Photography with flash – something that i never loved

First of all this small confession – I never loved to use flash for my photography. No matter what kind of the flash it would be – builtin or external Speedlight, nothing was in my wishlist to use it. Don’t get me wrong, I have two Canon Speedlight flashes and sometimes used them with a remote control for some projects and events I was involved to photograph, but I can’t say that I loved this especially for street photography I always found flash as an inappropriate and superfluous add-on to the camera.

Of course, there is an exception to all rules for my perception of this type of photograph – Bruce Gilden always was “the one and only” for me. When I saw another try of different photographers to go close to him – I always said – why we need two Bruces. Well maybe I’m wrong and there is also Boris de FLASH and the FULL FRONTAL FLASH collective, even I don’t like most of their scary people portraits, but some of them deserve attention.

Anyway – I wanted to push myself to something less comfortable for me and now when I have this little pocket monster Ricoh GRii with me every day – it’s very easy to nail this technique and but to stay compact and minimalistic, but from another side to get not bad results even with the built-in flash. I already used it for a wedding ceremony, for many live performance music events in Tel-Aviv and of course for hunting during my night street patrols.

A few images in this series were taken in Jerusalem – always a welcoming place for me and my cameras. The light train is a great shiny and moving, not too fast object, packed with people. Also some moments from the Mahane Yehuda market – this young haredi guy drove his bicycle and held a cigarette in his mouth like some old skipper 🙂 Another bigger series was taken during Christmas days in the old Jaffa close to the Clock Tower, where the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality installed a fir tree at a height of 15 meters. I decided to photograph a series here dedicated to locals and tourists coming to take selfies and just to see this shining like a diamond huge Christmas tree.

I will continue with more images from my experiments with Ricoh camera flash and will write about the camera settings I use for these works. Stay tuned and write to me if you love this mess of movement and light and also if you don’t like this. Each of your opinion about flash photography is welcome.