Creative Flash Photography

Workshop 8

Creating a Fire Effect with an Orange Filter

▸ Using an orange filter to set the scene on fire

▸ How to create smoke effects

If you are shooting on location in the evening or at night, your flash won’t have to compete with the sun, but you run the risk of your backgrounds looking dark and uninteresting. In an urban environment you can simply use the bokeh of any background lights for a livelier background, but in a rural area you have to produce your own background lighting. We shot this workshop at a nearby lake where the reeds provided an interesting counterpoint to the subject. We used one flash on a stand to light the reeds and another fired through a white shoot-through umbrella to illuminate the model.

Schematic of our setup ...