light experiments
When I acquired a flash to go with my Leica M, in October 2024, I had two motives for doing so. First, I wanted to see whether flash could be used to enhance my images during grey days, where the light is resolutely flat. As a light chaser myself, I often found it hard to get inspired during my ‘f5.6’ days, as I call them, which happens often in Great Britain. Secondly, I wanted to make my camera more versatile at night, capable of shooting at longer depths of field, to simplify manual focusing; and I wanted to experiment with low speeds to get interesting images.
What I learned: Flash is a fragile and difficult thing to manipulate, and works best when your focus is on one subject, not multiple layers within an image. With that context in mind, my experiments led me to some interesting photography and effects, which I wanted to share here.
In broad daylight, my photographs took on a hyper-realist twist, giving a whitish yellow look to random subjects in the street, making them stand out in all their reality against a darker, more subdued background. At night, flash takes over any ambient light around, creating a unique atmosphere far from my habitual night pictures. But it allowed me to play with light trails at low speed, giving my subjects surrealist looks, frozen in time, while the surrounding light trailed down around them.
This series presented here is the result from these early experimentations with my Leica M 240, containing photographs that are paradoxically either hyper-realist or surrealist under the whitish, unforgiving flash light - a real departure from my usual photography.
