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Flash photography tutorial: Balancing flash & ambient exposure

May 22, 2015 Neil vN 47 Comments

flash photography tutorial: balancing flash and ambient exposure

Flash photography tutorial: Balancing flash & ambient exposure

This topic - balancing flash and ambient exposure - seems to one that many newer photographers struggle with. The big hurdle seems to be the basic starting point - how do you decide on the exposure for each? I'd like to explore this topic a bit with this post. The trigger for this was a question that someone emailed me regarding an image in one of my books on flash photography. Instead of answering the question directly, I thought that a wider answer might be more illuminating. We're still on that perpetual quest  Read more inside...

reverse engineering an image (3) – a contest!

December 1, 2010 Neil vN

wedding portraits with multiple light sources

edited on Dec 08, 2010 : contest winner has been announced, with feedback from Josh about this photograph When we've previously featured photographs that we tried to reverse engineer, there was a great response by readers of the Tangents blog. Similarly, many participated in the recent Photoshop contest. So I've decided that we should combine the two. Maybe even make it a regular event. The contest then is to reverse engineer this photograph in terms of the lighting. The winner gets a $50 B&H gift  Read more inside...

Bridal portraits with on-camera bounce flash

October 7, 2009 Neil vN 22 Comments

Bridal portraits with on-camera bounce flash

With the formal portraits of the bride & groom, and their families, I usually set up off-camera lighting.  But I also try to bring in some variety to the portraits - and I shoot on-location portraits of the bride beforehand, just after prep.  It's a good idea to get as much done as you can, earlier on in the day - just in case the time-line gets compressed and things don't quite follow the original plan. You'll be much happier then for having some solid portraits in your pocket. In this example, I wanted a few portraits of Michelle  Read more inside...

lighting the wedding formals (part 1)

October 6, 2009 Neil vN 59 Comments

lighting and photographing the wedding formals

With this, the first in a loose series on lighting and photographing the family formals at weddings, I would like to show that with a simple approach it is possible to get clean results that work every time. In lighting the formals, I don't try to get all Rembrandt, but prefer a fairly flat way of lighting everyone.  I keep the lighting static for all the images, whether I am photographing one person or twenty.  With time usually being a real constraint during the wedding day, there simply isn't the opportunity to play around too much  Read more inside...

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