Parker, CO Photographer – To flash or not to flash?

This is a follow-up post to my “To reflect or not to reflect” post that I did last week.  Last week, I chatted about shooting during the middle of the day, 12:30 PM, in harsh lighting conditions.  We talked about using a reflector, which is probably one of the best and LEAST-EXPENSIVE investments you can make in your photography business.  Now, lets move onto OFF-CAMERA LIGHTING.  This will be a little more of an investment than a reflector, but the results can be pretty spectacular.  In the images below, I used an Alien Bee 800, a Vagabond Portable Power Unit (the old-school one that is being discontinued) and an umbrella (not this exact one, but similar).

Whenever I am shooting with my off-camera flash set up, I kind of get a feel for where my settings should be by taking a few images of the sky.  I want to obtain that really dark blue sky that will set the background for my image.  I took a series of three pictures, in manual, and here is what I came up with:

Now, I know I wanted to be at 1/200th, because I wanted to cut out a lot of my ambient light, since it was SO bright outside.  When using your flash, remember these two things:  Aperture controls your flash and shutter controls your ambient.  So, once I had a general idea of where I liked my settings, I set up my flash unit, as pictured below:

I am actually bouncing my flash BACK INTO my umbrella and then onto the subject.  Next, I had Ryland stand in that general area that is circled above and these are my results:

 

 

As you can see, the flash eliminates a lot of harsh shadows that are caused by the sun and also lets a lot more light into your subjects eyes.  If I were to add or do anything different to this shoot, I would have added a reflector, camera-left, and reflected a little more light onto the subject.  But, with no one around to hold my reflector except for a few 3 year olds playing on the swings, I made do with what I had.  :-)  Would love to hear any feedback below!