Thought Piece 1

After reading the first bit of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” I have definitely learned more about flash (not that I knew much in the first place). I do believe that this book will be a good reference while I learn to use flash more. I have never really done work with flash besides a couple of projects in high school photography classes where we were just learning how to use flash and not necessarily going in depth with it. In those projects, we used umbrellas and diffusers, so I learned how to set up all these things (not saying I’ll remember how to) and we took portraits with them. But never did anything more than that. This reading showed me how many different things someone can do with flash because of all the different types of flashes we have available to us now. I never play around with my flash and have always just used available lighting, but I think that, once I learn how, using flash could improve some of my work.

            I found the stories of his projects really interesting, and it does give me hope for the future, that I’ll be able to have fun with my photography while still making a profit off of it. I hope to be able to do some cool projects like the author did in his life. I think that being able to photograph a military calendar must have been a really awesome experience in his life, even though he said the requirements were kind of crazy. But I think it would be cool to have some experiences like that in the future.

            Having never really played around with lighting before, there was definitely a lot of areas in the book that didn’t really make sense to me and were quite confusing. While the author was talking about metering and setting his flash to -1 EV but not necessarily having his camera at +1 to make up for it, these kinds of statements set me back a little and didn’t make much sense to me at all. It all certainly got more confusing when he started saying that it wouldn’t always work out that way and you kind of have to play around with it to get it right. I will say, this kind of stressed me out because what if there is a perfect shot right in front of you and you know exactly how you want it to look with your flash, but you have to get it just right and by the time you do, it’s gone? I feel like that is a major fear I would have in using flash and lighting and honestly, this might just be the reason I’ve never messed around with it. I definitely am a victim of letting my fears of failing in my photography stop me from experimenting with different things sometimes. Although, I have been more adventurous with it lately and I think seeing in this book that nobody is perfect in everything they do, not even the professionals, will help me step outside of my comfort zone even more.