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Lighting / Re: Which Syl Arena Lighting/Flash book would be best to start with?
« on: December 10, 2012, 04:12:41 PM »
The book "Lighting for Digital Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots" is very conversational and to the point. It offers a lot of background on why you might want artificial light. Excellent for beginners
The book "Speedliter's Handbook: Learning to Craft Light with Canon Speedlites" breezes through the beginning stuff faster and digs deeper in the advanced topics
Don't worry about an ST-E3 if you have an 600EX-RT. Syl is a very big believer in off-camera *cable-enabled* TTL. He really looks at doing things cheaply, if not on the cheap. This is a very reasonable approach until you realize how much you will like this. Why sink a lot of money in artificial light until you know what kind of light you are trying to create.
BTW - I don't think that a beginner in off camera flash will get as much from Joe's "Hot Shoe Diaries" book because there are few set-up diagrams. There's plenty of interesting text, but not at much showing you how to set up the scene and where to put your lights and what settings to put them at.
Another book worth mentioning is Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Flash Photography". I like his approach because he is all about manually controlling your flash. No ETTL involved, which is probably the best way to learn this craft. Forget all the automation and tweak things by hand so that you understand why your pictures changes as you adjust the settings.
Cheers
The book "Speedliter's Handbook: Learning to Craft Light with Canon Speedlites" breezes through the beginning stuff faster and digs deeper in the advanced topics
Don't worry about an ST-E3 if you have an 600EX-RT. Syl is a very big believer in off-camera *cable-enabled* TTL. He really looks at doing things cheaply, if not on the cheap. This is a very reasonable approach until you realize how much you will like this. Why sink a lot of money in artificial light until you know what kind of light you are trying to create.
BTW - I don't think that a beginner in off camera flash will get as much from Joe's "Hot Shoe Diaries" book because there are few set-up diagrams. There's plenty of interesting text, but not at much showing you how to set up the scene and where to put your lights and what settings to put them at.
Another book worth mentioning is Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Flash Photography". I like his approach because he is all about manually controlling your flash. No ETTL involved, which is probably the best way to learn this craft. Forget all the automation and tweak things by hand so that you understand why your pictures changes as you adjust the settings.
Cheers