another flash question

Joined: 15 Apr 2005 Posts: 266 Location: South Australia

hey :)
Ive spent most of today fiddling with my flash again. Its been great.
I took it outside and had a bit of a go at trying to fill flash on a harshly lit subject (my dog,) who was back lit.
I first exposed the camera for the paving that he was lying on and then set teh flash to either 1/4 or 1/8 power because i was fairly close. I wzs shooting at 1/250th. My question is this: When the fill flash it too hot. Should i be stopping the lens down or decreasing the flash power? How do i know which of these to do in different situations?

Cheers
Benen

Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 3:52 pm

I would think that it depends on the depth of feild that you wish to shoot at.

Joined: 18 Nov 2006 Posts: 288

benen wrote:

hey :)
Ive spent most of today fiddling with my flash again. Its been great.
I took it outside and had a bit of a go at trying to fill flash on a harshly lit subject (my dog,) who was back lit.
I first exposed the camera for the paving that he was lying on and then set teh flash to either 1/4 or 1/8 power because i was fairly close. I wzs shooting at 1/250th. My question is this: When the fill flash it too hot. Should i be stopping the lens down or decreasing the flash power? How do i know which of these to do in different situations?

Cheers
Benen

The aperture needs to be set to make a proper exposure of the background. It is the foreground that will get the fill. If you change aperture, you will need to compensate with shutter speed to maintain proper exposure for the background and that may or may not be the best approach depending on the situation (camera shake, motion blur, synch speed etc.) Usually, I recommend you use the camera controls to expose the background and adjust the flash unit to achieve the desired exposure for the foreground. No hard and fast rules, however. You can do it the other way if that floats your boat or fits the situation.

One of the nice things about the dedicated modern TTL automatic wonder flash units is that they handle fill flash automatically. If you don't have one of those, you don't know what you're missing.