Hey, it’s Jay P. here from The Slanted Lens. I’ve got Elsie here with me today. Hi! We’re going to show you how to use a speedlight as an off camera flash. You’re going to need a trigger. And one of the reasons you want a trigger is because you want to get this flash away from the camera. If the camera has this flash on it that’s really more of an event light. It’s for that kind of run and gun gritty kind of urban look. But when you really want beautiful portraiture you want to get the light away from the camera. My mantra is, if you can touch the light or the light stand it’s probably in the wrong place.So we’re going to show you how to set up a speedlight as an off camera flash. We got the FJ80se. We’re going to put that in a softbox and show you what bracket to use and how to get that set up so you can use a speedlight as an off camera flash.
Let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using a speedlight. The advantages for a speed light are most people already have them. You buy one of these because it’s one of the first kind of flashes that a person gets when they start into photography. So it’s a natural place to gravitate to, to be able to move things to the next level. Price is a great advantage. They’re not quite as expensive. So they’re inexpensive, especially when you get into one of these like the FJ80se is under $200. It’s an easy entry point for getting into a flash. You can use on camera for events or off camera for some kind of off camera flash. And last of all, they’re small and lightweight and easy to carry with you. You can put two or three of these in a bag. Just easy to have them on hand. So it’s not hard to have them with you. So that weight factor really is an advantage. Disadvantages, they don’t have quite as much power. This is an FJ80, 80 watt seconds. It’s not going to compete with the sun like an FJ200 or 400 would. So it does have a disadvantage in that. They also have a bit slower recycle time. So they don’t recycle quite as quickly. And battery life can also be an issue. But for the most part, people gravitate into this kind of step. You get it as an on camera flash. You move to maybe getting it off, but hold it in your hand. And then you move to an off camera situation where you can use it as an off camera flash. That’s a natural progression for people as they begin to learn and understand photography, to use that speedlight for off camera flash. Some people use it their entire careers and love them.
So let’s show you how to set up the FJ80se as an off camera flash. Let’s see how we set it up. In order to set this up we’re going to go to manual. When you turn on your strobe it’ll be here. We’re set on Lumix so we’re ready for our Panasonic. We’re on manual which is what we want to be on. We can set our sink right here if we want. We want to keep it at first curtain sync not highspeed sync and not second curtain sync. We’re going to do on first curtain sync and then we’re going to go to our manual. We’re in client mode. You see the little Z there with the arrow on it.
We’re now ready to set up our trigger. Our trigger is going to be set on the same, on channel one. So we’re on channel one. Channel One, we’re on manual right here. We can turn this to turn it off, to sleep or we can go to TTL. We don’t want TTL with what we’re doing. We’re going to do manual. Now when we’re in manual mode here we have complete control of the strobe. As I click on the green I can move the power down or move the power up. It gives me complete control of it in manual mode. So I’m now going to either be using a light meter or just shoot and test to be able to decide, to figure out how powerful I need to make this so it’s going to match the aperture I’ve chosen for my shot. So there’s how to set up your trigger and your FJ80se to work as an off camera flash.
So here’s the bracket that Westcott makes to be able to adapt your speedlight to be able to hold a softbox. So it’s basically a bracket. This allows you to adjust it. And on that bracket goes this little piece here. This kind of clicks around, push that in, pop that in place. Now this is going to sit inside the groove right here. And we’re going to take this little, right here and we’re going to twist that into the back of it. That holds it in that groove. Now this is the switch plate. So with a switch plate we can take our softbox and the softbox simply slides onto the switch plate and we’re ready to go. Our speed light goes right onto the back right here. It’s got a cold shoe. Tighten that down. I should have turned that down before I put it in. Put that in the cold shoe and you can see we’re too high. So we’ll lower this bracket down where our speedlight’s going to come right through our box right there. Tighten that down. Now we drop our box on that switch plate and we’re ready to go. So it’s got that cold shoe and the switch plate. Put any size softbox on this that you want. You can put the, I’m using a beauty, a 24-in beauty dish with the insert in so it bounces inside. It makes a little softer. But you can put, I put large boxes, extra large octadomes, any size on this with that switch plate. It makes it so it works really well. There are other types of brackets you can get that just simply clamp around the speedlight and the speedlight kind of just sticks out the back. I mean, those work, but I like this with a cold shoe a lot better. It allows you to make sure you can adjust this in and out and the height and it just gives you the ability to put a softbox on it really easily. So that’s the bracket from Westcott. You need that if you’re going to adapt your speed light into and be able to have a softbox on your speedlight and get it off camera for an off camera flash.
