Using a Ring Flash

The hot look right now for fashion photography is to use a ring flash, which is a series of small flashes that form a circle around your lens, and give a very flat look with a fairly hard shadow behind your subject. In the chapter on flash (Chapter 1), I showed an adapter you put on your small off-camera flash to imitate a ring flash look, because ring flashes can be pretty expensive. However, I found one that’s reasonably priced for someone who’s not going to be making their living as a fashion photographer, but sometimes wants that flat, ring flash look. It’s the AlienBees ABR800, and it’s not terribly heavy (as ring flashes go—they are fairly bulky and heavy by nature), but works surprisingly well considering its $399 price tag (you can spend over $1,000 on a ring flash pretty easily). You can check out page 223 for a photo taken with the AlienBees ring flash, so you can see the type of look you can expect from one.