I am currently trying more and more to improve and learn flash photography. I love natural lighting work, and would never try and annoy my clients with flashes going off at a wedding or event

With portraiture work and bridal shots I find flash lighting can certainly aid in creating great images.

Here is a quick image showing with and without additional lighting.

As you can see the model certainly stands out and the image looks much better with additional lighting. It is as you can imagine not just a simple task of turn on your flash and away you go. Some thought and testing has to be done.

From the images you can see in both that the background is how I wanted it.

Using a speed light in these images I didn’t use a light meter. I took an image without the light to get the back ground exposure correct and then I add the light.

Starting with the speed light on around half power and then I can turn the power up or down according to the exposure, or move the light source towards or further away from the model.

As always im learning while I do this, one thing I learnt from this shoot while lighting was to try and not to light the back ground so much. As you can see in the image above with the lighting, I love how the model stands out, but I would like her to stand out from the background more. From analyzing the images back at home on a large screen I think next time I will try and get the light too fall off the model better and not illuminate the background so much.

Here are a few images of behind the gear, and from the serious shots before you can see how we have fun and laugh taking pictures.

All the images were lit with a single Nikon sb900 speed light in a ezylight soft box by lastolite.