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Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

Lesson 5 from: On-Location Light and Lighting

Mark Wallace

Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

Lesson 5 from: On-Location Light and Lighting

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

5. Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

It’s time to put all the principles we’ve learned into practice. Mark walks through the exposure diamond to demonstrate the different ways we can balance ambient light with our flash and solve dynamic range issues.

Lesson Info

Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

We have learned about the problem with dynamic range. We have learned about sync speed and the limitations our camera has. We've learned about overcoming that with high speed sync. We've learned about the exposure diamond. So what we need to do now is put it all together, because until we start working through it, none of that makes sense. So what we're gonna do is I hope you've printed out those bonus materials, those sheets, those little charts. I have my cheat sheet over here on my iPad. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through each of these things and walk through how we can do either sync speed and make sure everything matches or using depth of field while we're using high speed sync and make sure things match. We're gonna expose our ambient light more or less, and our light from our flash more or less. We're gonna do all of that in this session. So we're not looking at flattering light just yet. We're just looking at the appropriate amount of light. We'll get to flatterin...

g light in the lesson right after this one. So we're just learning about exposure, ambient light, light from the flash and moving those independent of each other and sort of the different ways we can get there. Okay, so I need to introduce somebody to you. So Christopher Barry is a phenomenal photographer from Tucson, Arizona. He said that he would help me out today. So I said, "yeah!" So he is way overqualified to be my assistant today. I'm very flattered that you're here, but he's gonna be helping me all day. So what we're gonna do is we're going to begin by using nothing but the camera to sort of show the problems that we're having here and our dynamic range issues. So Sydney, come on out. Sydney's gonna come and she's going to stand, oh, at about here, something like that. I just want to show you the issue with dynamic range. So what I'm going to do is I have my camera in manual mode, so I can control everything. I'm gonna actually point at your feet, Sydney. The reason for that is I'm trying to get a proper exposure in the shade. So my exposure right now is ISO 100, 125th of the second and F4, shallow depth the field. Let's see what happens when we try to take this picture. When I take the photo, and this is gonna pop up. There it is. You can see that nothing is right in this exposure. Sydney is underexposed. The background is overexposed. Our camera's dynamic range just isn't able to capture the darks and the brights and everything in between. It's just not gonna happen in a scene like this. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with the humblest of humble tools. That is the speed light. So I've got this speed light here. This is a Canon 600EX-RT. This is about 50 watt seconds. So it's not super, super powerful, but it should do a lot of really cool things. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna first start with this on the camera. Okay. So what we're gonna do is by putting it on the camera, I have it in full TTL mode, meaning that it is using through the lens metering to figure out what the exposure should be from the flash. So I'm gonna leave my exposure at the same exact thing as it was before. We're gonna see what happens. So all I've done here is I've added a flash. (camera shuttering) We'll take a photo. Now what we can see is the exposure on Sydney is correct, but the background is way overexposed. So the exposure on Sydney is coming from the flash. So the flash, because it's using through the lens metering, it is doing something. So let me walk you through how through the lens metering works with the flash. So Christopher, come on over here. Just hold this. You'd be a photographer for a second. Oh, yeah. (chattering) So can we see this? Yeah. So what's gonna happen here is when you take a picture with the flash attached to your camera using through the lens metering, the flash has something called a pre-flash. So the flash fires, that light comes over here, it hits your subject, it bounces off that subject. It goes through the lens, TTL, through the lens. Then the camera says, ah, this is how much light is coming off of the subject. And then it will tell the flash to either increase or decrease the power, so that we get a correct flash exposure. Then the shutter opens and then the camera takes a second, a picture and the flash fires. And then that's how that works. So the flash actually fires two times in TTL mode. So a pre-flash that bounces off, goes through the lens and tells the camera how much light is coming from the flash. And then the second is the actual exposure. So that's happening so fast, you can't even see it. On some videos, if you look closely with the speed light, you'll see papoom. These two flashes that's what's happening. Okay, thank you. So what we wanna do is we're just leaving the camera and the flash to figure out the exposure from the flash itself. So we've set our ISO. We have set our shutter speed. The flash power on that side of the flash exposure diamond is just being figured out by the camera itself. We're gonna manually figure some other things out in a little bit. So how do we control this ambient light? So if I look at the ambient light and I'm just pointing at the ambient light, I can see that I need to go way faster than my sync speed, which my camera is not allowing me to do. The reason for that is I have to tell the camera to turn on high speed sync. