Outdoor Flash Photography by John Gerlach & Barbara Eddy

Author:John Gerlach & Barbara Eddy [Gerlach, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317516545
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

MANUAL AMBIENT EXPOSURE WITH TTL FLASH

Allow me to walk you through making this portrait. Ignore the flash for now. Place your camera into its Manual exposure mode and use your histogram and blinkies to find the optimum ETTR exposure. Use f/11 to ensure adequate depth of field for Barbara and whatever of the surroundings need to be in focus. Use an ISO of approximately 200 to ensure low noise and few artifacts. Your hypothetical shutter speed becomes 1/60 second.

Ok, but you don’t want the conventionally well-exposed ETTR background. If you prefer a darker background, then you need an exposure which subdues the background detail and makes your primary subject “pop” from that background. You remember that a viewer’s eye is virtually invariably attracted to the brighter parts of an image. So you accommodate that reality by changing the shutter speed from 1/60 second to 1/125 second, making the background one stop darker. The histogram data move a stop to the left, a proper response to your conscious decision to modify your routine ETTR technique.

Turn on the flash unit. Arrange the flash to trigger remotely by either a dedicated cable or by optical or radio means. Set the flash to TTL mode, being especially careful not to set it to Balanced TTL. Ensure that the flash exposure compensation (FEC) control is at 0. Hold the flash off-camera approximately a foot or two right or left of camera and slightly above the camera, and make sure the now positioned flash is pointed at the intended subject. The most carefully positioned flash won’t help much if, in your rush, you have pointed it at the sky. Shoot! Check the histogram. It’s a rebuttable presumption (my lawyer taught me that term and I’ve been looking for a place to use it) that the flash added enough light to change the histogram. The histogram, having moved leftward when setting up the background exposure, should now have moved back somewhat to the right. If the histogram is now in the ETTR comfort zone, you are all set. If not, introduce some plus-FEC or some minus-FEC as appropriate, and take another trial shot.

If you think the background still needs adjustment, change the ambient light exposure by twiddling the shutter speed a bit. As long as you remain under your maximum sync speed, you can use a faster shutter speed to darken the background or a slower one to lighten the background without making much exposure change to the subject.

When the result of the flash on the subject has returned a nicely muted background image with ETTR, the image is ready to be shot! Don’t forget to disallow blinkies in any highlight regions of the image in which you want to preserve detail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.