Use if Light - People and Portraits

In many of the photographs that I have seen the models are highlighted with additional lighting. Clearly I do not have a full set of lights and all of the necessary equipment that may be necessary to achieve much of this. However, I do have a Nissin Di622 Speedlite Flash gun.

I have been researching the internet to see how I can get the most out of this as a tool.

So far I have learned that:

• The flash is triggered remotely using the infrared burst from the camera flash.
• To avoid the camera flash affecting the shot too much, you can adjust the Flash Exposure Compensation, on your Canon camera. Hence I have adjusted this down by 2 whole stops.
• The infra red receiver needs to be able to 'see' the infra red burst from the main unit.

I spent a while yesterday evening trying to set up different scenarios. Using my camera on my main Manfrotto tripod, I put the remote flash unit onto a smaller tripod and adjusted it so that I could use both flash units at the same time. The results were quite pleasing, although I did not have a subject in the shot, I was happy with the way that I got both of the units working together.

The next step is to take them both out with me to test a 'shoot', which I hope to be doing over this weekend.