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Few things are better than capturing a landscape under the perfect light. But often we’re met with less-than-perfect conditions, dull skies and flat light. This could be a time to try flash painting. By using a portable flash or Speedlight, you can pick out details and highlight the contours in a scene. This could also be an opportunity to include a figure – or yourself if shooting solo – in the shot to create a point of interest while holding up your light, as we’ve done here.
• Read more: The best flash triggers
You don’t necessarily need an expensive flash for this, almost any Speedlight will do. Getting the flash off-camera is essential, so you’ll need a wireless trigger and receiver to fire it, but these can also be picked up very cheaply.
Twilight can be the best time to head out, as skies are dark and moody, the remaining daylight becomes a cool blue in colour, and scenes take on an atmosphere that feels entirely different to daylight. The technique for this might seem complicated, but when it boils down to it there are two key things to grasp. First, we use an exposure that underexposes the daylight, so that – without flash – the scene comes out very dark.
Then, with our exposure locked in, we simply fire our flash around the scene to light the parts that we want to showcase. This way, everything else comes out dark and moody, while the flash-lit parts can look spectacular. To make the project easier, we can pop our flash in different places over several frames, then combine the best parts later in Photoshop.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
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