All right, for me this is a very classic lighting setup. I use it all the time. I’ve got a rim light from behind. That rim light’s going to give me a nice rim on her, on the back of her head. And that gives me a second light because I’m using a speedlight as my key light on her face. But I need separation from the background. And so shooting with a backlight always helps to accomplish that. I’m also looking into the shadows back there which gives me a beautiful, just a beautiful soft area. I’m going to want to see some sunlight so I’m not looking to look into dark back there. I’m going to be looking for the lighter areas back there as I shoot around to find the spot that gives me a nice beautiful bokeh in the background. I also, I always use the light to the camera left side or camera right side. And I shoot on the opposite side of the person. And I have them turn towards me. So she turns towards me. Now I’m shooting into the shadow side of the face. The light is on the other side of the face from me. So right here I’m looking at Elsie and the light is on the left side of her and I’m on the right side. That means that the shadows are going to fall towards the camera. And that’s a beautiful way to shoot. Shoot into the shadow side of the face.
So now I can go through the formula to get that background to do exactly what I want. Let’s see that formula. First thing we’re going to do is set our camera on manual. Then we’re going to choose our aperture based on our creative situation. If I’ve got a big family with a row of people in the front and a row of people in the back I’m not going to shoot at f/2.8. I’m going to shoot at least at f/5.6, maybe f/8. I need some depth to be able to get the people in the front and the back in focus. If I have a single portrait of a person I may go to f/3.5. I may go to f/4. F/2.8, I can go to f/2.8. It’s a very shallow depth of field on a full-frame sensor. But you’re going to set that aperture according to the creative decision, what you want the image to look like. If you have a person standing with a big row of trucks behind them and you want to see all those trucks then you’re going to choose an aperture that’s going to give you more depth of field. You’re going to choose f/8 or f/11. If you want the background to just go away and become just a nice soft bokeh you’re going to choose a really open aperture like f/2.8 or f/4.
So once you’ve chosen your aperture now you’re going to set your shutter to 1/200th of a second. The reason you’re going to choose 1/200th of a second is because that’s the fastest that your camera can sync with your speedlight as an off camera flash. Then we’re going to set our ISO at 100. Now we’re going to take a picture and just see what we’ve got. Now we’re going to raise and lower the power of the strobe to match the aperture we’ve chosen on the camera. If we choose an f/4 it’s going to be much easier because we won’t need as much power. If we use an f/8 we’re going to need more power out of that speedlight. We may have to run it on all the way to 9 giving it full power. So it depends on the aperture you chose and how close you get your strobe to the subject matter. That’s going to depend on how much power you need to set it at.
We’ve set our strobe on manual so that we have complete control from our trigger as we talked about when we set it up. Now from our trigger we can dial the strobe, give it more power or less power. So that it’s going to give us a nice light that we like on the person’s face. Every situation as you change and move is going to be a little different. You look this direction, the background’s much brighter. Look that direction it’s a little darker. When the sun bounces off from something it opens up the face. Maybe there’s a white wall. It’s going to bounce light in the face. The face becomes very bright. And so you don’t need as much strobe power. So every situation is different. I couldn’t possibly give you enough scenarios but this gives you a formula to be able to change and to adapt to the situation you’re in. With experience you become better at this. You’ll be able to set it up quickly and get a nice image. I generally shoot like we have here, with the sun as a back light. You’ve heard me say that many times I’m sure. That gives me a second light as a rim light. And now I can use a strobe to really light the face and give me beautiful light on the face. And I can keep most of the ambient off the face because the person is standing pretty much in the shade. So let’s go shoot some images using this formula. We’ll keep talking as we go and it’ll help it make more sense for you.
