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Why Press Photographer Use Direct Flash

UMNO | Photographers | Canon Rules

© 2009 Wazari Wazir | The Photographers

Why PRESS Photographers use direct flash? Lately there is misunderstanding among my friends of photographers about why PRESS photographers especially doesn’t use “Bounce Flash” doing their coverage of news related matter. Some of them think that shooting with a direct flash considered to be unprofessional, there will be harsh shadows if we use direct flash compared to bounce flash, to some extend they are right about those harsh shadows when using direct flash especially when the distance between the person that we photograph and the background, the wall for an example is close.

The number one reason why PRESS doesn’t use bounce flash is because “time”, we don’t have much time, we were rushing to get the shot especially when covering our leader, Prime Minister for an instance when shaking hand with another President or Prime Minister, we have few seconds to get those perfect handshake shot, if we try to bounce the flash to the wall or to the ceiling, the time that the flash need to fully recharge will take few seconds and by that time we will lost few great shots, maybe the eye contact, the smiles between two leaders and a great facial expression between two leaders, every single frame is important and we can’t repeat that moment. In Photojournalism, we captured the moment, we are not making the moment.

So to be on the safe side we have no other choice but to shoot with direct flash where we will be able make full use of camera burst mode and keep shooting without worrying too much about flash recycle times since it will recycle fast when shooting in direct flash because the power that being use in direct flash is much less than when we bounce the flash to the ceiling. There is a time when we have more time, when we are not rush to get the shot that we will bounce our flash, for an instance when shooting for a press conference or when taking a picture of our leader speaks at the rostrum.

I don’t want to write long article about this matter, I wanted to make it clear that, we know what we are doing, we know when to use which technique for which situation, like I said, the number one reason why we don’t use bounce flash is because we don’t have “The Luxury of Time” and let’s not forget most PRESS photographers does not equipped with extra battery pack to make fast recycle time for our flash, the most important thing to PRESS photographers is to get the picture that will tell a story, we know that bounce flash will create much more “beautiful” picture to the eyes but capturing the story without missing the moment is more important to PRESS photographers.

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