Flash Photography for Beginners

[Music] welcome to everybody to be an H photo I'm pleased to be your speaker for today we're going to talk a lot about flash I also want to thank B&H for having me back again probably be back more and more and more so hopefully you'll get sick of looking at me so today we're going to talk about flash photography and it just because I have this one on top of the camera doesn't mean that this is what you have to actually use you could very easily just use the pop-up flash and that's going to give you some real basic ideas of when to use it when not to use it and when the pop-up flash has been exhausted of what you can do with it and then why something like this or something smaller than this with the capabilities of moving the head around in different directions where that can help you and make your flash photography look a little more on the natural side because that's one of the things I think that an op what are some of the things that bother you about flash photography just right off the bat yellow mouth anybody say again unnatural looking okay so snapshot II just write the light kind of doesn't look like a regular natural like photograph yes okay alright so right on the one you expose your issues right okay so it didn't look the way I thought it was gonna look or it didn't look like that through the viewfinder right these some of the things okay anybody else shadows okay cool we wait to use or not use it since when do you use and when not to use for instance outdoors yeah all these things we're going to cover today so I'm so glad you're here anybody else have any other issues that you know besides you to get a perk anis Manuel trying to get a perfect exposure in manual all these things we can handle and off-camera flash well that's a little beyond the scope of this class but the same principles apply he asked about off-camera flash well that's a whole other class but what we will the concepts are the same you know with with automatic flash yes okay so when you look when you're in a situation how do you evaluate a scene and say flash would be a good thing for this instead of what I'm seeing right okay good all those things are going to be hopefully at the end of the two hours that we have here today you'll be able to know a little bit more about when and when not to use it and how we can avoid certain pitfalls that may happen along the way like having images that are too bright or too dark and why those things happen so we'll share some of those things with you and hopefully you'll get a really good idea when we're done here how it all works so again this is the fundamentals of flash so we're gonna start this is not designed for professionals so is anybody a professional in room awesome I look well quasi right has anybody ever made any money selling pictures at all a couple of you alright good so you know that's the rule if you've sold anything in photography you're a professional that's what I my benchmark was when I was like 15 I was like I sold something so now we're professional I just wanted to be called professional for some reason but whether you're a professional or you're an advanced amateur or a rank amateur it doesn't matter all of this stuff I think will be good for you and some of it may be review some of it may be new to you hopefully most of it will be new to you especially when we get into how do I fix some of the problems that I'm experiencing with flash photography so the characteristics of flash and this gentleman over here it said it right it looks unnatural we you know somebody said shadows that we see and those aren't that don't really exist from camera position when you're looking with you know perhaps using natural light those things because flash only exists for a brief period of time and by and large there's no modeling light or like you know the lights here in the event space that you can see where the shadows are falling real time like natural light would so those are some of the things like okay this picture here right you know we've got the shadow from this mic stand or whatever that is that's going right across this kid's face that wasn't there when you looked at it but because your Flash was positioned in a particular place that shadow fell right on his face and you're like flash sucks and I get it like but there are things that you can do to remedy some of these things but it's but historically a lot of people are frustrated with Flash and I get it but it comes with understanding something to be able to then begin to figure out remedies to make it look better so anyway most I would say you know that we talked about the harsh look right weight especially when you have your your your camera and it doesn't look bad when you're holding a horizontal but if you ever take a picture of somebody when the cameras like this and then you have this big shadow on the other side of them it's you know just giving them a basic cutout of what their profile looks like on the wall those are some things that you'll see somebody mentioned manual flash control well today we're mainly going to talk about ETTL meaning automatic flash ETTL stands for evaluative through the lens and evaluative is the metering system where the light how the light is measured in the camera it evaluates the scene and then gives an a the camera an idea of how much flash power do we need for this particular scene so all right so some Flash basics recycled time has been one thing that some people you know complain about and a lot of it is okay how do I do I have new batteries in there do I have old batteries I'm waiting to take this picture the moments happening it's there you know and I'm still waiting for this flash to recycle it's frustrating so that's one of the beauties of natural light is you can take the picture obviously at the moment that that the pinnacle of when that action is happening so having some of the tools in your head of how we can help that recycle time be faster so that it's ready when you're ready those are some of the things like for instance shooting closer to your subject instead of using a longer telephoto lens to try to bring everything and that's one thing because it takes much more energy to move the flash further away than it does working with a close-up subject shooting with wider lens apertures everybody familiar with what an aperture is it's on the lens it's similar to the way your eye operates you have that iris in your eye that closes down in real bright situations and opens up in darker situations same thing with a lens lens has one of those so if you open up the lens wider that allows the flash not only to reach recycle faster because it's using less energy it also allows you to get further distance with your flash okay the other thing is is everybody familiar with with term ISO means anybody not it's okay so ISO is basically the camera sensitivity to light and the higher that number you've got ranges from like 100 which is a very low ISO not as sensitive to light typically in the film days we would go out and you would buy one hundred speed film and that would be what they would recommend to go outside with on a sunny day shoot with with that the higher that ISO the more sensitive it is to light and meaning that you can photograph hand held in dimmer light situations or even candle light and still get fast enough shutter speeds so you don't have cameras shake that's without using a flash now if we're using flash you've got a portable light setup with you that you're bringing and that can help in a lot of different situations bring the light levels up so that you can still handhold your camera and not worry about camera shake but higher ISO s again make the whole camera more sensitive to light meaning that you get more efficiency out of the batteries so fresh batteries and then also if you have one of the flashes like this this is the 600 EXR T on these cameras that I have here the predecessor to that was the 580 X - some of you have that I talked to you earlier before we started there's the 4:30 range which is kind of the middle-of-the-road flash in the Canon system those the the the 5 80s and the 600 s have the ability to plug in an external power source so something we can and make say a little battery pack that you can put eight eight double a's in and that speed also speeds up the efficiency of you know the recycle time and things like that the 430 series and below that won't accept an external battery power so anyway so those are them those are some things that you can do to help with recycle time so now on the back of the speed light you'll see usually it's a red light this is your flash ready light when that comes on you would think that okay we're ready to go and in most cases yes you are ready to go but generally I would say it's not 100% fully charged when that light turns on so if you make you know if you're looking through you know the back of your camera in you know make sure that light is on maybe give it another second or two before it's really fully charged and in most cases you're not going to need using ETTL automatic flash you're not going to need a full recharge you'll be fine in most cases but just a little bit but if you're looking through your viewfinder and you see the little squiggly arrow that's the flash indicator when that illuminates in the viewfinder that also comes on right when that red light comes on so you can get an idea of just you can see that come on and the in the information panel on the bottom of your frame when that comes on give it a second or two if you really want to wait till that full power comes in all right and now