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into my camera's menu and I'm going to go into my flash settings and I'm gonna turn on high speed sync. Now, when I look at the background, I can dial in my shutter. So F4, ISO 100, my shutter speed should be 1,000, 250th of the second, much much faster. Now we haven't gotten to the little charts or anything yet. I'm just trying to show you that you can change the exposure of the background independent of the flash. So now let's take another shot. This flash is now in high speed sync. It's gonna do all those little bursts of light. So now, let's try again. Sydney's still there. I'll take a shot and look at what happened here. Look at the background of this image. What a dramatic difference. So if I take this, I'll show you both of these side-by-side. You can see the background has changed dramatically. We're changing the exposure on the background by changing our shutter speed. So what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna go back to this shot. All I'm going to do here is I'm going to roll my shutter speed faster and faster and faster. So you can see that the exposure on the background is changing. So hold up your finger and just put up a one. So number one is what's supposed to be a correct exposure. Number two, hold up a two. We're gonna make our shutter speed 3,200th of a second. And then hold up three. And then finally, four. Okay. Now we're gonna see some things here that are really interesting. So I'm going to put those four things side-by-side. All right. So what we're seeing is we're seeing the background get darker and darker and darker. If you'll notice, also Sydney is getting darker and darker and darker. The reason for that is high speed sync sometimes just can't keep up with a really fast shutter speed. So it could be that the other thing that might be happening is I might not have waited long enough for my flash to recharge. So let's see. I'm gonna take picture number four again. So actually, give me a five. Let's see. So Sydney is a little bit more exposed, but that flash, yeah. So what was happening is I wasn't waiting long enough for my flash to recycle. So the thing to remember is with high speed sync, with a battery powered flash of any kind, you can turn on a beep that will tell you the flash is ready or not. I was shooting too fast. Because with a normal flash, the flash in fire, and then recycle and be ready to go really quickly. With high speed sync, because it's flashing so many times, you have to wait longer for the flash to recycle, and it's gonna suck down your battery a lot, lot faster. So high speed sync isn't the miracle solution that we all think it is. Okay. So now that we've seen that background go, let's play a little bit more with this. I suspect I might be able to fix this exposure. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use something called flash exposure compensation. That's where I tell my flash to take what it thinks is a proper exposure and increase it or decrease it. So right now, when I look at Sydney, she's underexposed by about a stop. I'm gonna tell my flash to take what it think is correct and increase it by one stop. So I don't know if we will have enough oof from this flash, but we will see. So we're gonna do this flash exposure compensation plus one. So here we go. Let's see if we can get us there. Wamo. It just can't get there. So this flash at 8000th of a second just doesn't have enough oomph to give us everything we need. So we need to go to a more powerful flash. All right. So what have we learned so far in this session? We haven't gone through the exposure diamond yet, but what we have learned is how our camera exposes the background independent of our flash, and that high speed sync can sometimes have issues. So those issues are, because it flashes so many times, the amount of light coming from our flash goes way down. So that's not groovy. That's not what we want. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna change my flash exposure compensation back to where it was before. So I will do that really quickly. So now it's at zero. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna get this flash off the camera and then we're gonna start walking through our exposure diamonds, so that we can learn how all this stuff works. The benefit of taking the flash off the camera is that you can take the flash and get it much closer to the subject. So because the flash is much closer to the subject, the amount of light that it needs to throw out there, it doesn't have to be as much. So getting the flash closer is good. The second thing it does is we can start adding light modifiers and making our light, not just a proper exposure but a flattering light shaping tool as well. So we wanna get this off the camera as soon as possible. Okay, so Chris we'll have you put that on that Frio there. What I'm going to do is I'm using a Canon transmitter as a speed light transmitter. All it does is it allows me to wirelessly trigger and control that speed light. So that's what you need