In this post I decided to take you through my thought process in lighting the photo.  Because I wanted the knife as close to the camera as possible (while still being in focus), I had to lower the intensity of the flash on the camera.  But that meant I would end up too dark, so I had use another flash to light me.  I wanted to make sure that the flash lit only me and did not add any extra light to the knife, so I put a snoot on my flash.  As we covered before, the snoot directs light forward with a very quick drop-off to darkness from the projected circle of light.

This one’s another subtle one because it’s so obvious, but if, like me a few months ago, you’ve only shot with available light, on camera flash, or bounced your light because you were told to - you probably haven’t thought about how light affects your portraits.  And so you have always taken portraits where they came out good enough if the people were photogenic and not so good if they were average.  Well, the key is creating realistic, but soft shadows.  (Although, in fashion photography and other styles you may eliminate all shadows)  The problem with on camera flash is that you end up with super harsh shadows.  (Also, the behind-the-head ugly shadows that make the person look like they grew an afro) What you want to do is to soften up the shadows and move them to the side.  Just remember this thing you learned as a child - shadows appear where light is blocked.

Here’s a non-obvious problem that photographers come up against all the time - I bought a white background so why doesn’t it look white in my portraits?  The reason that it’s a non-obvious problem is that you have to remember that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way you do.  The internal circuitry of the camera wants to meter for neutral grey.  So the cure is simple as long as you have an extra flash unit - you have to use it to light up the background.  One important thing to remember if you’re using a small flash (speedlite or speedlight), you need to pop a diffuser cap on that lens to spread out the light over the whole background.  In fact, if the background is wide enough you might need two or more strobes.  Another tip is that it may help to put your flash unit into manual mode so the flash itself doesn’t try to make the background neutral grey.