Flashing at Night. Bonus: 30-30 rule

Spc. Sarah M. Wiita, 490th Civil Affairs Bn., plots her points in the dark during the night land navigation portion of the 350th Civil Affairs Command best warrior competition at Camp Bullis, Texas on March 25, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

Yesterday I said, "Flash is good. I promise." To which a co-worker of mine said, "It's not good for night land navigation." To which I say poppycock!

   Okay, I really do get his point. The problem with flash at night is that it can certainly temporarily blind you. But without it, getting an image of a moving object at night is hard. It's more luck and than anything else. Without flash you're hoping your subject won't move too much. If your subject moves too much your subject will be blurry and seem out of focus. You're also hoping you can stand still long enough without moving so that you don't cause unnecessary blur to your image.

The night time, is the right time, to use flash. 

   In the above photo we have a few things going on. First off, this soldier is mapping her route on a map with a pencil and a protractor. She is able to see thanks to her headlamp, because it's dark.

   I also want you to notice the orange light on her back/head, that is from a dim street lamp. The reason it's bright like that is because this was a fairly long exposure, (1.3 seconds according to my metadata) that means I capture 1.3 seconds of her moving and light bouncing off her. We talked a little about long exposures and it's effects on light during a post about leading lines. You can consider this a bit of continuation of that topic.

   In case you don't want to go back and read up, what's happening here is that I'm opening my shutter for 1.3 seconds, collecting light, it's not a lot because it's dark, and you can tell because most of my image is rather dark. I used rear shutter, which means at the last fraction of a second my flash went off and "froze" the action.

   You'll notice her head lamp is a little blurry and the general feeling is that we capture motion. You can tell she's doing something, even if you're not sure exactly what it is.

Also note that I didn't use my flash at full power.

   My intent was to add just enough to highlight my subject and not to overpower the other lights. I used an external flash unit, but even your built in pop-up flash probably has a setting which lets you either have it super bright, which I would use during day light with the sun in front of me, or less bright which I would use at night. Because I turned down the umph of the flash and because this soldier was using a bright head lamp anyway, and she was wearing a hat, I didn't blind her.

How did I know how much light to use? Well it's all about experimentation. You need to go out and play with your flash at various power levels at various times of day. The more you practice the more you'll understand when you need a lot of light and when you need just a touch.

"Felix, you could have used a Tripod!"

I could have and that would have eliminated any movement on my part from making the image blurry. But I had the shutter open for 1.3 seconds. The exposure time would have been longer if I didn't use flash. You can see how much she moved in the image. Unless you're controlling the action and telling your subject not to move, after 1.3 seconds you will get a blurry image.  

So how about the composition?

   I included the points of interest so you could think about it yourself, did I use any of the rules we've been talking about? You're welcome to leave a comment or two about what you think.

So why did I include three pictures if I wasn't going to talk about each one of them? Simple.

I want to talk about shooting in a sequence. 

   Now, if your familiar with video you probably just said, "Wait, sequence shooting is for video not photo."

   Yes, this is a video term, but I think it works for photographers as well.

   Sometimes we see something and it doesn't quite turn out how we thought it would. The key isn't to just walk away and see, "ugh, I can't take a good photo," the key is to move and take another photo until you get it right.

In video there is a rule called the 30-30 rule. 

   Which means you move around your subject at least 30 degrees from where you started and you also increase or decrease your subject size by 30 percent.

   This isn't the best example of a 30-30 sequence, especially not for video [in fact I broke a video rule but I won't bore you with more video rules.] However, you'll notice I took a photo, moved my body and took another photo. Same subject, same action, different point of view.

   Next time you go out shooting, remember 30-30. Keep the same subject and move around your subject, make your subject a bigger or smaller portion of your frame and take another photo. Take five or six more. Go crazy. But change it up every time. Doing things like that will help you improve your eye.