With color, white balance goes only so far, yes. Knowing light, light sources, what color it will be in-camera, and being able to alter that (also with a flash), is important. I’m not very experienced with gels yet, so I do most of my color control in-camera with white balance and the remainder with what I’m bouncing my flash off of. Going for a warm look? Cloudy WB with a golden umbrella. Blue? Turn down the heat to 2500K and use silver, or grey brick. Soft, pure, white tones? Easy auto balance with a gentle flash off of a white umbrella or through a white diffuser. See, I’m getting there. Slowly.

    “This way, your good pictures will not be accidents.” I try so hard to have this not happen. Sometimes you can’t help it, the accidents just turn out. Others, I am shaping, carving, molding the photo with careful precision before even thinking about the shutter. Then, if it’s good, I’m replicating it. How did this turn out so good and why? So that when I do try it again, it’s even easier, more machine-like, than before. Good photography doesn’t have to be those perfect moments that only happen rarely – perfection is all around us, we have only to harness our skills to expound upon that perfection through the lens.

    According to Kent, I have broken many rules already. I use multi-exposure in sports action shots and not just art photography or art feature shots, because sports have sequence and can be shown as such. I use motion in portraits, because people move. That is a fact of life, we are life given movement. A little motion at the tips of a grin goes a long way to showing that perfect smile, and not just the canned, metallic taste of normal portraits. Breaking rules is kind of my thing. I love experimenting with my camera and finding out how to differently bend light than I had previously thought possible. I guess you could call that my guilty pleasure.

    “You can make the sun come back.” A quote from illustrious McNally, having an underexposed scene is what he shoots for so that he can have unlimited control of his photos by introducing HIS light. Yeah he gelled it again in this example, I’ve come to expect that, but everything is done with purpose, not just a guess. Purpose in lighting, purpose in exposure, purpose in color (and gel), and it’s THAT level of good that I aspire to be.

    Auto FP high-speed sync is, in fact, a life saver. Shooting in the daylight, getting nice and close to your subject and still being able to fill flash with golden sunlight in the background? Nonsense. It’s amazing, really, the amount of good photography that you can make fantastic just by adding light in an already lit setting. It doesn’t seem logical, the light is already there, but it’s not quite perfect coming from on high as the sun moves past one golden hour and towards another. How do you replicate golden hour photography at midday with “flat” light? More light, surprisingly.