![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/models\/anelisa\/DSC_5251.jpg\")
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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?<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. Instead of answering the question directly, I thought that a wider answer might be more illuminating. We’re still on that perpetual quest for more aha! moments. So let’s see where we head with this. (I’ll come back to the specific question and answer at the end of this.)<\/p>\n Why do we even want to add flash to our subject? The answer is that with flash we can control the direction and quality of light, and create a more dynamic image.<\/p>\n We don’t necessarily just use flash to avoid camera shake and \/ or poor exposure in low light. We use flash to create better light on our subject. We can ‘clean up’ the light that falls on our subject. Or to create more dynamic and interesting light. It’s about control<\/strong>. We decide. So where do we start?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The simplest approach for me, as shown in this image, is when I work in fairly flat and even ambient light, is to under-expose the ambient light <\/strong>by a certain amount. Then we add flash for correct exposure. \u00a0So how much do we under-expose the ambient light by? \u00a0Well, it depends. Usually a stop is good. Two stops can also work. If you’ve seen some of the images in fashion and music magazines where the subject is in a pool of light .. yet, the sunlit cityscape is darker, then that is because the photographer under-exposed the ambient light by 2-3 stops. Even in bright sunlight. So we have some leeway. That should ease some of the anxiety.<\/p>\n Under-exposing the ambient light by a stop, and then adding flash … is but one scenario, and one recipe. This approach won’t apply to every<\/em> possible situation you might encounter .. but it’s a good starting point in grasping that Big Question – where do we even start in balancing flash and ambient light.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I wanted to distill the essence of what we, as photographers, work with – light! Before we can truly grasp on-camera flash and off-camera flash, and really, any kind of photography, we have to be aware of the direction and quality of light. We need to observe the light that we have, and then decide how best to use it, or enhance it.<\/p>\n With this book, I try my best to share those \u201caha!\u201d moments with you, and I do believe this book can make a difference to your photography.<\/p>\n The book is available on\u00a0Amazon USA<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Amazon UK<\/a><\/strong>, or can be ordered through Barnes & Nobles and other bookstores. The book\u00a0is also available on the Apple iBook Store, as well as Amazon Kindle.\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> <\/p>\n Now let us look at an example where the previous method wouldn’t work:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here’s a reference image without flash at the same camera settings:<\/p>\n Then we add off-camera flash\u00a0– a speedlight in the\u00a0Lastolite EZYBOX 24\u00d724″ softbox<\/a>\u00a0(affiliate<\/em>).<\/p>\n As we can clearly see here, without flash providing light on our model, she would be completely under-exposed … for the settings we chose.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With this image shown at the top,\u00a0I positioned Anelisa<\/a> so that she would be in the dark relative to the brighter background. This is purposely done, so that I can use flash without much concern for the ambient light giving weird color casts. In deciding on my basic exposure, I simply needed the background to appear bright\u00a0enough.<\/p>\n I don’t know how you’d use a handheld meter for that. The simplest would be to check your camera’s built-in meter<\/strong> against a portion of the background that doesn’t contain too many dark areas or overly bright areas. \u00a0We just want a general idea of our settings. Then we take a few test shots (without flash), and check our camera’s preview until we’re happy with the way the background appears. It’s an iterative process with the starting point given to us by our approximate camera readings.<\/p>\n Then we add flash. <\/strong> We needed f\/2 @ 100 ISO amount of flash. Simplicity itself.<\/p>\n There is a range of settings for which we’d get images that work. \u00a0If 1\/160 @ f\/2 @ 100 ISO worked in this instance, we would’ve had success with images where the background is perhaps one\u00a0stop brighter, or\u00a0perhaps a stop darker. We really have a wide margin here as to what would work … because our model is in the dark \/ shade compared to the background. And we have a wide latitude as to what would be great exposure for the background.<\/p>\n You decide what you want to do and want to achieve. \u00a0You have options here.<\/strong><\/p>\n In all these examples, our starting point<\/strong> was the available light, and how we decided to expose for it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Angelo in Australia wrote:<\/p>\n Greetings Neil<\/p>\n I must first say what a well written and technical book you have released regarding on-Camera Flash.