if you wanna take your flash off the camera. Okay. So what we're gonna do here is we're gonna take this flash. One of the tricks that I like, I stole that from you, sorry. You're like. One of the tricks of using a speed light like this is if you wanna do something that is vertical, so we're gonna do some vertical shots, instead of having this is made to match the camera's horizontal aspect ratio. But if you're shooting vertical, we wanna take this and move it to the side like this. So if we look and see sort of what we are illuminating, so we're trying to illuminate Sydney. If we have the flash horizontal, it's only gonna illuminate a little bit of her. If we make the flash vertical, she's vertical, so we can match what we're illuminating. So we're gonna move this and we're gonna make it vertical. And then Chris is gonna sort of move this up and down in back and white, up and down and back and forth, and so we can make sure that is all good just like that. So this guy is on, if you turn that on, I'll turn this guy on and then let's see if we get a flash out of that. It's not connected just yet. Oh, the other thing, we have to put that on remote mode. Can you put that in remote mode this guy right here? It should be one more. There we go. There we go. So we have to tell the flash that it's in remote mode. And then this flash right here, it's in transmit mode. So transmit, remote, so those all connect. Now, yeah. Now that's flashing and everything is all hooked up. So it's the same as having a flash on the camera, except for it's not, it's off the camera. Okay, so let's start with our cheat sheet here. So I'm gonna do this really fast. I have this enabled. So the first thing we wanna do on our cheat sheet is the ISO value. The ISO value of my camera is 100. So I've set my camera to 100. Why? Well, because it's really bright, so we wanna have our ISO as low as possible. So we don't have too much. The second thing we wanna do is we wanna set our shutter speed. So right now, we wanna do this at sync speed, just to learn how to do that. So what I have to do here is I'm gonna go into my menu and I'm going to turn off high speed sync. I'm gonna turn off high speed sync. So now my camera is set to it's sync speed, which is 200th of a second. So ISO 100, 200th of a sec. What's the next thing? Number three is aperture. What should the aperture value be? Well, we have to first get our ambient light exposure set correctly. So I'm in manual mode and I need to figure out what the ambient light meter's at. So what I'll do is I'm gonna use the meter in my camera and I'm just gonna point my camera at the background. I'm gonna roll my aperture and tell the camera tells me I have a correct exposure. So I'm gonna not point at Sydney. I'm gonna point at the chairs in the background. I am moving my aperture until it says F-13, F-14. F-14 is the correct value for our background. We can prove that, I'm gonna turn off my external flash and I'm gonna take a photo. (camera shuttering) What we will see here is when it pops up here, it's gonna pop. Let me do that one more time, 'cause I think my camera was not ready to go. (camera shuttering) There we go. I think maybe I have to turn this, take that off. Let's try that. Let's try that. My camera's not behaving nicely. Oh, sorry. I know exactly what happened. Here's the thing. When I turned this off, then my camera went back to what it was before. It didn't go to 200, it went to 8000th of a second. So I need to go and tell my camera 200. Okay. Now, I was at 8000th of a second, not 200, my bad. Okay. Not the camera, it's Mark Wallace being an idiot. Okay, 200th of a second. The light changed just a little bit. So it's F-13 is showing me the correct exposure. All right. Sometimes I'm an idiot, and that was one of those times. So we can see the ambient light is exposed correctly. If I try to take a photo of Sydney here, then we'll see is the ambient light is exposed correctly and Sydney is under exposed. Okay, so we have our ambient light exposure set according to our exposure diamond. ISO 100 shutter speed of 200. That's what I messed up, 200. And then the aperture value we dialed in, so it's at F-13 right now. Okay. Now the last thing on this little cheat sheet here, number four, is we need to figure out what our flash power should be. Well, the nice thing is we're using TTL metering. The camera is gonna figure that out for me. So all I'm gonna do is turn on my remote roll here. It's gonna sync to my speed light. And then Chris, I wanna get this flash as close as possible without getting in, so bring it to the side just a little bit. Yeah. Just about like that. Raise it up about six and half an inch or so. Yeah, there we go. Right about there. Six inches, half an inch. I'm really bad at numbers. Okay, there we go. I'm going to take a shot and now look what happened. Now we have Sydney and the background and both exposures are good. Now this is not flattering light, because we haven't added a soft box or any kind of reflectors or any kind of anything to make this look flattering. All we're doing is we're getting the exposure from our flash and the exposure from our background. We are getting those set. Now watch what happens. Now that we have these two things set correctly. I am going to take my shutter speed down to 100. (camera shuttering) I'll take a shot there. Notice the background just went up a little bit. Now it's overexposed. I'll take the background down to 50th of a second. Bamo. Now notice the background is getting brighter and brighter. So if we look at these