Flash Testing Experiments

The other day before I was able to shoot I thought I would try and practice with my compact digital flash on my camera as I want to create a cinematic atmosphere within my photographs to fit in with the Film Noir style, I will be shooting in colour and editing in post production as I feel shooting in this way works better for me and the overall finish of the photos before and after editing are higher in quality.

The first shot of this image was highly over exposed, this was because I had the camera on the wrong settings. I altered the camera to shutter priority and adjusted the flash thus. this image was taken in complete darkness as you can see from the window it is dark outside and I had no lights on in the hallway, this image is still slightly over exposed but in comparison to others it works well.

This image like above is a shot of the bedroom I will hopefully be shooting in for my film (with some tweaking of furniture) I took this image again in darkness with no lights on to receive the desired effect, again it took some shooting to get the right image to be light appropriately, however this is not the style lighting I am hoping to be using for the final shoot.

After much fiddling with the equipment I found a way to use my wireless sync equipment for my camera and flash and was able to experiment with the placement of the flash strategically placed around the room, for this image I placed the flash under the blanket facing up towards the pillows as you can see from the directional lighting, despite the lighting being very much at the background of the image I still think this image works well as the outer edge of the image is darker than the back of the room giving a slightly more atmospheric appearance to the image, if I had a subject in the image where the 'glow' of the light is I feel this would work as a strong image.

In my screenplay the description of the 'apartment' I'm shooting in is covered with dark shadows up the walls making the rooms dark in contrast, this is something I needed to experiment with before the night of my shoot with my actors so that I don't waste time and I know exactly what I'm doing to create my images how I see them when I think about how I see them looking like when its complete. I like this image as I feel the flash works well to create harsh shadows thrown up the walls which is what I want for my images, despite a lot of darkness being in the centre of the image (on the bed) I still think this is a successful image giving a lot of atmosphere to the room and is something I am pleased with the outcome.

This image is the same as the coloured one above however for this image I altered it to be in black and white and added a sepia filter to make the image look slightly older with a rustic feel to it. I feel this works quite well with the theme of work I want to create being mostly based in the 1940s where colour film was only just being experimented with. With the rest of my images I will experiment with the same if not other similar techniques to see which works better and is more appealing to the eye.
Doing this helped me to work out what style of lighting I would like to experiment with for my work for this reason I found it very useful.