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Photo Tips & Techniques

Flash is a great tool to use to control backgrounds, especially when working with macro subjects. Whether the flash is mounted on the hot shoe of the camera or on a specially manufactured bracket used for close up photography, the distance from the subject to the flash is short. When working with small apertures, which are necessary when doing macro work, the light from a flash falls off quickly. This results in backgrounds rendered in black. This can be quite dramatic if the subject is vividly colored as it seems to "jump" off the page.

Problems begin to arise when the subject has many dark tones, especially if the dark tones make up its perimeter. The result is the subject merging with the background making it hard to differentiate where the subject and background separate. One solution is to use another flash as a rim light aimed at the subject from behind. It creates a halo of light making the subject's outline more obvious. The problem is you need to carry another flash and you'd have to calculate flash distances to arrive at its proper exposure.

A much simpler solution is to adjust the camera's shutter speed to allow more ambient light to reach the film. Just because the camera synchs at 1/250th doesn't mean that all flash images must be shot at that speed. While it's true you can't exceed a camera's flash synch speed unless you have one of the new high end bodies and dedicated flash units, you can use any shutter speed that's slower. The exposure for the close up subject should be determined by the flash and aperture setting while the background can be lightened based on the shutter speed.

In the two images seen here, both were shot with flash. For the first, I used the camera's recommended synch speed of 1/250th which produced a black background. As a result, sections of the wings and most of the antennas merge in tone with the background. For the second shot, I spun my shutter speed dial to 1/30th which allowed the available light inside the butterfly pavilion to be recorded on the film. So the next time you're using flash, experiment with different shutter speeds to see how you can improve every image you create.

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