Speedlight vs Monolight on Location: Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

Battery powered flashes are great for shooting portraits on location. There’s plenty to choose from and they vary between small speedlights and bigger, more powerful monolights. In theory more power means more light and that’s usually a good thing for location portraits but can a speedlight be used to light location portraits like a monolight? That’s the question Gavin Hoey puts to the test in this video.

Gavin sets each flash the challenge of being used as a simple fill flash, creating dramatic skies by “over powering” the ambient light and finally getting some beautiful shallow depth of field portraits using HSS (high speed sync) flash. The results might surprise you!

Interested in learning more about portrait photography and some lighting techniques to try during your next shoot? Check out these guides on 42 West:

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