flash sync speed every camera has what's called the maximum sync speed and what does that mean anybody know well you can't when we're talking about shutter speeds here so every camera has what's a maximum shutter speed that it can use during normal flash you know operation that will say okay I'm not going to be able to go over this flash and when you have a Canon dedicated flash on your camera you could try to turn the shutter speed higher than that number and it won't let you because it's smart enough to know that hey this isn't gonna work and you know what would end up happening if you if you could you would end up with a picture that has maybe half of the frame blacked out if you've ever seen that on older cameras or if you tried plugging in a studio strobe into your camera you can still achieve that because the camera doesn't know that it's a can of dedicated flash so you would see that so in most cases it's about two hundreds of a second on rebel cameras it's two hundredth of a second the 5d series its 200th of a second cameras like the 6d series of the 60 and the 16 mark two is one one 80th of a second and then when you get into cameras like the 1d series the 7d series and that forty d50 D 60d 70d ad D that it's a lot of these those cameras are usually 250th of a second so it's just a little faster that way not by much though but one important thing to note is that the shutter speed does not really affect flash power what effects flash power is the aperture and the ISO so I'll show you some examples here so this picture you're looking at of this little girl in sure that was illuminated with flash of course yes you can see some detail on the background there but what happened the difference here between this picture and the last picture I'll go back one so you can get a look backgrounds darker here right how did that happen it had nothing to do with the flash at all if you look at the exposure on her skin it's excuse me if you look at her exposure on the skin it's pretty similar from one to the next what we did change was the shutter speed and what a slower shutter speed will allow the light to kind of build up more so you're putting more light into the camera via a slower shutter speed and that will then control how the background looks and for most of you if you're working in a mode like program mode you you have very little control over independent shutter speed it's going to pretty much stay especially in a dim room it'll probably stay at a close to about sixtieth of a second it won't drop below that by design now if you go into other modes and we're going to talk about that later how those behave that can be changed but by-and-large shutter speeds are the one thing that allows you to control the background intensity the the flash is going to take care of the soap the subject locally in front of you but then you know you realize that flash isn't going to travel a great distance beyond of course not certainly not way back to the end of the the room there in the church so that's where shutter speed comes in and I'll we'll share some of those things with you so anyway exposure pretty pretty much say the same on her the other thing that controls how far that flash goes right is the aperture if we open up the aperture we can get further distance if you close the aperture down the distance diminishes and you're making the flower the flash work harder the more you close that lens down and when you close the lens down of course you're increasing your your depth of field in other words how much foreground to background is in focus the more you open your lens the shallower that depth of field goes so if I'm focusing on on what's your name Eileen so if I'm focusing on Eileen in the second row from this distance at an aperture of say F 2.8 one row two rows three rows back will gradually become more and more out of focus if I close that lens down to say f11 f-16 those lens apertures will then yield more depth of field so you'll start seeing more in focus in the background but of course now when you're closing that lens down it makes it harder for more light to get in the camera therefore you have to use more flash power so so apertures of f-16 f8 okay the more you open that lens the more efficient the flash becomes so it's okay to make your flash work harder if that's what you need if you need a lens aperture of f/16 go ahead just expand that you're gonna be changing batteries more often and of course then the ISO is the other thing that really controls efficiency of the flash or how how bright it can be and how far it can go so if I'm shooting at 100 ISO I could expect especially indoors like this right it would be fine for very short distances it will be more efficient of course if we raise the ISO up it will go farther now when I raise the ISO up it's it's a global adjustment so meaning that it's also going to make the room the ambient light that the route the light that's constant we can see not even these I mean just this artificial light that's on me right now but any type of like room lighting or natural light that's coming in a room that will also brighten up so if your backgrounds too dark raise your ISO and open up your aperture and you'll start seeing all these things in the background change and just you have to adjust them to your liking and well I'll show you examples as we go through here so you can get an idea of what that actually means and how you how you do it so but with our cameras today I mean the the ISO range that we can shoot now my starting point used to be in earlier digital days 400 and that was considered fairly high because of what we call digital noise it's that grain you would see you know in the picture picture now my starting point is usually about 1200 ISO and I can control everything with with shutter speed with regards to how much of the background I want to be you know do I want to be brighter or do I want it to be dimmer and that's where manual mode can come in you can also change some things around I'm a big proponent of shooting an aperture priority because I it allows me to concentrate on just one thing rather than have to worry about both shutter speed and aperture and I'll share some some tips with you as we go along with that and you little you know some pictures that you'll see that will kind of help open up the the floodgates so you could see alright this is what it means when I have my camera in aperture priority versus program mode who shoots in program mode most of the time here it's okay if you do okay that's fine what's some of your favorite shooting modes like it's okay if you're in green mode - that little green box anyone anyone after party okay you're like I like it some people have called me not a professional because I use aperture priority and I I quickly show them how it helps me I mean it separates so why we make it I mean there's lots of different reasons to do what you do as long as the image comes out the way you wanted it to you're perfect well okay so the gentleman the first row says okay I like aperture priority but when I go indoors the shutter slows down and I have to worry about that so there's some things that you have to be aware of like a priority and shutter priority are like a semi-automatic mode so the camera is going to behave like it wants to expose the room properly it doesn't even care that there's a flash on the camera it's going to attempt to give you proper exposure and if you're in a dark room that exposure is going to be the shutter speeds going to be pretty slow and you may end up with a flash picture that where you have a somewhat frozen subject from the flash and then you have a ghosting or some sort of blur have you ever seen that before yeah we all have that's that's the reason for that what's that again the person could be blurry too right I mean if like I just took a picture of Debbie when she was introducing me and I didn't even look I didn't look at the camera setup I just shot it and that was a slow shutter speed because I was in aperture priority at 100 ISO so I have a picture of Debbie with a somewhat ghosted view of her and then blur I could see right through her so it's kind of interesting but you know the more you play with this the more you learn and then you know the more mistakes you make you learn hopefully you learn from those mistakes and then you don't do those the next time when they come around that's how you learn yeah yeah if I had a tripod and Deb was Debbie was holding still then that changes the dynamic a little bit but I was moving she was moving with us with a shutter that's completely wide-open for it I think it was probably open for about a second which is an eternity to try to handhold if you're on a tripod that's a little different all right so you went to a sporting event aperture parties which you went to and then you know just raising the ISO is that what you're saying or just you switched to - shudders - shudders - right okay so we switched to a constant shutter speed went to shutter priority okay and then so you're now shutter priority right you're you're choosing your shutter speed it's gonna pick a matching aperture so now you've said to the camera don't go any slower than 200 and of course your pictures were were clear or less camera shake or slow shutter so you're getting more frozen image of your subject and even a two hundredth of a second you could still experience some examples I'll show you in here where you depending how flash how fast the subject is moving even with flash you can get subject blur and I'll show you I have my son swinging a baseball bat with flash and you can see there's blur