Improving your photography comes down to one thing, which is using light to your advantage. Photography is all about light—your camera isn’t any good without it! Having good light on your subject makes it stand out from a darker background and creates more flattering portraits. But sometimes natural light isn’t available. When I am photographing inside or at night, to add extra brightness to my subject, I use the Neewer TT560 Flash Speedlite for canon, so the photo is exposed correctly.
The pop-up flash fitted to most cameras gives harsh lighting results because it blasts the front of a person’s face, which tends to flatten the features. The Neewer TT560 Speedlite is an external flash that sits on any camera’s hot shoe mount and bounces light from a chosen direction to illuminate a scene with more style. Compared to other flash units on the market, it does a similar job at a fraction of the price.
Pros
It’s simple to use
This flash is very affordable
The head tilts and swivels for bouncing the flash
You can use it on any camera that has a hot shoe mount
The flash includes a built-in diffuser and reflecting panel
Cons:
The plastic casing feels fragile.
It drains the power from standard batteries fairly quickly
It doesn’t have Through The Lens (TTL) metering capability
There isn’t an indicator light showing the level of battery charge remaining
It becomes hot and will shut down if too many strong flashes are used in a row
Things to consider before buying the Neewer TT560 Flash Speedlite
Using extra lighting can seem overwhelming at first, but this flash keeps it accessible. Beginner photographers and more experienced ones who need a simple, additional source of external light will appreciate having this tt560 flash on their camera or positioned off-camera through its wireless set-up.
Using the Neewer TT560 Speedlite flash improves your photography because you can tilt and swivel the head of the unit to bounce light off walls or ceilings to gently illuminate your subject, rather than using direct light from the flash.
If you want to experiment with variable lighting, this is a fantastic choice for someone who wants to learn about manual lighting options. Because it doesn’t have Through The Lens (TTL) metering, you have to do a few test shots to get the exposure right, but discovering how light works is all part of the learning process. Professional photographers with bigger budgets would look for something more robust and automated. Still, anyone needing a cheap flash to illuminate a dark subject or reduce shadows will appreciate this unit’s value.
TTL metering would have been a nice inclusion on this flash, but that would increase the price by a considerable amount. A manual flash forces you to become familiar with the basic concepts of speedlite and off-camera flash options. You can spend more money on lighting equipment that takes the guesswork out of your photography when you’ve gained that knowledge.
How to Use Neewer TT560 Speedlite
The main thing I like about this flash is that it’s so easy to use. There are only a few settings to choose from. There is a power button on the back of the camera to switch it on or off, a button to increase the power output, and another one to decrease the amount of light sent from the flash. A test button fires the flash even when it’s not connected to the camera, so you can see how the subject will be illuminated from any position. Another button changes between Manual and Slave modes. LEDs show the power setting at a glance. That’s it! You can’t get much easier than that.
Convenient Manual Mode
Because this flash doesn’t have the TTL option, you have to adjust your flash exposures manually. This tt560 manual mode is great. You take a shot to test the level of intensity from the flash; then you move the +/- buttons to increase/decrease the power output level from the flash unit.
With no communication between the camera and the flash, when attached to the camera, the neewer TT560 will fire the flash when the shutter is pressed. Unless you are using an off-camera light meter, you will be ‘chimping’ it, or in other words, you’ll make a test shot, check the result on the camera’s playback screen, make an adjustment to the power output, and fire again.
Simple Slave Mode
Slave mode is when the Speedlight detects a flash of light from another source, triggering that flash unit to fire a burst of light. To use slave mode, you simply switch the flash to S1, pop up your camera’s built-in flash, and when the pop-up flash fires, it triggers the Speedlight to go off simultaneously. The Speedlight is a slave to the master flash, which controls the situation.
For best results, use your camera’s settings to reduce the intensity of the pop-up flash (through the ‘flash exposure compensation’ options in the camera’s menu) and place the Neewer Speedlite to one side of your subject to provide the primary source of light. Most of the illumination will come from the off-camera flash, but the pop-up flash on the camera will give fill-in light to reduce shadows on the other side of your subject.
