Bluff it as a fashion photographer

4. Be creative
You can use flash in all kinds of exotic ways. But what if you're a lone photographer taking photographs on the street? You have two big problems. Firstly, you're not going to be able to carry massive flash units with you, and secondly, there don't tend to be plug sockets on the street that you can just borrow electricity from.

One cheap but effective technique is to buy a load of camera-mounted flash units off eBay and then string them together to create elaborate flash rigs. You can pick these old flash units up for around the price of a DVD and they're powered by standard AA batteries (use rechargables).

Here you can see we've used a standard camera-mounted flash taped to a camera tripod, fired into a white umbrella. This is an extremely portable unit that can be folded up and carried in a backpack. You could use several of these to create fairly advanced lighting set-ups.