side-by-side, one, two, three, notice Sydney is staying the same, but the background is getting brighter and brighter. I'm changing the background exposure totally separate from Sydney. Totally separate. So what I'll do is I'm going to go in. I'm gonna take my shutter speed. I'm gonna put it back to 200. So our ambient light is the same. Let's take another shot. So look into that light. There you go. Yeah, face it. There you go, perfect. There we go. I'll take this shot. Now things are balanced again. So we can see that Sydney and our background are, she looks like she's been chopped out and pasted on it, so crazy. She hasn't, (laughs) but it looks like it. That's the flattering light thing that we need to fix. So what I'm gonna do now is because we're in TTL metering, we don't have a manual control of the flash, but we do have something called flash exposure compensation. What flash exposure compensation is, it says, hey, flash, take what you think is right and increase it or decrease it. So that's what we're gonna do now. You'll see that the flash on Sydney is going to, or the exposure on Sydney is gonna increase or decrease. So I'm gonna go in. I've got a little button on my camera that I can push and it takes me to flash exposure compensation. So I'm gonna take it to negative one. Negative one. When I shoot that, we will see that Sidney is now darker than she was before. So we have that shot, this shot in side-by-side. There we go. Side-by-side, you can see the exposure on Sydney has changed. So we've changed the exposure just on her, but the background is the same. We haven't changed the background at all. We've just changed the flash exposure. Let's try. I don't know if we have enough gusto with this flash. Let's see if we can make it plus one. Let's see if we can just blast out the exposure. Yes, we can. So check this shot out. So now notice the background is the same, but Sydney is blinded. So when we look at that shot and that shot and that shot, notice the background has not changed at all, but Sydney has changed from correct exposure to underexposed to overexposed. We're changing those two things independent of each other. Okay. So let's review. What we did is we went in and we are at sync speed. So we set our ISO. We set our shutter to 200. That's our camera sync speed. Then we set the aperture value to be a correct aperture value for this ambient light by just pointing our camera at the ambient light. Once we did that, our camera and flash figured out the correct flash exposure, and it got that right. Then we used flash exposure compensation to increase or decrease the flash. That all worked just great. So we were able to control those two things. This is one way. This is the easiest way to get all this balance, but it's not the only way. In fact, there's a bunch of different ways to get to the same place. We're gonna keep working at this. Follow along on your worksheet and try this at home, so you can nail this every time, because not all methods are the same. Okay. So the second thing we're gonna do is I'm gonna change my worksheet from the sync speed worksheet to the depth of field sheet. So get that worksheet that says DOF on it, that stands for depth of field. We're gonna do something a little bit different. The first thing we're gonna do is set the ISO on our camera. The ISO is at 100. The second thing we want to do is set the aperture value. So I want to have a shallow depth of field. So I know that on this lens, the widest aperture value I have is F4. So I'm gonna open my aperture to F4. ISO 100 aperture of F4. So instead of now figuring out the correct aperture value with the ambient light, I'm going to set the correct shutter speed. To do that, I know that I have to have a faster shutter speed than 200. So I'm gonna go into my menu setting and I am going to turn on high speed sync. So high speed sync has been turned on. If you don't know how to turn high speed sync on on your camera or your flash, look in the manual, because it's different between Nikon and Canon and Fuji Film and Sony and I don't know every single. It's different also between different cameras of same brands. So between one Canon and another, the way you turn things on and off might be different. So just look in your user manual and learn how to turn on high speed sync. Okay. So high speed sync is on. I'm at F4. So what I'm gonna do is now I'm gonna look through here and I'm going to increase my shutter speed until I have a correct exposure on the background. So I'm turning off my flash and I'm going to take a photo here. Okay, we can see that now we have a correct ambient light exposure. So Sydney is totally underexposed, 'cause I turn my flash off. I will turn it on. I can turn on. We'll go back to the computer for a second. You can look at my menu bar here. You can see that I'm at 1600 of a second at F4 at ISO 100. So we did our ISO first. Second, we did the aperture value for shallow depth the field. Third, we did our shutter speed, which was at 16. Now we need to get our flash power set. We're gonna do it the same way we did before. We're gonna just let our camera figure out the correct amount of light using through the lens metering. So we're going to just look through here. Make sure my flash is powered up. It is. We will take a shot. Blemo. Now look, we have this shot of Sydney and we also have shallow depth of field because we set our aperture value to F4. So that works really, really great. Okay, I know what you're thinking. Mark, what if you have a flash that doesn't have TTL metering? What if you