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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
November 14, 2008
The penultimate set of workshops for 2008 was held this week in Florida with a series of just two workshops - one in Miami Beach and the other in St. Petersburg. What a difference going from cold and rainy New Jersey to Miami Beach!
Part of the workshop program in the evening (where weather and location permits), is to go out and improvise and find various surfaces and objects to bounce flash off, like we were able to in Miami Beach. Using the available light from the city locations and combining it with careful use of bounce flash, surprisingly good results can be achieved.
One of things that seem to surprise workshop attendees is that you don’t always need a very specific area like a wall to bounce flash off. Quite often you get great results still by bouncing flash into a very large room or hall, or like the example above, where I bounced my flash behind me off some random architecture – or what became the catch-phrase for the evening – ‘random shit’.
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Comments (7)
March 27, 2008
What are your settings? - a question that I am often asked about various images.
And quite often, the answer is surprising – it doesn’t really matter.
Sometimes the specific settings are of importance, but usually much less so than the method of getting to correct exposure of the ambient light and the flash.
This is the photographic equivalent of teaching someone to fish, versus just slapping a fish down on a dinner plate. Just telling my settings will reveal very little about the how. And yet, the how is far more important than just a listing of seemingly random figures.
Let’s look at this recent image from one of my workshops on flash photography – especially since it is exactly the kind of thing which I teach during the course of the day.
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Comments (31)
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