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Cheat Sheet Education

Why Flash Duration Is the Photographer’s Secret Weapon!

Chris Gampat
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09/26/2020
3 Mins read
Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Roundflash dish review images with Asta preset (1 of 1)ISO 4001-125 sec at f - 2.8

Things changed so much for me when I learned about flash duration!

If there’s one thing that I adore about flash photography, it’s flash duration. This is a secret weapon so many new photographers don’t know about. But once you understand it and tame it, you’ll see how much better your photos will be. It’s is the subtle difference between that extra pop and a flat image! The 3D look that it can deliver is surreal. You’ll be able to see and experience it even when not looking at 100%.

How Flash Duration Works

To understand how flash duration works, you need to know how exposures work when shooting with a flash. So here’s the breakdown:

  • The shutter speed controls the ambient light in the scene. It becomes your secondary light.
  • The aperture is tied to your flash output. If your flash is fixed at 1/4 power, then your aperture will let more or less light in accordingly.
  • The ISO controls overall sensitivity.

Now that you’ve got that, you can understand how the process works. It basically acts as a second shutter speed. Your camera has a shutter speed, but your flash also releases bursts of light in fractions of a second. The faster it is, the greater it is at stopping motion. But it can also act to kill ambient lighting in the scene. It works very similarly to how shutter speed works.

“In situations where flash is added into the scene, the shutter speed controls movement capture and ambient light while the flash duration stops the fast moving subject. Theoretically, it can allow a photographer to handhold a camera and shoot for an entire two seconds or so because the flash will stop the fast moving motion. In fact, we were able to create the opening image in this article by shooting at longer than two seconds–but the fast flash duration helped quite a bit.”

A quote from A Quick Introduction to High Speed Flash Photography

Best Uses

To a certain extent, a very fast flash duration can also give the same effects as less ambient light. This works best at the camera’s max sync speed with your flash. Model: Asta Peredes.

Here, the above is an example of a fast flash duration. The sun was still up, but it killed the ambient lighting in the scene. So we got this awesome photo. The extra pop that you’re seeing is because of the silver and white interior on the light modifier. If you combine that with a fast duration and a sharp lens, you get results like this. We nailed it here. And you can’t really get that with constant lighting unless you crank up the ISO and do some post-production.

We shot one photo with TriggerTrap’s sound activated flash sync and one without it. The first photo gave us a fast flash duration and the really cool effect that we see there. The second photo is obviously with a slower flash duration. The way it worked is by listening to the ambient noise and making the flash go off when it heard something. This is great for breaking glass or throwing a coin in the water. The Triggertrap set off the camera, which set off the flash. And the short duration gave us the effect above.

These creative effects can only be done with short durations. Unfortunately, constant lighting can’t do this.

Flash Duration Is Not High Speed Sync

Just to reiterate, flash duration and high speed sync are different things. With fast flash duration, you’re shooting at your camera’s maximum shutter speed. With high speed sync, you’re going over it.

ambient lighting constant lighting flash flash duration high speed sync images motion photographer
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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