Fill and Balance

Justin Hsu plays a piano outside of the Fine Arts Building at the University of Missouri on April 8, 2015. The galaxy painted piano was placed outside of the music department's section of the building in honor of Johan Sebastian Bach's 330th birthday. "It's great," Hsu said, "I'm a biochemistry major, but I like to play [piano] for fun."

            I have had some experience with using balance and fill flash. I have used this technique with the portraits but never in a journalistic sense. Usually I will either attach the flash or my camera to the tripod and then handhold the other. With this assignment, I handheld both. It gave me freedom to move around the seen much more easily. The downside to shooting this was that sometimes I wasn’t exactly sure where the flash was pointing.

            For the first take, I shot on the shuttle to my apartment. I had limited success with this because the area I was shooting in was too small, and the angles created by the shape of the interior of the shuttle cast shadows in different directions. If was going to do this assignment again I would try to get a wireless transmitter set. This would allow me to place the flash on the dash and improve the angle.

            The second take started with me photographing a girl walking and carrying an umbrella. I tried to get the light into the umbrella so it would be both direct and bounce flash. The issue that I had was that she was walking much faster than I was able to walk backwards and shoot. So the distance kept changing with each shot. I wasn’t happy with what I got with this shoot, so I waited until the weather began to clear. I found a guy playing a piano outside of the music department. The piano was under a tent and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky so it was a very large lighting ratio. I had more success with this shoot because he wasn’t moving much and I was able to maintain the distance.

            I plan on working with this technique in the future. I need to get better with being able to move and still maintain the same distance. This will allow me to focus more on what I am shooting than trying to get the power right on my flash. I know that I can shoot ETTL and this will take a lot of the guesswork out of it, but for these I assignments I only shoot in manual mode.