\u00a0Like many of your readers, I have read the book twice. On each and every occasion I have learned something new about flash.\u00a0My question points down the technical side of “how did you do it”. Step by step process!<\/p>\n I understand the theory in what you are trying to achieve, however become lost when trying it out practically.\u00a0By this I mean, how did you meter for the background light (ambient light), as far as its correct position on the meter scale. Under\/over by 1.7 stops (canon)<\/p>\n Lets use the example of being in a church for a wedding or christening.\u00a0The church has various colored plate glass windows (ie: yellow, red, orange etc), which allows both colored and natural ambient light. Add some tungsten bulbs also. \u00a0When you indicate you meter for the ambient light, how is this done. Are you underexposing by 1-2 stops and then bouncing flash from a wall etc. I know this seems vague, but let me further pick your mind.<\/p>\n In your book, page 42, plate 7-3 and was to use this as my example location.\u00a0Do I now … ok, I think we’ve thoroughly covered the first part of Angelo’s question.<\/p>\n Now, about the specific image in the book that he refers to:<\/p>\n This was to illustrate the how the shutter curtains affects your choice of possible shutter speeds to sync your flash at. \u00a0It’s partially discussed in this article on understanding the effect of maximum sync speed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Angelo, the reason for the round-about way of getting to your question, is that you asked about the image as if it was shot using TTL flash, and possibly using bounce flash techniques.<\/p>\n When I photograph the wedding formals, the flash is always in manual. In this example\u00a0–\u00a0a simple lighting setup for photographing the wedding formals<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0I used two\u00a0flashes in manual mode.<\/p>\n So I had to answer your question explaining how I would normally go about balancing flash and ambient light .. but it doesn’t directly relate to that image.<\/p>\n With a set-up like that image – using manual flash with the formal photos at a wedding – I would mostly rely on my choice of shutter speed to allow the available light in. \u00a0With manual flash, shutter speed becomes your only independent control for ambient light<\/a>.<\/p>\n So with that, your questions should be thoroughly answered, even though a few dots might still need to be connected. See if it all makes more sense now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Flash photography tutorial: Balancing flash &\u00a0ambient 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 Read more inside…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[431,14,15,17,22,24,110],"tags":[870,871,54,56,63,67,68],"yst_prominent_words":[9867,9861,1785,9869,9862,9887,1265,9732,9882,9872,9886,9873,9879,9864,6736,3763,9877,4644,4646,4647],"class_list":{"0":"post-2241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anelisa-durham","8":"category-exposure-metering","9":"category-flash-photography","10":"category-general-photography","11":"category-lighting","12":"category-models","13":"category-off-camera-flash","14":"tag-exposure-metering","15":"tag-flash-photography","16":"tag-flash-photography-technique","17":"tag-flash-photography-tips","18":"tag-lighting-tutorial","19":"tag-off-camera-lighting-for-portraits","20":"tag-photographic-lighting","21":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48944,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions\/48944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/models\/anelisa\/DSC_5199.jpg\")
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\n\n\t\t\t\t\t![\"Direction](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/books\/NvN\/3-qualityoflight-250.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\tDirection & Quality of Light<\/h2>\n
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/models\/anelisa\/DSC_5250.jpg\")
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\nor alternately, the\u00a0Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite<\/a>\u00a0controlled by\u00a0Canon ST-E3 Transmitter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/models\/anelisa\/DSC_5221.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/models\/anelisa\/DSC_5228.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n(The lights around the Times Square area are quite bright at night.)
\nWe have two options here:<\/p>\n\n
\n
Camera settings & photo gear (or equivalents) used\u00a0for the main photo<\/h2>\n
\n
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\n<\/a>or alternately, the\u00a0Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite<\/a>\u00a0controlled by\u00a0Canon ST-E3 Transmitter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBack to the question which triggered this article.<\/h2>\n
\n* meter for the brides dress, face, wall, brightest relevant area ?
\n* dial in 1-2 stops under in exposure ?
\n* adjust FEC ?
\n* test shot and chimp ?
\n* re-adjust FEC and chimp ?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/flash\/flash-sync-038.jpg\")
<\/p>\nRelated articles<\/h2>\n
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