From the course: Photography Foundations: Flash

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Anatomy of a flash

Anatomy of a flash

From the course: Photography Foundations: Flash

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Anatomy of a flash

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- In the lighting world, we tend to divide lighting instruments into two main categories, continuous lights and strobes, which we also call flashes. Continuous lights are just like the lights you're used to using in your everyday life. You turn them on and they stay on until you turn them off. Technically, a flash is also a continuous light. It's just one that's not left turned on for very long. All flashes have a flash head. On this flash that's this thing right here. It's the mechanism that actually emits light. On more expensive studio strobes, the flash head might be a completely separate unit from the power and control mechanism. The bulb in a flash head is a tubular shape, rather like a fluorescent light bulb and like a fluorescent light bulb, it's filled with a gas that emits light when an electrical charge is passed through it. The bulb's brightness can not be varied. Now, this is a very important thing to remember. Though you can adjust the output of the flash, that output…

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