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Metering for indoor ambient+flash
I've seen many indoor shots by NvN where he keeps the ambient lighting (incandescent, candles etc. and of course window lighting) and adds just enough flash to balance the darkest areas without making it look like flash. Beautiful!
But where should I meter the ambient light from and in which mode?
Naturally light from say a table-lamp varies enormously from its immediate surroundings and elsewhere in the room. I've tried spot metering along with both off-camera and on-camera (reflected by the ceiling/walls) Speedlite in manual and TTL modes but it still seems a little random what my result will become.
Comments
So you meter (evaluative) for the whole scene (with the camera's light meter?), then adjust the exposure -2 stops below and add flash?
That's pretty cool, and something I like if I want the subject to "glow" and "stand out" (looks great outdoors with a sunset or the sky), but for indoor shots like I described above I just want the whole scene to look natural, the way you'd see it with your eyes.
http://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/3-dragging-the-shutter/
http://neilvn.com/tangents/metering-for-ttl-flash-ambient-light/
The ambient part of the shot either has the lamps overexposed or the rest of the scene is severely underexposed.
So in those kinds of situations should I just spot-meter the brightest parts (i.e. a table lamp in the room), then fill-in with the flash, spot-meter for what I can consider somewhere in between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene and use fill-in flash for the rest or is there a better way?
Here comes the power of PP. The digital world and Adobe products have really taken us a step further than the old film days. Film was much more forgiving. How about a balance between the lamps and background? The highlight and shadow recovery tools on LR and ACR are outstanding. Did wonders for me when I did some real estate gigs one summer. Needed to rely on OCF a lot less. I would focus more on the background exposure because of noise and less on the lamps and then just use highlight recovery.
My B&W mentor was Ansel Adams. I read all his books, purchased built a 4 by 5 field camera kit by Bender and and dabbled in the Zone System. Ansel must have been the most meticulous photographer on the planet. He spent a great deal of time keeping records of exposures and negative development for film types and the paper he was going to print on. This was to produce the perfect negative that had the perfect balance between highlights and shadows while maintaining detail in said areas. Despite all that I think he spent more time in the dark room, dodging and burning the prints than he did in the field. We have been PP long before the digital age to get the results we need or want.
The key I found out, is to NOT light the whole scene with the flash but use it just to (slightly) fill in the parts which the candles are unable to light up themselves.
I had the camera set to manual mode, the flash mounted in the camera hotshoe (but titled towards the wall for bouncing) in TTL mode. With a wide open aperture (f/2-8 or 4 as I recall it) I still had to raise the ISO in order to let in enough ambient (candle) light. A full-frame sensor would probably give me some improvement here over my crop-sensored 50D, but still not too bad as I didn't go above 400 or something like that.
If I recall correctly I used spot or center-weighted metering, aiming at the brightest parts of the candles, but I still had to take several test shots and readjust. I assume this all comes with lots of practice.