in there and there's there's a mode on the flash that that's called high-speed sync that we'll talk about that will freeze that action okay so what we want so again this is the similar gauge that you would expect to see on the back of the flash this is the flash distance range in other words when you're in automatic flash ETTL you can see in the upper left hand corner of the of the viewfinder pane the LCD pane on the flash you know your Annie TTL that way that's the automatic flash and that's the range that you could expect now this one's in meters you can change it to feet if you like but that's the range of expect and of course there's your aperture and then this here is the zoom head and every flash from the 4:30 on up and in fact some of the slower other the one from down from the 4:30 to the 3:20 has a manual zoom on it but the 4:30 series and up have this automatic zoom so that when you're zooming your lens the flash will change the cone of light how wide or how narrow that beam is based on what focal length you're at so that will change because there's no point in wasting light if you're zoomed into 100 millimetres right there's no point in having light go all the way out here if you're not seeing it so that's what that flash is that that's again built-in to keep you a little more efficient with the flash you're not wasting light that's not even being used and I'll show you normally when you're in auto mode on the zoom head it will automatically keep up with you you can manually override that if you want for an effect or whatever so again ISO is also factored into this if you guys haven't gotten that already and then generally speaking the minimum distance that flash should be used at is about three feet unless you're doing a macro type of situation but if you have the the flash on camera okay if you get much closer than three feet to your subject that you're gonna you know the flash can't get down far enough so a little bit of more working distance then you're starting to see the effect of the whole flash on your scene so plus if you're that close to your subject nobody wants to get a flash like you know that's that's paparazzi stuff right you're up close which is nothing wrong with that either so now one thing that that is also frustrating I think for a lot of people about Flash is that have you ever taken a flash picture in the backgrounds like completely dark yeah why is that and that's frustrating well flash can only expose for one distance because it it's light it travels in a straight line so if if I've got good exposure on my second row right here what's gonna happen way back there it's going to get dark if the flash is right on camera and it's directed forward I can change that a little bit if I want to take that flash head and turn it up and maybe bounce it off a wall that's changing the dynamic a little bit but we'll get into that as well but generally speaking if you're if you're talking about on-camera flash and the flash head is directed forward it's only gonna expose a one distance so that's called flash fall-off and you'll see this particular picture right you've got he's well exposed but of course this girl by the window here there's no real flash hitting her because the flash had properly exposed for this gentleman in front even though you can still see her there she's not exposed by the flash because it didn't reach that far same thing happened here right you see this is a really prime example of flash fall-off where everybody in the back there is in you know it's it's again at one distance now one thing you can do to remedy this situation is if I'm taking a picture of you guys here right and this so I've got a little bit of a fall-off here I could take this flash head and just angle it a little bit so that now I'm getting the the cone of the light instead of beating here angled it you sir now you're going to be illuminated by the edge same thing now you get the bulk of the light and more lights traveling back this way that's one method of changing how that you know all things considered just changing the direction of that when you're up close and you're shooting wide-angle things like that that'll help out a lot and that would have helped out in this situation as well now white balance this is another thing the the light that comes out of your Flash is balanced for daylight meaning now daylight can be a lot of things right it you notice that sunsets and sunrises generally can be very Warren G and warm right but when we when we talk about daylight balanced flash we're talking about like if you were going out midday and it's it looks pretty normal outside and you're you know you set your white balance for auto white balance looks good the flash looks good but if I take my flash and I use it at a picture during sunset I get two different looks that you get this nice warm background but the flash maybe looks a little the skin tones look maybe look a little cold on your subject they don't match so that's a that's a white balance thing and there's also I mean if you really want to get into it there are correction filters that you can put on your on your front of your flash that are basically like amber gels they're just like plastic or mylar type looking things cellophane type things but they've got a color correction built into them and there's varying degrees of you know how Orange they are and that will help balance that but that's a whole other class the question was do I use daylight when I'm using my flash for the water white balance well auto white balance does a pretty good job most of the time if you're unsure about what where to go with it put an auto and then use it until it gives you a reason not to use it and then you can you can change it there's there's different methods of you know you could use you know you could use the daylight setting which is going to be a constant so you've got a bunch of different white balance options you've got auto white balance you've got daylight you've got shade you've got tungsten you've got fluorescent you have a custom white balance and then you on some cameras not the rebel cameras but anything above rebel you generally have an option to set a Kelvin temperature or that you'll see a little K in the white balance menu and that you can dial in a color temperature from like 2500 degrees Kelvin all the way up to 10,000 degrees and so that you want to see the effect of that it's really easy put live view on and just go into the white balance setting and then just turn it and you'll see the color change right in front of your eyes it's kind of interesting little tutorial on how color balance is effective so so you've got daylight you've got flash of course the flash setting the white balance and flash setting on your camera is a little bit cooler than the daylight balance setting so the flash tubes and our cameras that they they emit a light that's a little bit colder than daylight so what we do the flash setting where you would see a difference here if you set the white balance in flash versus daylight you would see a little bit of a little bit of a warmer look when you use the flash setting because the flash tube is colder meaning a little more blue what's the opposite of blue yellow so if you look at the color wheel blue is the exact opposite so to correct for that the flash white balance setting adds a little bit of warmth into that white balance setting to kind of take off that that that coldness that the the flash tube is emitting so you're just going to see a little bit of that so if you if you want maybe you're shooting daylight without and you want it just a little bit of warmth in the picture put it on the flash setting and it'll just warm it up a little bit try it now again I talked about the Kelvin white balance that's again dialing it in manually it's a good idea a little exercise to practice this and just not with flash but just while you're you know and outside or in your house just take the covin scale if you have it on your camera again rebel cameras don't have it but everything else generally does just dial it in you'll see what you think looks gonna is going to look best and then of course the last one is Kelvin temperature and our custom white balance scuse me custom white balance is really the the best way to get your color completely neutral meaning there's no color cast or anything like that but it comes at a price of extra work on your end so meaning that you would have to like carry around a white balance tool like a grey card or something like that and you would have to go into the lighting and photograph that under the lighting that you want and then go into the custom white balance setting and have the camera set it up for neutralizing any of those white balance it's a little more work if you're doing something that you want you know that color to be neutralized and you're not going to be moving around a lot it's not a bad idea now how many people in the room photograph in JPEG only or I'll just start with JPEG shooters you have two options JPEG or raw jpg shooters raise your hands rate high okay nothing wrong with that you just have you have to if you're going to shoot JPEG versus raw you have to do a little bit of extra work to make sure that your settings in camera are just about as perfect as they can be because a JPEG is processed in the camera meaning that you it's very difficult to make color balance changes after the fact because it's it's like a remember the old Polaroid film days where you know you just process it would come out and what you got was what you got that's very difficult to make changes without damaging the