{"id":4083,"date":"2010-07-14T14:34:30","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T18:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2021-02-19T02:16:34","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T06:16:34","slug":"overpowering-hard-sun-with-flash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/overpowering-hard-sun-with-flash\/","title":{"rendered":"overpowering hard sunlight with flash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

overpowering hard sunlight with flash<\/h1>\n

With this part of a photo session with Johannie, we worked in an alley.\u00a0The light was very uneven, with some swathes of sunlight falling directly on her. \u00a0(See the image below for the photo without flash.) \u00a0To get rid of this uneven sunlight falling on her, we have to add at least<\/strong> as much light on her as the brightest areas lit by sunlight. In the example above, our exposure is set to 1\/250 @ f13 @ 200 ISO and we can see from the bright patch of light on her shoulder, that we\u2019re at the edge of acceptable exposure. Any wider on our aperture, or higher on our ISO or slower on our shutter speed, and we\u2019ll start to lose detail in the sunlit areas.<\/p>\n

In the example above, our model\u2019s pose helped hide the uneven light due to her face being in shadow and her shoulder being in sunlight.<\/p>\n

Here is the same image, without flash. \u00a0This will give you a better idea of how much flash was added, and how uneven the available light \/ sunlight was.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In this following image, we can see the uneven light below her chin, casting strange shadows. Even though I had pulled out one of the two baffles inside the softbox, we still couldn\u2019t deliver enough light from the softbox to completely over-ride the daylight. In other words, I had to set an aperture \/ ISO combination where the daylight still registers to a large extent.<\/p>\n

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Ideally, to lose the dappled or uneven or harsh available light, we need to under-expose it by around 3 stops. Then the flash exposure will completely dominate.<\/p>\n

For our lighting here I used a\u00a0softbox on a monopod<\/a>, with a slaved speedlight attached. The Slave flash was triggered by an on-camera flash set to Master. I disabled the output from the Master slave so it didn\u2019t add anything to the final exposure. It was there just to communicate the camera\u2019s instructions to the Slave flash.<\/p>\n

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The key in overpowering hard sunlight, is to under-expose our available light to some extent, and then use flash to make up for the slack. In this case we could get away with a softbox held closely to our model, but with these other shoots, I used different lighting setups:<\/p>\n