Understanding Flash Photography: How to Shoot Great Photographs Using Electronic Flash by Bryan Peterson

Author:Bryan Peterson [Peterson, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817449728
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2011-08-29T21:00:00+00:00

Watch out for those subjects in hats! The human eye is an amazing machine in its ability to see light and dark simultaneously. Your camera doesn’t see the full dynamic range as well, so scenes in which the subject is in partial shadow (under the brim of a hat) may need a little extra illumination.

When I set my aperture to f/8 and adjusted my shutter speed until 1/160 sec. indicated a correct exposure in the camera’s meter, it was immediately apparent that the subject’s hat was causing an underexposure on his face. Since I wanted to keep the hat in place, fill flash came to the rescue. Staying with the available-light exposure I’d just made, I dialed in f/5.6 on the back of my flash—again, lowering the flash power so as not to over-flash the subject. Based on this setting, the distance scale on my flash told me I needed to be at 27 feet at full power, 19 feet at 1/2 power, and 13 feet at 1/4 power. Since I was about 12 feet from the subject, I used the 1/4 power setting. And since I was actually using an aperture of f/8 on my lens, this flash-to-subject distance resulted in a 1-stop underexposure—just enough to fill in his face with some illumination without overpowering the scene with flash light.

Both photos: Nikon D300S, 24–85mm lens at 32mm, f/8 for 1/160 sec. Bottom: with Speedlight SB-900

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