spacer spacer
spacer

Tangents

02 – flash + ambient light


flash photography techniques
natural looking flash ~ flash & ambient light ~ dragging the shutter

Here I want to illustrate a particular point for those who disdain flash and prefer ambient light only – even if flash would’ve helped.

With a bit of thought, and understanding of some essential techniques, using flash need not look unnatural, nor spoil the ambient light.

By metering for the ambient light .. ie. making sure my ambient exposure is correct, I could use flash to lift the shadow areas and make it a better image than it would’ve been without flash.

Have a look at the following photo :

  I bounced flash off the church wall. The church was large, and the ceiling high .. but by shooting in a vertical position, I could bounce my flash straight towards the church interior wall to my left.

This spilled enough light onto the couple to improve the image, and make my post-production time much less. 

(Starting with an image that is very close to the ideal exposure and WB will really speed up your workflow)

The settings were:
Canon 1Dmk2N
Canon 70-200mm f2.8 IS
1/125th @ f2.8 @ 1000 iso
manual; eval metering
TTL flash: 0 exp comp

I purposely did NOT use an omnibounce / Stofen attachment, since I didn’t want flash to spill forward for the series of images I took here. I did NOT set my flash to 45` since this would not have been a correct angle to bounce at.

As the parents walked down the aisle, I had time to make a comparison shot without flash.
(I did this specifically for presentation here).

So here are two shots in succession. The one with flash, and the one purely ambient light. The shot with flash had the WB slightly adjusted, the other is directly out of camera. Exposure settings remained the same, and I didn’t touch up exposure in raw either.

Note that the flash shot has NO flash shadow. It looks natural, and a hell of a lot better than the ambient-only shot. By using flash, *I* controlled the light, and didn’t merely shrug my shoulders and complain that the ambient light wasn’t ideal.

 

To improve exposure for the ambient-only shot, I could’ve set a slower shutter speed, and risked blur as they move and from camera shake. Or I could’ve bumped up my iso to get the higher shutter speed, but then have to deal with increased grain. Also, the ambient light isn’t even. With flash I had much more control over how the final image looks.

And with this I am also daring the ambient-only purists to tell me that the image with flash doesn’t look a lot better than the ambient shot.

How to better match available light and flash …

Neil van Niekerk

If you need more direct help or instruction on flash photography, I do present workshops and seminars, and I also offer individual tutoring sessions.

If you feel that you have benefited from these webpages, then ordering equipment and other goodies through the sponsors and affiliates, would be a welcome way of helping towards the cost of hosting these webpages. Thanks!

       Comments (7)

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Rights Reserved © 2006-09 | Client Login