file you know throwing information out and also JPEGs are compressed meaning that they're designed to be to fit in a smaller area on your computer than a raw file it takes up a lot more space RAW files whose raw file shooter okay good that's good to see not saying that you have to be one or the other there's no wrong or right answer but if you're shooting raw you have the ability of making changes after the fact in your computer to your white balance your picture style exposure all sorts of things that open up it's a safety net so I say it this way if if you want to take up tightrope-walking as a hobby do you want a net or don't you I want a net you know unless I'm on a mission but shooting raw is like having a safety net and it's a it's that extra latitude that you don't really have when you're shooting JPEG you get more after the fact but you have to process it so it takes more work in the in the back end there's a give-and-take you could shoot both ways sure yeah and this is what I recommend if you're not really sure shoot JPEG and RAW and maybe 80 or 90% of your JPEGs come out great you don't have to do work on them now yay but for that shot that just happened you know you had you know a monkey jump out and do something totally crazy maybe you know flipped you the bird or something who knows and you got the shot but guess what it was three stops underexposed because you were trying to fumble around with your camera and it didn't nothing happened but if you're in RAW you could probably save that shot versus JPEG where you don't have that latitude anyway I'm looking I'm looking at you because you raised your hand so don't I'm not picking on you I'm just saying there's reasons to do everything I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong that's why we put it in there it's it's great to have that so the question is what's my ideal range for using flash well that's a really open-ended question but in general I'd my method now there's not a lot of there's a lot of people out there that that depends on what you're doing the answer to everything a photography is it depends and in general the way I use flash I rarely use flash on camera anymore most of it I like doing off camera but when I do use it on camera from doing an event or something like that like a wedding or you know whatever I need it I need a camera I need a flash on board generally it's it's you know six eight ten feet maybe fifteen feet away is is most of what ends up being photographed if you if you need something further away there's some action happening across the room and you can't physically walk there in a quick amount of time to get it and it's you know that would be a situation where I would you know when I'm using the zoom on my camera the flash head is gonna narrow that cone of light right maybe I'll just if I need to quick raise my eye iso up so i can get a little more efficiency out of the flash and get it that way but if for most cases it's fairly close up stuff five to 20 feet away okay and then you know you control that background with with shutter speed if you if you know if it's not happening action very quickly you can control that and just slow that shutter down things like that so yes sir if you're shooting raw plus JPEG does the white balance of is doesn't the white balance effect the raw so no so the white balance in RAW you've got all basically it captures all the data so you've got all the white balance options available to you after the fact in JPEG weight the way you have it set at the time the picture is taken it's like it's all burned in there so you can't change the white balance now you can say Eric you know I go into Photoshop and I can change the color sure you could change the color but that's not the white balance the specific white balance for a scene is really different than changing the color in JPEG now you could make some shifts but anytime you make a shift in a JPEG in color or any other adjustment for that matter when you go to save it it's now recompress in that file so if I had an 8 by 10 piece of paper and that will consider that my my raw file uncompressed this is getting a little bit off-topic but I think it's it's good to share with you I can't really put that in my pocket without doing damage to it it won't fit right so consider that you know your computer how much space you have on your hard drive that'll be my pocket now think about JPEG is there compressed so I could now take that 8 by 10 paper and fold it several times until it fits in here if you drew a picture on it right I could put it in there I could pull it back out open it up and the pictures there but now what you see with the paper you see all the creases right so all the creases metaphorically are damage to the file because you compressed it and every time you save a JPEG you're recompressing it again and you're throwing out data so the file ends up getting smaller in size and smaller and smaller every time you save it and eventually it'll look like dogmeat if you keep saving it over and over and over again not saying that if you save a JPEG two or three times that it's going to look bad it's not but just keep in mind if you have that picture of a lifetime right and you keep saving it and making changes and saving it again your degradation the file every time you save it lesson over let's get back to flash real quick do you need the flash to do a custom white balance so are you asking me if you're using flash and you go out into a scene indoors okay do you need a custom white balance that do you need to have your Flash on to get a proper custom light balancing yes because any light that's going to be hitting your subject if you want to take any color cast or anything out of there because there could be a mixed lighting situation you could have window light coming in here you could have tungsten light coming from over here plus flash that's three different light sources and probably three different light temperatures so now yes you would want to take a picture with taking the white balance right based on all the light that's going to be in the picture because if you just balance for tungsten and the other light source but not flash and then you add a flash that's changing the whole color right so we're getting a little bit beyond what we need to in this class so I want to keep continuing where we're going here so a little bit more about white balance here's it here's a classic example of mix color and what does that mean well we've got daylight white balance on her face and then you've got this tungsten lighting from the porch light if you had the camera set to that day light or flash area on the white balance and even auto white balance will will do this because it's looking this is the primary subject here so it's going to attempt to white balance for this you're gonna end up with that amber or yellow looking thing have you ever photographed in a church before take a picture of the bridegroom walking down the aisle you know and in the the altar looks nice and you know yellow which maybe some people like some people don't some people's ago that's beautiful so warm looking other people may look at it and say that's a hideous looking thing so some people would want to balance the two and that's where those color correction filters come in so if you're photographing in a in a tungsten environment you could put these filters on there called CTO filters color temperature orange and they come in varying degrees so if you're in a full tungsten environment you could put a full CTO on there and basically what you're doing is you're taking the light that's coming out of that flash and your balance sitting exactly for the tungsten light that's in the room and no so then you put your white balance on tungsten and everything looks neutralized and pretty that's a little bit beyond the scope of what this class is but I wanted to share that with you so you understand it not that there's anything wrong with this picture it's it's okay but you're just so you understand that you're gonna get a little different look with mixed light sources like this so all the white balance can be good in these conditions you know again it's going to look at the primary subject first with you know with whatever is closest to the camera whatever that primary subject is to base that white balance on so now the AF assist beam some of you have probably noticed when you're photographing in dark situations and your camera is in the one-shot mode meaning you're not on can you know a servo mode where you're tracking moving subjects but you're in the one-shot mode where you take you one shot you hear the beep right and it's just focusing on one thing if you see that if you're in that mode right I don't know if it's not dark enough in here but you'll see a little red beam come out kind of looks like that that's the focus assist from here and when you're UN basically when when these cameras first came out with with focus assist it was great because you could chase little kids around the room with this little red beam and you know freak him out but it was fun to do I was tormenting kids but anyway so those red beans allow you to photograph in complete darkness if you wanted to and it will the camera will find those red beams and focus on the subject that's closest that that falls within the array of the autofocus points and it's just it's good thing to have if you're in a dim light or in this situation I think they're either like they're indoors or they're backlit or something from there yeah it might be like the doors open or something and there's really no light coming forward