wanna do this all manually? What we're gonna do now is we're gonna step up to an off camera flash. Instead of using a speed light, we're gonna get a flash has a little bit more juice. So the flash that I want to use, it's called the Elinchrom ONE. If you can turn that off for me. This little guy here is made for location shooting. That is what it's made for. So it's called the one because it's the one light that does everything you need. It has an LED light that you can use for video. You can change a color temperature, but it also has a flash. So this is about 130 watt seconds. So it's about twice as powerful as our speed light, which is really cool. I also have my Elinchrom controller. So this is gonna work essentially the same way as a speed light does. But just to show you what's going on, we're gonna do this manually. So I'm gonna turn on my controller. I'm gonna turn on my speed light. Actually, my Elinchrom ONE is supposed to be off camera flash. Okay. So these are now connected. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm putting this in manual mode, so we're no longer triggering things with TTL metering. So I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna put it pretty close. I'm just using this diffusion here, sort of how it comes by default. We can also do some things with this to get a little bit more juice out of it. So I'm just gonna put this here. This should make the light bounce all over the place, which is probably not what we want, 'cause we want as much light to get to Sydney as possible. And then Chris, I'm gonna have you move forward and back just a little bit. So I just wanna frame this up really quickly. I think, can you come forward towards Sydney a little bit? Just a little bit more and more, more. Right there is good. Right there is good. Okay. Now how do we know what the flash power should be? Well, we need a meter. So I happen to have one right here. This is my fancy Sekonic meter. You don't have to have this really expensive, fancy Sekonic meter. A lot of people tell me it's overkill, which in this instance, it probably is. I'm asked frequently why I don't just use a different light meter. The answer to that is I only have money to buy so much gear and this is the meter that I bought. So I don't have enough money to buy all different versions. So you don't need this fancy light meter. You can get one that's a little bit less crazy, but this is the one I'm gonna be using. So this has a little radio transmitter built in right back here, and that tells my flash to fire. So that's one reason that I use this light meter. There are other Sekonic light meters that also allow you to do that, that aren't quite as expensive as this. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna set my flash to my camera setting. So my flash is, I mean, my meter to my camera setting. So my meter is set to ISO 100. My camera set to ISO 100. My shutter speed is 1600 of a second. So I will set that here to 1600 of a second. Now I can go over here and I can meter this. Blemo. That says F10, which is way too bright. So we wanna get down to F4. So I'll decrease the power that says F8. I'll decrease that. We're all the way down. Oh, that's F4. That says F4. Okay, let's see if that works, 'cause I think with that meter, it might not work because we're shooting at high speed sync. So this might meter incorrectly. Let's try it at out and see if those things are in sync. They're not. So that's another gotcha. When you're metering at high speed sync, you have to make sure your meter is set up for high speed sync. Let's see if this guy can do that. So it's got high speed sync setting, which is one of the reasons I love this as well. So now we are going to try metering this. Oh, I have to say high speed sync radio trigger. So dadadadada. There we go. I'm almost there. Almost there. Is it going? Yeah, there it is. All right. So we're gonna try this one more time and see if this is gonna work out. Okay, that's F5. I think on this, the high speed sync metering of this, you have to trigger that from the remote control. So I'm gonna have you press this and hold. And then let's see what happens when I fire this guy. Okay. What does that meter? 2.5. 2.5. Not bright enough. So let's go in there and increase that. I'll trigger this again. That says under. Can you trigger that? Yep. Still under. Create this a little bit more. Okay, trigger that. That seven we've gone over. Oh, TTL metering is so much easier. Isn't it? (Mark chuckling) It's either under or over. Okay. We're almost there. That's 10. Okay, so what we're gonna do is you can see that the pain of metering this manually. I'm just gonna use inside my camera to look and see what that looks like and we'll get it right. So right now, okay, we were close. Really, really close. So that looks correct. F4. So for some reason, I'm sure I've got a menu setting or something that I haven't set correctly for my meter, but that's normally how you would do that is you would just meter it. Then I can just change my power setting up or down on this and we can get an exposure that's brighter or darker. So almost always when I'm using high speed sync, I'm just letting my camera do the exposure. I'm almost always only metering when I'm at sync speed or slower. That's the reason why, 'cause it can be really problematic with those multiple bursts of light. But I think we have something that's pretty close here, but you can see that the light is not very flattering. If we go back to this photo, you can see we've got these crazy shadows that aren't