If you don’t want to use your pop-up flash to trigger the remote Speedlight, attach a transmitter (to your camera) and a receiver (to the flash) instead. When you press the shutter on your camera, the transmitter will activate the receiver on the flash, and you can have one-direction lighting without a fill-flash. Suppose your camera doesn’t have a pop-up flash, and you don’t want to invest in remotes and transmitters. In that case, you can produce this same result with this TT560 Speedlite acting as a Master flash on your camera and having a secondary Neewer Speedlite as the Slave unit providing the primary source of light.
Tip: Always use shutter speeds between 1/60th second and 1/125th second. If you exceed the camera’s flash synchronization speed, your shutter will be too fast for the flash, or the image will show subject movement plus ‘frozen’ areas of the scene illuminated by the flash.
A Hot Shoe Mount
The hot shoe on the top of your camera is the connecting base for a flash unit. Attaching the flash to the hot shoe makes the flash sit higher on the camera’s body than a built-in flash, so you are less likely to get red eyes in photos. The hot shoe mount on the TT560 Flash Speedlite is the area that attaches the flash to the hot shoe. This flash has a metal plate that slides into the hot shoe. Having a metal hot shoe mount is rare amongst budget flashes—most are made of plastic, which bends over time and becomes difficult to attach. When you slip the flash onto the camera, remember to tighten the base until it locks onto the hot shoe. Otherwise, it will slip off when you tilt it backward. This flash has a lightweight plastic body, easily breaking if it falls onto a hard surface.
Temperature range
For a flash to be helpful in your photography, the color output has to be appropriate. Like professional flashes, the Neewer TT560 has a color temperature of 5600K, which is similar to daylight conditions, so your color balance says true. Many cheaper flash units have a different color range to what is suggested by their marketing, which means wasted time fixing colors in post-production editing. The Kelvin rating for the Neewer TT560 flash has proven to give reliable daylight white balance for accurate skin tones.
Settings & inclusions
The settings on the head of this flash are easy to use. M is for Manual, and it’s for on-camera flash. S1 and S2 are Slave settings for off-camera flashes. The blue power light shows what level of power you choose. Adjust these with the plus and minus buttons under the lights to increase or decrease the power output. There are 8 steps of power output. These LEDs will come on as soon as the power switch is activated, but wait until the red light is on before you do a test shot. The red power light shows the flash unit is fully charged. The flash comes with a stand (for off-camera shooting), and there is a tripod mount on this stand for on-location photography where you have unstable surfaces. An instruction manual and a protective drawstring pouch of surprisingly good quality are in the box.
Within the head of the flash unit, you can pull out a built-in diffuser and a built-in bounce card (reflection panel) that extends from the top of the flash. Use the flip-down, wide-angle flash diffuser to provide soft, even illumination. Use the bounce card to direct more forward light. When doing portraits, if you bounce the flash from a white ceiling, the flash does not get caught in the subject’s eyes, but using the reflection panel redirects some of the light and produces catchlights, making an image more appealing.
Tilt and Swivel
One of the main advantages of this flash over others of a similar price is its ability to swivel and tilt. Some budget flashes have a fixed, forward direction only, which is only helpful for direct light. A horizontally swivelling head (up to 270 degrees rotation) means the flash can be on the camera but turned to a nearby wall to provide indirect light onto the subject. This option offers more creative control over your photography. The ability to tilt the head vertically (to 90 degrees) gives you the chance to point it to the ceiling to produce soft and natural light that brightens an overall scene and significantly improves the image.
Specifications
Guide Number: 38 (ISO 100 )
Power: 4 AA size batteries.
Light Quantity Output Control: 1/8 stop increments.
Flash Duration: 1/300 second to 1/20,000 second.
Dimensions: 190mm x 75mm x 55mm (7.5 x 3 x 2.2 inches)
Net Weight: 286g (10.09 ounces)
3.5mm PC Sync Socket (for synchronizing flash and shutter with a cable)
Socket for an external power source.
