Just wanted to follow up with Maurice's post with some different scenarios in which i've tried to use flash. A key principle I try to use with flash is that i want to make the shot look like there was no flash. i hate the extra shine and bouncing light that i see from a lot of flash-driven shots. This is the beauty of being able to manually adjust your settings. Again, I don't have a lot of before/after pictures that are identical but I have a few sample shots that show these principles.
Basically there are 2 principles to keep in mind. Actually 4 according to zack arias, but i think these are the easiest to start with.
- Shutter Speed - controls ambient exposure (background)
- Aperture - controls flash exposure (how bright the flash lights up the scene)
Setting 1 - indoors with low light. You want to light up the whole scene - not just the subjects in the foreground. You want to include the background. Aperture around f/4 is good. play with it for necessary lighting that you want.
- Lower the shutter speed - like 1/20, 1/30
- the first picture has a shutter speed of 1/100
- the second picture has a shutter speed of 1/30 and the background comes in a lot more.
Setting 2 - outdoors and heavily back-lit. This is right from Mo's tutorial.
- Key here is to increase the Shutter speed and decrease aperture.
- the first picture shows a great background but my daughter's face is a little dark b/c it's caught in the shadow. look at the railing. this was at 1/320 and f/16 but no flash. any more adjustments and i would have blown out the background although she would have been lit better.
- I added the flash here with the same settings and you can see how well and evenly it's lit-up. I would say part of this is b/c of the Nikon TTL, which rocks, in my humble opinion.
Just wanted to make a little comment and correct me if I'm wrong but I think in the case when you're using Nikon's TTL to expose the flash, the second statement about aperture doesn't apply because your TTL will automatically expose for the subject (read: smaller aperture will lead to increased flash output). I think the second statement however is true when your'e using manual exposure.
ReplyDeleteThe first statement on shutter speed remains true for TTL though since that does control your background exposure (and TTL doesn't meter for the background).
That's why for the time being I use Manual exposure metering on my camera when I have flash but still use ETTL on my external flash (and just use FEC to get the output I want). I'll continue doing that until I can handle manual flash.
Oh to supplement so what I mean is that instead of f/16, if you had used f/4 (and 1/320, key is to keep shutter speed same) for that same picture above, you'd still get the same metering both on the subject and the background except your background would be more blurred out
ReplyDeletedave, great comment. you are correct. for the first shot i did it manual mode with my sb600 and the 2nd was with my on-board flash in ttl mode. i didn't have to do f/16 but i was thinking a lot of times people like the background without the bokeh when they want the scenery. i was kind of thinking like the grad pictures at the top of the Greek!
ReplyDeleteand you are correct that the aperture comments will have to deal with manual mode flash. actually with most shots when i'm using TTL mode i don't even need to adjust much except when i may want to drag for ambient. it's like shooting in "P" mode so it feels like i'm cheating a little bit.
i am trying to play more with the manual flash but when i can't get it to look right, TTL is awesome.
thanks for the important distinction.
Good point david!
ReplyDeleteBtw, distance-to-subject also factors in for manual flash, so for instance if in the photo of Maddie, John wanted more fill-flash, he could have walked closer to her. (Btw, cute pic of your kid, John! I take it she's not camera shy? :D )
Btw, the TTL/E-TTL etc. modes are even a bit more complicated than that, I believe, as it uses the matrix metering info and does the whole compare-to-computer-databank-of-matrix'ed-scenes bit. Really crazy stuff. Canon's TTL isn't as spot-on as Nikons, so I hear, and I can at least attest to the fact that Canon's doesn't work that great (never used a Nikon strobe), so when it's critical I usually end up using manual.
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