hitting them and that's where your Flash comes in that's what this is a good reason why okay when you ask the question know when to use it and when not this is a great situation if you have a picture that looks like this the background is exposed great the subject there's nothing on them that could be an artistic choice but I kind of doubt it in this situation if we'd simply just turned the flash on boom there they are and this is as simple as just even popping up the if you have a pop-up flash on your camera just hit the button and it'll look just like this the camera does a really good job of balancing foreground meaning the subjects and background especially outdoors and things like that so they if it system is good you know in those dimmer situations you could also use the AF assist beam if for instance you are having trouble focusing in a really really dim light you can shut the flash down so it's not contributing to the light to the scene but you're still using the auto focus assist to help the camera just focus maybe there was you know lighting that you didn't want to have that flash look to it the ambient light was great but it was so dark that the camera wasn't focusing and you're searching back and forth just turned the AF assist beam on on the flash and we mean that you can just turn the flash from contributing light to the scene and that's a cool way of handling it so ETTL is that - is that that the hash mark there at the end is just the second version of this of this metering system that Cannon has east and for evaluative and the TTL stands for through the lens like I said in the beginning and it basically he breaks your your frame up into a grid and it's looking for a subject and it finds it right and these are the grids that now the camera is using its evaluating how far that subject is away and how much flash power is going to be needed to illuminate them properly evaluate Allah metering does a really good job now there are situations where you need to adjust it and this is something we'll get into in a little bit with regards to how a meter actually works in your camera so we'll continue that in a moment but a situation like this again this might be something that you take and you go wow this I wish I had something to better illuminate my subject and you could use again a situation where you could pop up the pop-up flash or just turn on your your auxiliary flash that you have on the hot shoe in the camera and then you went from that to this and whether you're in program mode or aperture priority mode or shutter priority mode even manual more than likely this candidate will look more balanced if you're just turning the flash on when you're in manual mode and you think okay automatic TTL flash is that going to work in manual mode when I when my camera's mode is in manual and I have to control the shutter speed the aperture the ISO all that stuff even though you're in manual mode the camera looks at the settings the and the ISO and it's going to attempt to give you a proper exposure based on the camera's settings so even though your cameras in manual mode the flash is still an automatic and it's looking at whatever settings you have and it's going to attempt to give you proper exposure amount of light put out of that flash to give you proper exposure so that's kind of interesting and there are reasons to put your camera in manual versus aperture priority and one of those is if you're in a dark room and let's just say you're an aperture priority shooter again if knowing what we know about aperture priority it's attempting to expose the room it doesn't pay attention to where the flash is on the camera it's expecting to expose properly as if there were no flash so in a dark room you may end up with a very slow shutter speed right and then you end up with those ghosting images that we've talked about earlier so that's a really good situation where you just take your camera put it on manual mode so that the flash or the shutter speed perhaps is maybe at a sixtieth of a second or better and the flash will do its job and you won't have that real slow shutter speed so you can just control that alright so again evaluative it's working like this it's seeing the the child here on the pew and exposing member it's exposing at one distance only because it's on camera flash there's a pre flash with ETTL that happens so that it happens so quickly you may not even notice it but it's a little blip of light before the main exposure goes off and that pre flash is what the camera is using to evaluate the whole scene and give you the proper output on the flash so it happens so quickly you don't even see it I did a high speed video of it and slowed it down for another presentation so you can see it but it's it's a bit you don't even see it and the camera evaluates all that so quickly does a good job so alright outdoors when you're using even the pop-up flash up close in a situation like this this may be you know this is this particular shot here it's just natural like a simple pop-up of the flash or turn your flash your auxilary fashion on and all of a sudden now you're starting to see details and those deep shadows that you weren't seeing before Photography is about controlling contrast so is it you know when you have somebody's hat on like this or maybe even without a hat you know you've seen pictures where the Sun is straight overhead and you get these like raccoon eyes real deep shadows and oh I get it a lot when somebody photographs me with a you know straight overhead light and it's just not pretty like this gentleman's got a nice leg is that connect can i call that a fedora is that a fedora that you're wearing the Hat it's a cool hat right all right so he's got his brim hat right and so I'm looking at the light that's hitting him right now and I can see his eyes but the camera is not going to see that my eyes have a much more much greater ability to see into the shadows than the camera does so this is part of the problem with photography because the cameras aren't as sensitive as your eyes are your eyes have an amazing ability to see into the shadows and also on bright days like this be able to see details in the highlights so you may say ah I wish I would have done something more on this one because I can't see into the shadows so just turning the flash on a little pop of light will help fill that now is it an award-winner absolutely not but that's not what our expectation was on this one we just wanted to actually see somebody's facial expression whereas before yeah now you could take this in Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever it is and brighten the whole thing up so you can see the detail but what's gonna then happen to all this area as you do it as you brighten it up it's a global adjustment when you brighten that up so now you're gonna end up with what a washed out background so you can't have it both ways without flash if you're using just natural light and you don't get the great exposure where you need it on the face you got a you're gonna have to go in and post and lighten that up and then all this gets washed out flash will then fill in where it needs to and you'll end up with a much more pleasing image like we do here so is that mean just simple pop up flash is that helping a little bit don't be afraid to use flash you know my my father would always say to me you're outside why are you using flash well I did some reading dad you know so alright so here's another now I want to talk about how a meter works and this is the same whether you're using flash or you're using natural light meters do one thing average okay it's looking for highlights it's looking for shadows and it's looking for mid-tones and it if it doesn't see that it gets confused and it doesn't really know what to do so in this situation here you've got this lady with this light-colored outfit on the camera looks at that and says there's too much light here I need to squelch the power down on the flash and you ended up with a picture that's that's kind of dark the same thing would happen if I was taking a picture what's your name yeah Vince as in Vince's wearing a black shirt he's got a black hat on skin tones are a little dark so the cameras gonna look at Vince and it's gonna say whoa there's not enough light available here I need to add a whole lot more flash power to you and most cases Vince pictures of you will probably if you're wearing just what you're wearing right now pictures are going to be a little bit brighter than they really should be of you and if you know that going in before you ever take the picture you'll know to make a quick adjustment to one thing and I'll share that with you in a moment so light colored subjects can produce issues for meters now this is all based on the fact that we're using ETTL automatic flash not manual flash okay so again here's the valued of metering is looking at the this area here and saying plenty of light available I don't need to give you as much flash power so it squelched the power and you end up with an underexposed flash image same thing this woman now this is again not an award winner but the the that her hair was very close to the camera it's fairly bright looking at the tonal value and it squelched the power down this is another prime example of flash can only expose at one distance you say well they're not that far behind it doesn't matter and even it's even more prevalent when you get closer to your subject because there's a there's a thing called the inverse square law and the closer you are to your subject the faster that light falls off if you back off from your subject