Disadvantages
Limited flashes per battery life: This flash drains power from AA batteries fairly quickly, so always have spare sets available when you have a big day of shooting. The number of flashes available from this unit seems to be between 150 to 200, depending on the power output chosen for each flash. But since there isn’t an LCD screen offering information such as battery life, you can’t tell how much power is left until it runs out. Recharging the flash between shots doesn’t take too long. At full power, it takes 3 to 4 seconds—at 1/2 power, it’s about 1 second—and at reduced power, it’s almost immediately available for the next shot.
Overheats with strong use: If you need to use full power to illuminate a distant subject, you’ll soon find the flash head overheating. You can’t flash more than twenty times in full (or even half) output level before it will activate its over-temperature protection function, which reduces the recycle time to 10 to 25 seconds between shots. When this happens, it’s best to stop production for at least 10 minutes until the flash unit cools down.
No TTL: Through The Lens, metering is a mode where a flash unit fires a series of infrared bursts, and it works out how much power to deliver when taking a shot. A budget flash such as the Neewer TT560 Speedlight doesn’t have this option, meaning the flash has to be manually set to an appropriate output. This is a disadvantage when the flash is attached to the camera and is being used for flash photography in various locations with variable light conditions. Still, in a studio setting where the lighting is controlled off-camera, manual mode is usually the preference anyway.
Best Alternatives
Apart from the Neewer TT560, a few other entry-level Speedlight flashes are worth considering. From the same manufacturer, and at roughly the same price, is the Neewer NW561 LCD Display Flash Speedlite. This is slightly heavier, but it has a built-in LCD that offers more straightforward control over brightness and other settings. Compared to the TT560, the NW561…
Has flash compensation +/-3 EV steps.
It has a swivel head, but it only goes to 180 degrees instead of the 270 range of the Neewer TT560
Has a quicker charging recycle of 0.1 to 5 seconds (depending on the power output required)
Another good option for photographers who want to start their journey into flash photography is the Godox TT600 Speedlite Flash. As with all the others in this comparison, this one doesn’t have TTL. It is almost as cheap as the TT560, but it does include a built-in radio receiver. The differences between this unit and the Neewer TT560 are…
The TT600 flash provides uniform light distribution, which lights up the subject in a balanced manner, without any fall-off at the corners.
It has very slow recycle times between flashes.
The LCD provides a clear indication of all the settings and information you need for each shot.
Our final choice in basic flash units with a low price tag is the Yongnuo YN560 IV Wireless Flash Speedlite. We’re dealing with a manual flash with no TTL as with the others. Even though this flash has the advantage of an LCD, the buttons and options are very confusing. It’s not an intuitive system; in fact, it requires a thorough reading of the instruction book to work out how to set it up because some functions require pressing multiple buttons simultaneously. However, there are good points about this flash that make it desirable…
This Speedlight flash has a more robust design than the Neewer TT560.
It has a quick 3-second recycle time between most shots.
Its built-in radio synchronization means it can work in slave or master modes.
Conclusion
There are many good reasons why the Neewer TT560 Speedlite is one of the most significant selling flashes. One of these is because being a manual flash, this unit is suitable for various cameras, including brands such as Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Olympus, Pentax, or any other DSLR camera or compact digital camera with a standard hot shoe. Regardless of the brand of DSLR or mirrorless camera, you own now or in the future, you’ll be able to use this flash.
The other reason for its popularity is its astonishingly low price. It’s excellent value for an item of such considerable quality. This flash is an essential item of equipment for beginner photographers who want to explore the creativity associated with external lighting.
The only disadvantage is that without TTL, this generic flash only communicates via the shutter press, so you can’t control the output through the camera’s settings. But this forces photographers to learn the art of manual lighting, which is helpful if you decide to progress to full studio lighting anyway. Buying this flash will help you learn about exposure, light metering, the benefits of fill light, and the effects of varying the lighting angles.
The Neewer TT560 Flash Speedlite is a basic unit aimed at the budget-conscious market, but I don’t think its low price means it’s low on quality. Click here (insert link) to discover the potential of this flash to take your photography to another level.
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