. I found soon what I wanted to buy. What happened then? I am going to write a post soon. Until the post, I must warn you: Do not order anything from ExpresPro!
