Portable Flash Units for Your Camera

Portable Flash Units for Your Camera
I’m Scott Vallance on behalf of Expert Village.com. Today we are going to be doing a clip on portable flash units. Most people think of flash units as being for night time use only. Actually we use flash units a lot during the daytime just for a little bit of fill in to fill in the shadows under peoples eyes and to possibly darken their background. There are several different types of flash units. Starting from the smallest would be the one that comes with your camera. The exposure on that normally will not take you beyond about 8 feet and they go up in size. This is still a fairly small unit. This flash will probably take you from 12 to 15 feet. This is medium size. They come in several different types. This particular one actually has its own feature for different length of lens, wide angle, normal and telephoto. It also has several vertical positions where you can bounce light off the ceiling inside. Light won’t be quite so harsh in case someone is standing in front of a mirrored glass or something that is a better way for this so you don’t get flashback to your camera. Then we have the monster. These are potato masher type of flash units. They are incredibly powerful. They are mostly used for commercial uses. Wedding photographers use these a lot because they can actually go out to about 25 feet. They are real powerful. All of the flash units connect to your camera several different ways. On some of these will sit better on this one. They have a small connector on the bottom of the flash unit that actually fits into a little slide on top of your camera and will automatically hook up to your camera so when you click the shutter the flash will automatically go off. The bigger ones actually have cords that have to go to those. You have to set the ASA or ISO on the flash unit itself. This part hooks to your camera. This part hooks to the flash. Each one will be slightly different but they are all basically the same thing and have to have some way to synchronize with the shutter. Once again, I am Scott Valance. If you would like to see some of my commercial images, you can check out my website at vipphotographic.com. Thank you very much.