you end up getting more a little bit more latitude in how that flash will look at further distances from the camera so again same problem here so how do we deal with these problems well oh here's one other thing this is great because you end up with these little these lights that are also in the frame the cameras looking at these and saying plenty of light available I don't need to give you much flash power that's a common situation as well and you say flash sucks I hate it and this is part of the frustration that a lot of people have with using flash in their photography so your first weapon on this that you want to check is it's called flash exposure compensation now there are two different types of exposure compensation one is flash exposure compensation where you're only making the flash brighter or dimmer and then there's ambient exposure compensation and that is independent and I'll show you a really good example of how we control each of those independently in a little bit okay so now based on this picture what do you think happened knowing what we know already about how a meter works white dress right so the cameras looking at that white dress and saying all right the evaluative metering is only looking at that white dress because remember flash can expose at one distance properly so it's just looking at that white dress it's not really paying attention don't ever anything in the background and like colored subjects you're gonna end up with pictures that look like this so that now changes the the calculus in your head right when you're looking at you have to look at what the tonal range is or what the main subject is wearing or if it's if it's a human you know or whatever even if it's not something like human you could photograph whatever with flash the same principle applies here so all we got to do is put flash exposure compensation we're deliberately making the flash brighter or dimmer and to compensate for that all right this was plus one and three stops now I use the word stop does everybody know what I mean when I say stops anybody not know it's okay or in a learning environment that's basically an aperture setting now on in case of the flash we're making this the flash if we make it one stop brighter that's you know when you look at the exposure needle it's one click or it's actually three clicks but you'll see a bigger hash mark you'll see two smaller hash marks and then a bigger one those incremental lines each one of those big incremental lines there is one stop of light so this is mu when I say three clicks that's mean it takes three clicks to get to one stop if you have your camera set up in third stop it's a good starting point so a question was how do you know to go to one point three and a lot of it is practice when you see a particular subject as you know if you if you get hit in the head like you go down your stairs every day and you're really steep stairs and you hit your head on the top of the thing you're like in a farmhouse or something if you do that day in and day out you're gonna go you know what I need to duck you learn so I'm gonna show you yeah well the dress it because flash cannot think the question was don't we worry about over exposing the dress so you you want to get enough light so that the skin tone is proper if the skin tone is proper meaning that it's as it appears to you in normal daylight or whatever it is as long as the skin tone is is accurate to what it is in real life the dress is going to be fine because that's all the same distance right now there is a little earlier on there there was one tool that Canon put into our cameras called highlight tone priority and this this if you over expose a highlight to the point where there's no detail there in the right you can't print it like you can't pull it back even in raw that's grossly overexposing now highlight tone priority is design was really designed for wedding photographers because earlier in the in the day if you know a lot of photographers were saying oh well the skin looks great but the but that dress there's no detail in the dress and these brides paid you know tons of money for these elaborate dresses and you couldn't see the detail so highlight tone priority within one stop pulls some of that detail back in just enough to get detail on the dress and it's it's a nice feature and I use it and I have situations like that the the only that would even call it an issue but one of the limitations is that you lose the lowest ISO on the camera which in this case would be 100 so if you can't get your camera down to 100 iso check your highlight tone priority and it's it's in the viewfinder and in the LCD it's in a menu it's it's listed at highlight tone priority but on the top if you have on the LCD it'll say d+ that's how you know that highlight tone priority is active and so it's basically just increasing the dynamic range of your camera a little bit within you know an extra stop to pull that detail back in so alright so in this situation what happened here exact opposite of the light right so we looked at we've got a dark jacket we've got this dark tone wood and you ended up with with a skin tone that's overexposed have you ever anybody have a black lab dog or a dog that's got darker fur you photograph your dog and usually it's the Firenze up looking more gray than than black that's what happened the meter looked at that and said not enough light here I need to give you more exposure and you end up with an overexposed image so it when you have a situation like this you're gonna need to dial down the power so that that black starts coming into a proper range of what it's actually look what it actually looks like so there's - one stop there's - two stops so maybe somewhere in between minus 1 and minus 2 you want to play with it this is one good thing that you can use flash exposure bracketing for if you're not sure set flash exposure bracketing it'll take you take three shots in a row and the flash power will will you know change each shot depending on how you set it yes real quick if you you just opened up a whole can of worms brother so I want to get too deep into histograms because it's kind of above this the scope of this class but let's talk afterwards and and we'll cover it for you so all right so flash exposure compensation how do we set it there's a couple different ways one you could go right onto the flash - you could go into the top of the camera on the LCD panel and then well third version is you could dive into the menu into the flash control menu and do it there that's going to take a lot more time though I like stuff that's quick and when I you know everybody's different and you have to set whatever you're you know comfortable with but for me I like doing yana flash because this is what i want to make brighter and so i just hit the little plus minus button on the back here and i turn the dial and it's a really quick way for me to do it now you can also do it I'll show you here I got a slide on it okay so on the camera body if you have like a you know one of the ATD type cameras that series or above not rebel where you have this little LCD on the top of your camera you'll see the little ISO button which also has the flash exposure compensation this right here - it's a two-position switch well dual dual purpose really is what I should say but that's the that's the flash exposure compensation button so basically you push this button and you turn the rear dial and then you will see the exposure needle move to either the right of the left depending which way you turn it to the right would be adding more flash power to the left would be less flash power now my way is not the only way but this is the way I like I like taking this is a 600d xrt flash and so I just I get this little exposure indicator here I hit the button right beneath this plus - and that's my flash exposure indicator the compensation and then I just turned the dial now there's a custom function that you can set so you don't have to actually press this button you can just turn the dial if you're if you're a wedding photographer or you're photographing kids you need to move work quickly I like pushing less buttons than more buttons although ask my wife and she would probably disagree with that but I have mine set to turn just the dial in a custom function it just works for me don't forget to hit the set button when you're done that will confirm the choice you've made and then now whatever you're set at it will remain there until you physically change it so if your next picture is too bright or too dark look at your flash exposure compensation and because it's going to stay there until you change it here's that custom function that allows you just turn the dial it's custom function 13 for you guys that are taking keeping score ok so again here's one of those situations where we photograph this girl she's got this I think it's a bunny outfit but it's white we'll just call it white we think it's white it doesn't look white here it looks kind of gray just change your exposure compensation this is the classic thing for families to go and you know the kids are doing a thing at the school play or whatever and you're in the audience and the flash is traveling a pretty fair distance and the pictures are looking cruddy because they didn't come take this class so just a flash exposure compensation now the one thing I will say to you is if you're out in that example if you're out in the audience and your kids way up on the stage if if you're trying to get the pop-up flash to go that far you you're you need to like get your expectations in line because it's only