really good. I don't like that. We wanna change that by adding on some nice soft boxes or whatever. Or I could maybe move this a little bit closer to this. That's gonna change my exposure a little bit. So I'll check that. And it does. I need to increase the power output. (camera shuttering) There we go. Now we have it set. Okay, so now that we have this all set in manual, we have an off camera flash. We've enjoyed the pain of manual metering. What we can do is we can still change the ambient exposure from the flash. So here's what I'm gonna do. So this is at a power setting of 4.3. Chris, I want you to come over here and I'm gonna have you roll this down in full stop increments. So 3.3, 2.3, et cetera. Okay. So Sydney hold up your finger. So this is number one. (camera shuttering) Oh. So go back to where did we start with? So we started at four, three. Okay. So hold up your finger. We have that, okay. Now we're gonna roll this down to three, three. So we went down a stop. (camera shuttering) Now go to two, three, And then we're gonna take that shot. Okay. So watch what's happening here. As we're changing the power on our flash, notice the background, not changing at all, at all. Just the light from our flash. That power is changing. That's it. We're controlling that by using the flash power up or down. Okay, so we're gonna take this back up to where it was. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the exact same thing, but now with the ambient light. So hold up your finger number one. (camera shuttering) And then we'll put that up on the screen just so you can see that we're balanced again. Yep. We're just gonna leave that there. So I'm gonna take my shutter speed up to 3200th of a second. And then 5,000, maybe 6,400 of a second. And then even 8000th of a second. (camera shuttering) Okay. I like the beep to tell me what's going on. Look what we have going on here. The flash, even though it's beefier than our speed light, it's still not able to keep up with that high speed sync. As soon as you turn on high speed sync, the output from the flash, (mouth imitates bombs) it plummets, it really, really goes down. So you need a beefy, beefy flash. There is something that we can do, though. We're almost done with this. I just wanna show you this, 'cause this is really important to understand. So what we're gonna do here is on the front of this flash, what we have is we've diffused this light, which means a lot of the light from this flash just flying into space. We don't want that. So what we're going to do is we're gonna use a reflector. We're gonna throw this guy on here. What that will do is it will direct the light bam right at Sydney. So we're gonna get this as close as we can again. Okay. And then what we're gonna do is that's at 4.3, which is really gonna be too much. Okay, so we're gonna not change anything. This is the same exposure value that we had at before. So I'll make sure my ambient light is set correctly at F4. (camera shuttering) This should be much brighter. It is. So we have a lot of light being punched out. Now, if I start taking my shutter speed, let's take it down to maybe 4000th of a second. Let's see if we have enough light from this light. We still don't. Even though we added that reflector, we still don't have enough light at high speed sync to punch out enough to compete with this background. This background is crazy, crazy, crazy bright. So how can we fix this? Well, we can get this really, really close. We could do some things with the ambient light that we're going to get to. Or my preference, use a more powerful flash, which we have and we're gonna use in the next lighting setup. Okay. So this one, the point was to sort of see the problems that you have working with high speed sync, working with the speed light or an off-camera flash, trying to control the things to see me mess up, I think it's important for people to see me screw things up. So that high speed sync metering. I don't know why it didn't work out, but there must be a menu setting or something that I missed. I'll see if I can review that between these classes. But all those things can happen when you're on location. So if you get into that situation where something is just not working, it's okay to bail to TTL metering or whatever to get you out of it, 'cause normally, when you're shooting something, you only have so much time to get it right and you don't wanna be fumbling around, like I just was live for you, but I like to leave in the mistakes. Okay, what we're gonna do next is we've figured out how to control ambient light and light from our flash independent of each other. Either using flash exposure compensation, or just changing the flash power or by changing the shutter speed up or down, we can change these two things independent of each other. Now, what we need to do is we need to fix this light, 'cause it's just not very flattering. We wanna add some soft surround. We wanna add some fill. We wanna bounce the light around. We wanna make something that looks a little bit less like it was pasted in on a background. So we've done the ambient light. Now we need to do the making the flattering light, okay. So the appropriate amount of light, we got that. The flattering light, we haven't gotten that yet. So we're gonna do that next. So let's do it.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Flash Exposure Worksheet
Frio Grasp Mini Discount
Tether Tools Pro Kit Discount
Tether Tools Starter Kit Discount
NanLite_WALLACE5.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Bill Johnson
 

