Your site is one of if not THE best learning resources for photography I’ve ever come across.

I just wanted to make sure I understood what you explaining here. I understand the “over/underexposure” necessary based on the tonality of the subject within the camera; riding the flash compensation might be confusing me. For example, I’m shooting portraits in a garden that has white statues arranged in it, and I choose to (in manual mode and using TTL, no BF) adjust my aperture/shutter/iso accordingly to render them as closer to white and not a middle gray. Now I’m also able to bounce my flash in this situation and use it as the main light on a model wearing a white suit. At this point the camera is set to record the scene accurately, and would also probably record the suit correctly, but the flash is still looking at the scene (white suit, statues) as if it were middle gray, correct? So now, in order for the flash to “see” the scene correctly, I’d give it some added compensation? Am I correct in that if I didn’t add compensation, the flash wouldn’t fire with enough output to appear as the main light?

Seb, that’s it. You have it correct there.

Just keep in mind that you are not in fact over-exposing the scene, but that you are exposing correctly for it by pushing the tonal values to where they should be.

Neil vN

‘Someone in a white dress against a white wall, will appear under-exposed. So you need to bump the exposure compensation up for lighter toned scenes.’

This is pretty much the same concept as the standard example ’snow scene’ isn’t it? Snow fools the camera’s meter because it’s so bright and therefore the camera would adjust to a lower exposure turning the snow into grey vs. white (5% grey). If I remember correctly this scenario also requires a slight ‘overexposure’ (overall exposure compensation).

Anyways – hope i got this right and thought it may help to remember that the same concept appears to apply to flash exposure compensation.

Love your site, it has been exceptionally helpful for me, thanks a bunch. Re Canon and exposure compensation, wanted to help folks be clear. You can always set both overall exposure compensation and flash exposure compensation, right from the camera, as these are separate settings. Of course, when for example decreasing overall exposure and then increasing flash exposure to compensate, you get an overall similar exposure, but now different parts of the scene are exposed at different levels, so it doesn’t look the same, nor would you want it to be. This allows for more creative control. One great thing about digital cameras is the opportunity to experiment all you want, and immediately see what you get, so that you can perfect a technique before going on a job. And last thing, you can always set exposure compensation in manual, using the same knob, by just increasing or decreasing exposure of the shot, by adjusting either apeture or shutter speed. We simply no longer call this “exposure compensation”, but its the same thing, as the shot is either overexposed or underexposed by the amount you dial in.