Flashes Of Inspiration - 29/12/2009

I don't see my task as faithfully snapping what was there. The human eye (or more accurately brain, the eye being very crude) scans a scene, and corrects for light and shadow to get an overall picture. If, as a photographer, you want to catch the sense of what the observer sees, you are going to have to tamper with the light. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use fill in flash - exposing for lighter parts of the scene and then using a flash to lighten the darker parts and / or the subject.

In this shot the boat has been lit by two small macro flashes:

In this second shot, the on camera flash has been used as fill in to light the reeds: