Inbuilt flash
The light without love
A woman runs down a debris-strewn alleyway barefoot and wearing nothing but a white nightgown. The camera angle is low; the frame skewed. This drama is arrested in the violent light of Daido Moriyama’s flash, which reaches out for the woman like the frenzied grasp of a psychopath.
Inbuilt flash dominates the look and feel of an image.
As the flash lights your subject from the same angle as the one you’re shooting from, harsh shadows are thrown forward and its intensity causes anything in the very foreground, or slightly reflective, to become overexposed.
The use of inbuilt flash dowses Moriyama’s image with an unsettling yet mesmerizing fear. But, if used less skillfully, it can also work against you and create ...
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