designed pop-up flash is only designed to go about 10 feet now if you raise the ISO knowing what we know already about flash you can get more distance out of it but remember it's only this big versus that it's got a lot more power the external flash does so if you're going to do something like that you really need to consider a bigger flash or hopefully the the the stage lights are good and you can just use that and that's a whole other exposure thing because now usually they've got these black curtains behind and then you usually end up will take you'll take a light picture and every you know everybody's washed out because knowing what we know about meters right it's looking at all that black and staying it's really dark in here I need that more exposure so when you have that situation take your ambient exposure compensation which without the flash on let's just pretend that this is off this is the dial when you just turn this dial when you're in aperture priority shutter priority or program mode you turn this dial to the to the counterclockwise it's going to go to the minus side turn it clockwise it's going to go to the plus side making it brighter or dimmer and it's very simple and you'll know that because when you look in the viewfinder you're going to see the exposure needle moved in that direction remember you're in an automatic or semi-automatic mode program shutter priority or aperture priority that needle is going to stay in the middle attempting to give you proper exposure until you change it which is exposure compensation ambient exposure compensation the flash exposure compensation is independent from that okay a little complicated I know but I have an example that's gonna like open up your eyes in a moment so you can say so flash exposure compensation this is going to be the most common thing that you use with your flash photography when you're in ETTL automatic flash mode now somebody mentioned manual flash who was that in the beginning okay so I'll ask you vent right Vince or Vinnie Vince Vince what's mom call you mom calls you Vincent alright alright she probably used your middle name in there too when you were in trouble right so all right Vincent so I totally lost where I was going with this but manual flash so you okay thank you for keeping me on track my mind's like a sieve so you mentioned manual flash Vince do you use manual flash a lot okay so what do you normally like to use automatic flash ETTL yeah okay so use automatic flash ETTL until it gives you a reason not to use it all right and that may be a whole myriad of different reasons but the one thing I will say about manual flash is that you really have to keep an eye on everything meaning if that flash is in manual mode and it's locked in to a particular power setting the second you go forward or backward you're changing the exposure because the flash to subject distance is changing and if I'm working up this close to my subject in it and I backup this much two feet I've changed my exposure so you really have to keep an eye on it now a lot of photographers that are doing say like team and individual pictures where they're taking you know one picture after the next the kids there's a little X on the floor the kid stands here okay and you're in one spot and you're not moving and they're in one spot and they're not moving sure you could do that that would be a really good reason to use manual flash because what if kids come in with different color uniforms and stuff one kids got a black uniform one kids got a light uniform and you're changing exposure compensation for every kid and your exposures are all over the place and it's frustrating right if you've got a locked-in distance you're on a tripod or even just you're stationary they're stationary put it in manual and every single picture is going to be consistent from one to the next that would be the reason why I would go to manual okay all right so using your flash in daylight okay so outside we've got lots of different lighting conditions and Sun can be one of the hardest ones to deal with because again we're nothing we're trying to control contrast and when you have son I could tell the sun's coming from like side lift she's really literally split light Suns over here really low because I can tell if I look at this shadow the sun's coming right this direction so it's probably late in the day and we're not seeing much detail on the shadow side of her face so what do we do turn flash on right boom done you still get the ambiance of what was happening and the flash now you could dial this down or up to taste right with your flash exposure compensation so if you don't want that flash look right you can turn it down a little bit you're just filling in shadows controlling that contrast same thing here all right flash on and you know yeah if you study it you could say yeah flash was used but if you look at this you you know there's no real detail you can't really see much and it'd be great if you didn't have sunglasses on you can actually see a little bit more into what's happening with with a situation but but I know now that this guy's name is Gary whereas in here I really have to look a little more to see what's going on there so it just adds a little more detail and again there's no right or wrong it's a personal taste thing I give you the tools and then you can do whatever you want with them so balance fill-flash this is one of the things that like if you like shooting in program mode and you don't want to have to think about much programs really great for a lot of things and outdoors in a sunny environment or even in a you know cloudy environment it does a really good job indoors same thing you have to worry about okay what's what's the in the background one thing I will say about program mode is that when you go indoors remember I said earlier that the flash the the shutter speed when you're in program mode won't drop below one sixtieth of a second by design because it's trying to not screw up which is what program mode is all about it's trying to give you a good exposure well okay we have a skin tone on her that is okay maybe it's a little bit dark but based on on this screen here but on my screen looks pretty good how can we improve this in program mode the camera won't go below sixtieth of a second I'm leading you down a line here so what can we do well okay that's one thing raise the ISO you could do that you could right no well the white balance doesn't change your exposure well where you're seeing skintone issues are for me like this is flash right the skintone actually looks okay what's confusing is all the dark stuff around which is making everything look a little weird so if we just put the camera in aperture priority now the camera is going to expose the scene normally I just you do it you'd break this is prokhor this is program mode okay this two clicks down to aperture priority and you get this you didn't have to fumble with your flash because remember aperture priority and shutter priority their whole job is they don't even care that a flashes on the camera they're trying to expose the scene properly regardless of there's a flash or not now the camera knows there's a flash on there and it's gonna pop it during the exposure but it doesn't care it's job is to say I need to give you proper exposure and this is what I'm thinking of all right now in program mode remember the camera is designed not to go below one sixtieth of a second so that's why you end up with that dark background so what we did when aperture priority was changing nothing else the camera slowed the shutter down by a couple stops now this is where you have to be careful because with a slow slower shutter speed you have to have a steady hand now that's one way let's just say that for for argument's sake that this was a hundred ISO and then when we turned it to aperture priority to get all of this detail in here maybe the shutter went down to an eighth of a second let's just first say for example all right that's a really tough shutter speed to handhold without getting any kind of shake or blur one month and then so how would we changing one thing how can we get this without getting that shutter speed at an eighth of a second we make the camera more sensitive to light by raising the ISO and then that now that the camera is more sensitive to light the flash is still going to properly expose our subject because it's automatic flash so whether you have a high ISO or a low ISO it's job is to take care of the subject now it's not it's not going to put out as much power but who cares how much power puts out as long as it exposes our subject properly so if you raise the ISO now the Broom lighting becomes it builds up right more into play so there's two ways you can control the background ISO and shutter speed you want the shet you want you want the background brighter first thing I would do would be lower the shutter speed if I can't lower the shutter anymore because now I'm getting camera shake raise the ISO and that will rate when you raise the ISO that will bring the shutter speed up to a point where you can hand hold and not get camera shake did that answer your question I how we shoot okay so the the question was if the flash sync speed is one 250th of a second how am i shooting at one thirtieth right okay you can't go that's like that's called maximum sync speed meaning you can't go over it you can go under it you just can't go over it unless you hit one button no you're okay it's common question so try this all right and I will guarantee that your indoor pictures are going to look better you just have to keep an eye