Saturday afternoon my shooting buddy Graham and I went with my mother for a portrait shoot at a location near the River Severn in Powys. It was quite cold which focused us on what we wanted to cover. We had some objectives which included specific types of shots in natural light. Once that task was out of the way, our next task was to tastefully add flash to natural light. Most of the shooting we’re doing at the moment has very specific goals of what we want to achieve and this last weekend was a great start! As my mother is elderly we had to adopt an image strategy that would suite her. Before we went out, I got my mother to choose the correct clothes, scarf and a selection of hats to take with us. Also, we hoping to use a reflector more… but it was just too cloudy and around 4pm.

Then is was time to use a single flash bounced into a Kood 24" umbrella which was placed about 10 feet away. My goal here was to get better at mixing ambient light with flash. Using bare flash is too punchy and wanted a much softer look for this image. ISO 400, 1/200 sec, F4, Manual.

I now always check what other options they are and with the same location and same setup, I took this from a different angle.

Then back to natural light and this shot was around 3 stops over compared to what the camera would have chosen. ISO 800, 1/40 sec, F4, Manual.