Ok this is the first (and by far the most important) link/piece of advice I can offer for aspiring photographers.

I’ve always hated the look of flash in photos; nuclear white deer in the headlamps subjects in front of an underexposed background. When I started to become serious about photography I did everything I could to make use of available light to take photos including investing in expensive wide aperture lenses and some dicey handheld long exposures. I was totally anti-flash.

I knew that studio photographers used big flash heads all the time but had dismissed this as the preserve of the rich[er than me]. This was until discovering David Hobby’s blog: strobist, which demonstrated what can be accomplished using an inexpensive battery powered flashgun and little bit of brainpower.

This lead me to the following realisation: photography is light. And if you are not doing everything in your power to bend light to your will then you are not realising the full creative potential of a given scene. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a suite of big mains-powered strobes, the key is to control the light by any means possible, whether it’s changing the colour or firing the flash remotely from an oblique angle or simply bouncing/modifying the onboard flash.

MG