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April 28, 2010
flash photography – background exposure and flash
When I saw this dramatic sky with the approaching storm during our recent shoot at Coney Island, I knew I wanted to photograph our model against it. By the time I actually started taking photos, the raindrops were already spattering around us. So there was little time to work.
I knew I wanted a brooding sky. Now, depending on how I chose my exposure, I could’ve had a much the sky appear much brighter, or just a little bit brighter than shown here. There’s a whole range of possibilities in how I could’ve exposed for my background, and we can choose a wide range of settings. In this sense there really isn’t any “incorrect exposure” for this particular background. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to choose our settings such that we’d over-expose our model.
This is idea holds true while we consider the sky as our main background. The street areas, and the amusement park areas are indeed under-exposed. They do appear too dark if I had chosen that as my specific background. But the sky as such, isn’t under-exposed. This might seem a semantic difference, but it is an important distinction to make, in that quite often there is no specific under- or over-exposure, but just a way that YOU decide to expose for certain tones. I simple chose to expose for the sky as darker tones. And I could’ve placed them “anywhere”, even as near-black.
Here is the test shot without flash …
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Comments (6)
April 8, 2010
balancing flash with available light / ambient exposure
Since many of the questions I get on the Tangents blog relate to balancing flash with available light, I want to pull the replies together into a single article. A reference point again, instead of the replies scattered throughout this website.
The questions most often revolve around:
- exposure metering for available light ,
- exposure metering for TTL flash and ambient light,
- whether to use manual flash or TTL flash,
- flash exposure compensation (FEC),
- choice of aperture,
- maximum flash sync speed,
- metering for off-camera manual flash and ambient light
- choosing our settings to balance manual flash and ambient light,
- whether to drag the shutter, or not.
The answer to the questions about how to balance flash and ambient light, is often along the lines of “it depends”. It really depends on:
- the scenario you have, and
- what you want to achieve.
Now that all sounds quite vague. Being told that you can pretty much “do what you want”, doesn’t help if you don’t even quite know where to start. Most of the answers are in the linked articles there, and on this page on my Top 20 Flash Photography Tips.
But, let’s look at one specific image, and analyze what our options are, and see if we can make sense of it all …
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Filed under: exposure metering, flash photography, lighting, photo shoot, technique — Tags: exposure metering, flash photography, flash photography technique, flash photography techniques, flash photography tips, off-camera lighting for portraits, photography workshop — Neil vN @ 5:38 am
December 28, 2009
Flash photography is one of those subjects that seem daunting from ‘the outside’. It might seem like you’re chipping away at something so big that it might even appear incomprehensible.
I actually do believe that flash photography is one of those subjects where you have to grasp a number of things simultaneously, before anything makes real sense.
So here is my list of Top 20 Flash Photography Tips.
This page has just been added to the main set of pages on flash photography techniques. My intention is that it might serve as a solid starting point in understanding flash photography, with links leading to various other pages within the site. Hopefully it all converges to the same point – some aha! moments where everything seem a lot clearer. And hopefully that page will help some in making flash photography more accessible a subject than it might appear.
As always, your feedback and questions on that page is welcome.
If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies. Thank you!
Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.
Comments (12)
December 19, 2009
bounce flash examples – wedding receptions
Over the course of the past year or so, I’ve made a steady attempt to move this blog away from being wedding-heavy, and take the material more towards general photography, and photographing people.
However, since the most of my work is as done as a wedding photographer in New Jersey, I still get a large number of questions which relate to wedding photography - and specifically, photographing the reception. So I thought I would expand a little on the techniques I use in photographing wedding receptions.
A few years back, I would regularly use additional lighting to add extra light to the reception room, in order to avoid the dreaded black background which everything faded into. But I rarely do so these days, and haven’t used additional lighting at a reception in more than a year.
Somewhere around the time I started using the Canon 1D mk3, I decided to forgo the additional off-camera flash setups at a reception. I could now really make use of the high-ISO capabilities of the camera to bring in the ambiance. And now with cameras such as the Nikon D700 (B&H) and Canon 5D and Canon 5D mkII (B&H), incredibly good high-ISO performance has become more accessible.
