Today was overcast while practicing. I take a lot of my dogs and they have a lot of white on them. I underexpose my photos constantly and struggle with it.
On these 2 photos I adjusted exposure in the camera to not have any blinkies on the white of the stuffed dog. If I were to expose for the background the whites blow out.
Next I added some flash until the blinking came back and then backed off.
I'm posting because I was surprised when I would increase the exposure on the ambient that the whites easily got blown out, so the background is darker than I wanted.
What would an experienced person do on this with the goal of exposing the best as possible in camera?
This is a bit over-simplified but a good place to start: when using flash, shutter speed controls the ambient. Lower your shutter speed.
Now where things get more complicated is when you start to hit certain constraints:
- if your subject is moving, you may get to a point where as you lower shutter-speed, you start to see ghosting from subject movement. Solution: Start upping the ISO to the extent that you can. You can optionally add additional flashes to illuminate the background.
- If you WANT to darken the ambient (over-power the sun/ambient with your flash), you may hit the maximum shutter-sync speed for the flash. Solution: Use the hyper-sync mode of your flash if it has it and/or use a more powerful flash.
Don't aperture, shutter speed and ISO all contribute to the ambient exposure.
Before I turned the flash on, I was exposing for the white and everything else felt too dark even then. When I then turned the flash on, I adjusted the output of the flash to reduce the whites until they stopped blinking.
I recall, when I lowered the shutter speed, the whites start to blow out/blink. If all is as I say, then this is the dilemma how to keep the whites correctly exposed and have everything else brighter - without having to use Lightroom or Photoshop.
mrhoni wrote:
Don't aperture, shutter speed and ISO all contribute to the ambient exposure.
Yes, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all affect the ambient exposure but aperture and ISO also impact the flash exposure. For most practical purposes, shutter speed only impacts ambient because the duration of the flash is shorter than the time the shutter curtain is open. Therefore, shutter speed is what gives you the most impact when balancing ambient to flash.
mrhoni wrote:
Before I turned the flash on, I was exposing for the white and everything else felt too dark even then.
Well, then you have a problem. Your background was already too dark for your liking compared to the properly-lit subject, even before you started adding flash. Adding flash to the subject is only going to make it worse.
You need to find a way to reduce the difference in the lighting levels between the background and subject. Some alternatives:
- Use a background that is lighter or is more brightly-lit from the ambient light.
- Add flashes to illuminate the background.
- Put a scrim over the subject or otherwise put the subject in a more shadowed area.
Honestly though, the examples you posted don't look that bad to me. The background could be a little brighter maybe, but if you lighten it too much it will start to take attention away from your subjects.
- - -
Beyond that I have two suggestions:
- Since you are apparently shooting Canon, take a look at these pages that Chuck Gardner has put together:
- After maybe doing a little more experimenting on your own, I suggest you post again in the Lighting and Studio Techniques forum. There are lots of lighting experts there and I am sure you will get more help there than here in the Misc forum.
