FFF - Full Frontal Flash

I don't know exactly who was the founder of this trend in street photography - Bruce Gilden or Martin Parr - but today the external flash is widely used in various documentary and reportage photography genres.

The full name of the direction is Full Frontal Flash (FFF), which literally translates as a frontal flash with a maximum impulse intensity.

Flash is generally preferred by American photographers, while the European school of photography rejects flash as much as possible. Although now everything is mixed...

An impulsed light source is used in reportage photography to illuminate the foreground, a person's figure or his face both at night and on a bright sunny day to get rid of deep shadows.

But if you understand the physics of the light produced by a flash, you can get an interesting creative trick out of it.

Street photographers tend to use flash too hard and too close.

I tried to use this tool to highlight the foreground as discreetly and loyally as possible.

I got so deep into the study of this direction that even at night I slept badly. I dreamed of myself taking pictures with a flash.

At first, I was not very good at it. I set the intensity mode to almost minimum and put on the diffuser.

But then I remembered the meaning of the name of the direction and turned on all the settings to the maximum without any diffusers.

The most important thing is to overcome the psychological barrier when shooting people with flash.

After all, here you cannot hide from a passer-by the fact that he was just captured, and even suddenly and with a flash.

Undoubtedly, this experience was simply the most useful for me as a reporter.

Of course, I'm not going to constantly shoot in this genre.

But this is just a must-know for any street documentary reporting.

But I love to study everything thoroughly and therefore I did not stop only at street photography.

I began to study further the properties of flash light.

PS: To work in such conditions, I had to re-study the external flash. Well, like anew... from scratch. I never used it at all and was an adversary, besides. But my creative scope has become even wider.