Other reasons for not using additional off-camera lighting at receptions usually have to do with the logistics and space, and shape of the reception room. Quite often there just isn’t space to safely put down a lightstand or two. Also, more and more receptions venues are lately using up-lighting. This already helps create a more colorful and interesting background, and additional flashguns would just destroy the mood.
To show some examples from weddings this year:
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Comments (42)
August 19, 2009
choosing your shutter speed when using flash
A question that I was asked via email, that I thought would be of interest to everyone.
Gary Payne wrote
Neil,
I just finished your book, and I would like to thank you for putting together a great book on lighting that an amateur without a studio and tons of lighting equipment can actually use. Its great. Now, I want to re-read it, camera and flash in hand, and really start to learn.
I have one question: When using ambient light, I understand that you set your exposure using the camera’s manual mode, then use flash to fill in. My question, when your shutter speed goes below that usually used hand-held, do you count on the speed of the flash to produce a sharp image or go to tripod or monopod? Or, increase either ISO or f-stop until you reach and acceptable shutter speed?
Gary .. You are entirely correct in that I usually increase my ISO or open my aperture, to get a high enough shutter speed for sharper images. I can count on the flash freezing the action when I am shooting in lower light levels, and my ambient light is around 3 stops or more under-exposed. This means the (TTL) flash will be the dominant light source, and the short duration of the flash will freeze the action
But when we get to situations in low light where we are using flash in nearly the same amount that the available light is, then we can’t rely on flash to freeze the action. I prefer not to use a tripod for my wedding photography, since it slows me down for the style that I work in.
I thought this might be a good opportunity to run through some examples again, and look at how we’d approach these scenarios. Then we can see what effect the flash might have on giving us sharper images .. or not. In other words, let’s see where flash would help freeze movement. I used tungsten-gelled flash there (bounced over my shoulder) to help open up the shadows cast by the strong video light.
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Comments (24)
June 14, 2007
photographing fireworks, using flash
Photographing people with fireworks in the background, is just an application of the technique known as dragging the shutter.
I had the couple in an area where there wasn’t much ambient light, so that I could light them mostly with flash. The strobe was a Quantum T2 with an umbrella, used in manual.
My flash exposure was determined in that I wanted the couple correctly exposed .. but my actual settings were dictated by my choices made in how I wanted the fireworks to register.
For my fireworks exposure, which is considered the same as ambient light,
I had to juggle the three controls again :
shutter speed / aperture / ISO.
That particular photograph was 1 sec @ f6.7 @ 400 ISO
You don’t necessarily want a high ISO setting, since you do want your shutter speed to be slow. Slow enough to record the fireworks as streaks of light. There is a lot of leeway here, and a quick check of your camera’s preview will tell you whether you need to adjust your settings. Therefore your is range should be 100 to 400 ISO. Then your shutter speed is in the region of 1 second or slower. In other words, you need a tripod.
Recording multiple bursts of fireworks by blanking out the frame with a black card is a great idea. This photograph was a single exposure though.
By checking my camera to see how other firework bursts recorded, I found that f6.7 @ 400 ISO @ 1 sec gave me enough firework trails and the fireworks itself weren’t over-exposed in the shot.
So using f6.7 @ 400 ISO, I set my Quantum T2 to an appropriate power level, to give me that exposure. (Manual flash in this instance, since my subject was in a specific position in relation to my strobe.)
f4.5 @ 200 ISO @ 2 seconds .. would’ve given me exactly the same exposure, but the firework trails would’ve been longer. There is a lot of leeway here, and you shouldn’t be bound by specific settings. But my suggestion would be to start at 1 second (or slower) and 400 or 20O ISO, then then chimp to taste.
Rear-curtain sync would not have had any effect here, since the couple was static in the frame.
More articles on off-camera flash …
If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies. Thank you!
Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.
Comments (4)
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