This beginner’s guide to using strobes will help you decide what to buy and how to use it

Speedlights and strobes can be quite intimidating to new photographers who’ve never had personal experience with them before. Particularly strobes. They’re really not all that difficult to get to grips with. There is a learning curve, for sure, but it’s a fairly short one to get going with the basics.

Photographer Mark Duffy recently gave a tutorial on the basics of strobes in a live stream for UK gear distributor, Transcontinenta. Not wanting to limit the information contained within to just the live stream viewers, Mark’s also shared a copy of the stream to his YouTube channel for everybody else to enjoy, too.

In the tutorial, Mark makes things as simple as possible to demystify strobe lighting for beginners, walking us through the basics of how to get everything talking to each other and how to even expose your shot. After all, you can’t see a flash exposure through the viewfinder as you can with ambient light on today’s mirrorless cameras.

Mark uses several different strobes to explain the techniques, including the Godox MS300, Godox AD200Pro and Godox AD400Pro, which satisfies the budgets and needs of most people making their first steps towards using strobes, whether it be your first time using flash at all, or simply stepping up from speedlights.

Whatever your starting point, Mark’s video will arm you with the knowledge you need to make the right buying choices to satisfy your lighting needs. And I don’t just mean he’ll try to sell you Godox gear. But he’ll give you an idea of what kind of power and features you’ll want to look for when building your lighting kit, no matter what brand you ultimately go for.

Do you use strobes for your photography? What features do you look for?