Fill-in Flash to balance daylight, and the effect on what the viewer sees – Ken Grant

Posted on By Tony

As part of my feedback for Assignment 1, my tutor suggested I take a look at Ken Grant and in particular look at how the images with flash compare to those without the flash.

The images below are taken from Grant’s collection ‘The Birdhouse’. He has not captioned the individual images on his website (Grant, 2013).

In Fig. 1, there is either no flash or very little. As a result, the images is approximately the same degree of lighting across the scene. I find myself looking at each individual in turn. The stare of the boy in the centre does capture my attention, heightened by him being in the centre, but it is not held there.

Fig. 1. Image of boy sourced from Grant’s set The Birdhouse (2013)

In Fig. 2., Grant has clearly used flash. In particular, the light has made the young girl in the centre of the frame much brighter than the rest of the scene. Although I find her stare less captivating than the boy’s in Fig. 1, I do find that my viewing of the image is almost exclusively on the girl and rarely do my eyes roam across the rest of the image.

Fig. 2. Image of young girl sourced from Grant’s set The Birdhouse. (2013)

Learning

Fill in flash can be used, obviously, to fill in shadows. But even if the shadows do not need this, the flash can achieve two other points, both of which serve to hold the viewers attention on wherever the light has fallen.

Point 1 – to produce a small catchlight in the subject’s eyes, which holds the viewers attention on the face of the subject.

Point 2 – to highlight the subject from the rest of the image. If the rest of the image is of other people, this again makes clear who the main subject is and where the viewer should look for longer.

Bibliography

Grant, K. (2013). The Birdhouse – ken-grant.info. [online] ken-grant.info. Available at: http://www.ken-grant.info/the-birdhouse [Accessed 27 Jun. 2019].

Figures

Figure 1. Grant, K. (2013). Image of boy sourced from Grant’s set The Birdhouse. [image] Available at: http://www.ken-grant.info/the-birdhouse [Accessed 27 Jun. 2019].

Figure 2. Grant, K. (2013). Image of young girl sourced from Grant’s set The Birdhouse. [image] Available at: http://www.ken-grant.info/the-birdhouse [Accessed 27 Jun. 2019].