Marc created a great class. Early on in the class things went slow and methodically through the basics. This is important. He could have told us but instead he lead us to discover...a much more powerful learning method. Then came all the different approaches and problems, Plus if you don't feel confident, it's here to go through again if you purchased or subscribed. I give the class 100%

user-def74a
 

An excellent real-life exploration of basic lighting techniques that can really make a difference. I especially appreciated the explanation of high-speed sync and the outdoor demonstrations with light modifiers. This is a perfect add-on to Mark's Understanding Light course.

Thomas WIlliams
 

This is a great look at methods of using natural and artificial light on location. It is very informative as well as entertaining to see Mark on set as a working pro and making a few mistakes. This is a practical and easy to understand course. We’ll done!

Student Work

Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

Mark Wallace
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Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

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Lesson Info

5. Balancing Ambient Light with a Flash

It’s time to put all the principles we’ve learned into practice. Mark walks through the exposure diamond to demonstrate the different ways we can balance ambient light with our flash and solve dynamic range issues.

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Mark Wallace

Mark Wallace is a photographer based in the United States. Best known for his web-based video series Digital Photography One on One and Exploring Photography sponsored by Adorama. Millions of people have watched Mark’s videos on YouTube, and the numbers continue to grow. Mark has a strong social media following on Facebook and Twitter, where he spends time interacting with viewers and workshop attendees.
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topics covered in this class

LightingSpeedlights
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