So I’m doing several things here. I started off with the sun behind her as a rim light and shooting towards all the dark. But because the sun’s hitting kind of splotchy spots on the grass back there I get some nice stuff. But it’s harder to find a nice background. I’m looking now into this kind of just nicely lit background here. But we’re using the softbox itself to create shade on her face so that I can let it be lit by the strobe. So she’s standing in the shade of the soft box and I’m kind of moving around so that box gets a little bit to the side and gives us a little bit of drawing on her face. And looking into that background back there it looks really nice. It has a little bit of life in it. It has a little sun that gives us a little bit of bokeh. It’s beautiful. There we go. You see if I zoom out where that softbox ends on her shirt, on her dress it gives me, it almost looks like the dress is two tone. We get a shadow on the neckline. So I have to stay in pretty tight in order to use this. I’m shooting at 200mm so I can give myself a nice shallow depth of field. The background falls out of focus. The light is really soft right now. So it’s easy at 1/200th of a second. I can use, I’m using my strobe on 7 which is not full power. I can make it much brighter if I needed to. But it just gives me enough light on her face and allows me to have some nice out of focus background.
So I’m shooting with a 70-200mm f/2.8. It’s a G2 Tamron EF lens adapted back to the S5 II Panasonic. This lens is beautiful at that 200mm. It’s just sharp. It gives you beautiful images. It doesn’t vignette in the corners. It’s just a really beautiful lens.
For our second setup I just quickly had her stand in the shade of this tree to take the sun off from her. I have some sun in the background on those trees. It should give me some really beautiful bokeh. I’m at 200mm. I’m going to set my aperture at f/3.5 and at 1/100th of a second. So at 1/100th of a second I’ll take a quick image and just see exactly what I’ve got. I have my strobe set at 7 on power, but let’s just see how the strobe is working here. All right, so at 1/200th of a second that background is pretty dark. I’m going to, I’m going to open that up. I’m going to go to 1/100th of a second and take another shot at f/3.5. Oh it’s much prettier. Look at the bokeh back there. It’s just beautiful. I’ve got the isolated, the light isolated on her face because I don’t have any sun on her. The strobe was giving me light on her but the separation comes from that bright background.
Okay, I can also shoot some full body here. Very contextual, I see the picnic tables back there and the trees. Maybe I’ll see less picnic table and more trees. So I see we see the trees are very brightly lit in the background. When I turn my strobe on now I get a nice light on her face. Yeah, oh that looks so nice. I’ll have her hide some of those tall trees back there so that they don’t look, they’re not so harsh. They’re side lit and they’re just really strong elements. So if I move over just a little bit the background becomes much prettier. I don’t have those hard trees in the background making the background really busy. So that looks really nice. All right, nice little setup. Let’s go on to another one.
So here’s a third setup. So I quickly, I see this tree back here has got some nice light on it with some dark behind it. So I brought the light around. We get some light from the left on her face. I’m going to stay with my settings here. I’m going to go f/3.5 at a 1/100th of a second and just see what I get. I’m going to use all that tree back there as our background. Oh that looks really pretty. We got the sun on the right giving us a little bit of rim on her hair there. This looks really pretty. There, we’ll take a quick look at it without the strobe. So our light is about gone here and so the strobe is becoming more of, it looks more strobe lit. So what I’ve done is I’ve gone to 1/80th of a second so that I have a longer shutter. That makes what light is left here is a little nicer. It opens it up a little bit. I’m actually using some with the sun in the shot which can be interesting. I’m going to try one here where we just let the sun be in the shot and really underexpose it like we’ll shoot at f/11 to see exactly what we’ve got. So, but this setup here is just a backlight with a light on her face. 1/80th of a second at f/3.5 and we’re going to go on to the next setup.
So we’re really exposing for the sun now at 1/200th of a second at f/14. I had Julene bring in the reflector here just to bounce a little bit of light back in on her face. But I’m really looking for that ball sun in the background. And then some light on her face. It looked really good. So just a fun different look.
All right, let’s wrap this up. For me, using a speedlight on your camera is a first step. Taking it onto an off camera in hand is the next step. But really, professional photography, doing really good professional work is you get the speedlight off into a softbox using a trigger. Now you can use it as a lighting tool. You can move it anywhere you want to be able to create the image that you want. And that makes a speedlight into a flash lighting instrument that really makes sense. So get your speedlight off the camera and get it into a softbox. Now you can make great portraits. You can make great family images. It’s just a lighting tool that’s going to really take you to the next level and look professional. So if you like this video take a look at some of these other videos that we’ve done on speedlights and other lighting techniques. So I hope you enjoyed this. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
