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2 Getting Started

Poulnabrone Dolmen. A megalithic portal tomb, some 5,000 years old, in County Clare, Ireland. The photo was taken a few hours before a solstice dawn, but the orange glow of the sky is actually caused by the sodium streetlights of a distant town, and not by the rising sun. During the three-minute exposure I walked around to the other side of the dolmen and manually fired off a Canon 580EX flash unit three times at full power. This created the bluish glow and backlit the ancient stones. EOS 5D Mark II, 3 minutes at f/4, ISO 200, 40mm.

This is an example of manual flash triggering.

At its most basic level, flash photography just ...

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