I was teaching the School of Photography 1 students at the University of Nations campus in Kona, Hawaii, how to improve photos by adding a flash to the available light.

I walked outside and immediately found this guy we had seen the day before.

We met him during our devotion time, where he did a monologue on a scripture.

They had the assignment to do an environmental photo of a person and improve it using a flash.

I found him playing basketball. I knew I already had something about him taking a class on learning the scripture by heart and performing it as a monologue. I could see he liked playing basketball, so I asked him to photograph him.

He had to go shortly, so in less than 5 minutes, I took the first two photos. One without flash followed it up with the off-camera flash of the Godox 860IIN, which was on a light stand and triggered by the Godox transmitter.

Go and try this yourself. Just find a place where the subject can use some help with light. Then add your flash off the camera. Start with it at 45º to the left or right of the camera. Then put it 45º above the person’s eyes as a starting point.

While the students would have to find their model and location later, I had each shoot the same setup with their flash and camera.

After a while, I noticed they were not coming up with anything exciting for compositions. I shot this to challenge them to look for something different.