Zoom Your Speedlight | 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.

Dedicated Speedlights have a handy feature called auto-zoom. The idea is simple. The Speedlight will automatically adjust the spread of flash to match the field of view of the lens you’re using. In this video, photographer Gavin Hoey hijacks this handy feature and gets creative with the zoom function.

Switching to off-camera flash and placing the Speedlight in a dramatic side lighting position, Gavin shows how changing the zoom settings of a Speedlight can create wide or narrow beams of light. He demonstrates how to adjust the zoom settings without touching the flash and how exposure can shift significantly at different zoom settings.

After putting the knowledge to practical use on a shoot, Gavin takes you into Photoshop to add a few finishing touches.

Want to learn more about speedlights and other lighting setups? Check out these guides on 42 West:

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