photography
[fuh-tog-ruh-fee]
noun

1. the process or art of producing images of objects on sensitised surfaces by the chemical action of light or of other forms of radiant energy, as x-rays, gamma rays, or cosmic rays.

Photography is at its crux is the manipulation of light. Before understanding photography you must understand light; its intensity, how it reacts when it meets different surfaces and how you can control that interaction.

When we talk about strobist photography we are generally talking about the use of off camera flash. When starting out in photography for me it felt like quite a passive experience of documentation. It wasn’t until I started making use of off-camera flash that for the first time I felt I wasn’t just documenting a moment but rather creating an entirely new one that was not possible without the use of external light sources.

In this post I’m going to outline some of the equipment I used that first helped me explore this new way to shoot and also the equipment I am using now in the hope that it piques someones interest in experimenting with off-camera flash as a new way to shoot.

I’ll not dive too much into how as that’s very well documented over on David Hobby’s blog, Strobist.com. If you are interested in learning more about it I’d highly recommend starting here. 

What do I need?

So there are endless possibilities when it comes to your equipment list for shooting with off-camera flash. A good starting point will be with;

• Flash
• Remote trigger & receiver
• Light stand
• Lighting modifier i.e. an umbrella

Phot-R 3m Adjustable 3-Section Light Stand

£20.83

Flash Choice

Buying your first flash can be daunting, there are *a lot* of options out there. Factors that will play a part in your choice are going to be;

• Budget
  • This is likely the main stumbling block
• Eco-system
• TTL capability
• HSS 
• Power output

These days there are a lot of Chinese brand flashes which are close to carbon copies of more reputable brands. In recent years they have come on leaps and bounds being almost indistinguishable from the real thing. If you’re on a budget this is definitely the place to start. You’ll want to future proof your purchases as much as possible, this is something I learned the hard way but at the time it made sense, small investments in equipment allowed me to start experimenting with off camera flash but has also left me with redundant equipment that I no longer use.

Can philosophy be a science? What does philosophy operate with? It operates with categories, which can be as wide and as interchangeable as one can only imagine. Ordinary science operates with definitions, which are quite limited in their field of research. Ordinary science uses terms and laws of that very science to continue the research, uniting with the others in very rare cases. We also can not call philosophy a supra-science, for it also uses hypothesis and arguments to state the opinion. But there is the obvious thing: there are now Philosophy is considered a science but it is difficult to say, when one has to compare with an ordinary science, for example biology, or chemistry.

This is a question that turns into a burning problem among the scientists and linguists all over the world. Can philosophy be a science?