Here - Clickin Moms

When
I
affected setting exposure actually hurt my brain. My first
got my speedlite all I knew was that it went on top of my
camera and that I could now bounce my flash. I had no
idea which mode to put it in and thinking about how it
few test shots were completely blown so I blindly fiddled with the settings until I got the
exposure right. Then I bounced it off of every surface and angle imaginable. Once in
a while I would luck out and get a shot that I thought looked like it should, but there was
no rhyme or reason to it. I’m usually good at figuring out how things work, but flash was a
mystery to me and I gave up on it pretty quickly and deemed myself a photographer who
“shoots exclusively with natural light.” Sound familiar
One of my resolutions for 2010 was to master
my flash. While I’m far from that lofty goal,
I did make a lot of progress. Using flash no
longer terrifies me and I would even say that
I am very comfortable with it. Getting to this
point involved a lot of head banging, talking
to myself, countless hours of learning by trial
and error and more a-ha moments than I
can count. Here are a few things that I wish
I’d known when I took my speedlite out of
the box for the first time.
Put your camera in manual and your
flash in TTL.
While it’s true that manual flash is more
consistent than TTL, it’s not practical for
on-camera flash and situations where the
photographer and subject are moving.
Manual flash gives off a set amount of light
each time it’s fired. That means, if you move
closer or farther away from your subject and
don’t change your settings, your shot will be
over or underexposed.
In TTL mode, your camera’s metering system
measures the reflectivity and average
tonal values of a scene and determines
the amount of flash needed to produce a
correct exposure. However, because it is
exposing for average tones, the exposure
will not always be perfect. It should be close
though and flash exposure compensation
(FEC) allows you to tweak it until it’s perfect.
The rules for manual flash and TTL
flash are different
With manual flash, aperture controls the
exposure of the area being lit by the flash
and shutter speed controls the ambient light
exposure of the background. With TTL flash,
you are not limited to using shutter speed to
control the amount of ambient light in the
exposure. Aperture, ISO and shutter speed
can all be used control ambient light. This
creates endless possibilities and gives you
almost complete control over the way the
ambient light appears in your image.
Your camera settings do matter.
I discovered pretty quickly that with TTL
flash and FEC, you can pick any camera
settings (as long as you stay under the
maximum shutter sync speed) and get a
properly exposed photo. Unfortunately,
when using flash, properly exposed photos
are not necessarily good photos. A good
rule of thumb is to meter for the location, use
FEC to set flash exposure and then change
the camera settings to underexpose the
background a stop or two. This will separate
your subject from the background and make
your photo pop.
Bounced flash is not the secret to good
flash photography.
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