on the shutter speed if that you know if you're like you know a sharpshooter and and you can control your heartbeat and you're super still right knock yourself out at an eighth of a second go for it but you know what there's so many easier ways to handle that just raise the ISO up the cameras can handle it there's no noise at higher ISO is of like 800 1600 it's beautiful so just before it's like that person is Brian everything else is dark and yeah they're in a big room and you want to do exactly this what you're saying is turn the dial to stops to the aperture from a temperature set aperture priority Haven okay and then you have that person that's lit right correctly if the back of the room is lit correctly but it's too slow because the you're getting some blurriness yes what you're saying is in that aperture mode you don't have to mess with the flash you just change the ISO setting change the ISO setting because you're making a little global change to the camera making it more sensitive to light it's gonna it's gonna bring the room lighting more sensitive so you're going to see more of the room lighting right and even though the flash on the last shot was was maybe it put out more power because of the lower sensitivity the camera in the ISO when you raise the ISO the flash doesn't now not to need not to have to work as hard so if you're working in manual like Vince does you would have to change that flash power much lower okay so after mode and and change is oh yeah so remember first first first thing I would do would be lower my shutter speed to try to attempt to get something like this dragging the shutter that's in the industry we call it dragging the shutter thank you now you're all in the industry you're all going to use that term dragging the shutter just slowing the shutter down that's all but again if everybody's different on their threshold of how slow they can shoot at what shutter speed me I don't like to go below a sixtieth of a second I can do it if I haven't had much coffee but I need I photograph a lot of children and they move quickly and so it doesn't sometimes matter if I'm holding still if the kids moving then all for naught right raise the ISO up like I said my starting ISO in a lot of situations is between 800 and 1600 and it's perfect and now I can I've got a lot more control I've got fast shutter speeds and all is good in the world so I want to move on so I will answer your questions at the end but I want to get through there's a lot of material here here's another good example this is an ice rink I think this is program mode what you're seeing here and a simple switch to aperture priority and here's the difference no just try to change it to aperture priority right it's a miracle see there's a can and we do miracles it's you know it's a this will work on any camera I mean you can I have here this is like this is a one of our Power Shot cameras this one's not even out yet this is the one this is the g1 X mark 3 and it's got the same size sensor as as the camera really cool but this has bless you this has a hot shoe on it meaning I could put a flash on here and get the same results out of this using this concept as I do want at the SLR camera so change it to aperture priority mode AV mode a B stands for aperture value in case you're wondering and T V is shutter priority meaning for time value that's the difference so okay alright so again in TV mode shutter priority mode it's always going to properly expose attempt to properly expose the background with flash regardless of how bright or dark it is here's you know balance fill flash like this is what I was talking about earlier when you're when you're photographing this and you've got proper flash exposure on your subject but the background is kind of dark if you want that background to be brighter slow the shutter down or what's the other thing we could do we just talked about raise the ISO yeah there's three main things that that deal with exposure the shutter prior aperture and ISO if you have a good command of those three things and know what each of them do you're set so this was the difference so we just slowed the shutter down but from this shot to this shot now you'll notice the background got that amber looked to it that's because there's tungsten lighting present nothing wrong with it it's fine but just know that as you know that you have those controls within your camera and it doesn't take a whole lot to to get successful I mean again two clicks over to a aperture priority and that takes care of most of your issues the question was when I do a pure party do I do five six or eight I don't mean to laugh but I mean there the answer is to everything it depends I often shoot wide open all a lot of things well in program mode the camera is is setting the aperture for you it's setting the shutter speed for you and that's part of what program mode does it's it's saying I'm taking control all right and if you're in a in a dim room or indoors it wants to get as much light in there as possible and so it's going to put it at whatever the minimum you know that the largest aperture is on your camera and it's not going to go below sixty of a second and sometimes the the exposure doesn't add up and that's when you get that dark situation so here's a situation where I was photographing my kids game and I get pictures like this using flash well if you put the camera from program mode okay remember what we know at program mode this is one sixtieth of a second with flash sixty of a second taking a picture of a kid that's dribbling the ball down to court it's not fast enough right so all we did was we took the camera we put it in manual mode at a higher shutter speed you could also do the same thing with with shutter priority set the shutter to hundredths of a second let the flash take over and do all the work now you'll notice that that Amber the the light whatever the light was usually the mercury vapor lights in a gymnasium but that's totally different color balance here than it is on the last one right so I know that flat was used because I'm looking at the shadow here from his arm look at those biceps good but you can see that and it's vertical right so I know it's vertical well first off I know it's vertical because I can see it's vertical but I know looking where the flash is this is an on-camera flash because they took the picture like this right there's my guy the flash is on this side of the lens and look there's where the shadow is you can tell a lot I didn't actually take this picture but this is do you know example photo but did I use exposure compensation used I don't know it have to look at the the metadata on it to tell me but I kind of doubt it because remember knowing what we know about how a meter works I've got highlights I've got mid-tones and I've got shadows back here so more than likely this is average so I'm gonna guess it's probably pretty accurate that it that's no exposure compensation at all okay sharp flash pictures right try manual mode I just talked about that don't get scared about manual mode again with flash it's attempting to give you proper exposure from the flash when you're an e TTL even with urine when you're in manual shooting mode so from program just go to manual and you'll be better I mean just set the set the shutter speed for one the maximum like one two hundred through one 250th and let the flash do all the work and if you want a little more distance out of the flash at five six or F point you know f8 something like that you'll get a little more depth of field if you set it up around f11 or sixteen you're going to end up with more depth of field but the flash isn't going to go as far over to manual you can control everything you know the onus is on you then but so don't look Olympic athletes get great because they practice [Music] it takes practice so make mistakes but make note of the mistakes so that when you get you know when you're in the heat of the battle right you know what to do you're like okay I this is my first picture and it's not looking good why is that I know why make you change whatever it is you know but don't don't say that the flash photography sucks you just you suck because you have I'm kidding I'm kidding because you didn't do your homework Vincent come on do your homework Vincent all right just it's all about getting educated no we're gonna get into high-speed sync in a moment yes so again this is manual mode now yep but we got you have to figure out what's important to you right in this picture do I care about the people that are back here probably not I don't even know them this is what I want right here it's fine backgrounds will be dark but it doesn't really matter now because the flash is going to do that the question was that's a lot of toying around in manual because you got change your your aperture and stuff no depending on you could put your aperture on any of those settings and the flash is going to attempt to give you proper exposure no matter what you have it set on the aperture so knowing what we know about shutter speed in an event like that set it at 250th or 200 whatever it is you'll freeze action in most cases and then as you get the aperture can go wherever you want right in a noir venue you don't want your Flash working too hard because you want to you know maybe you only have one set of batteries so she set it at like five point six or whatever f/4 or whatever it doesn't matter there's always a reason to change stuff if you need to but get get some pictures in the can so to speak so that you can then evaluate see whatever changes you need to make so [Music] anyway so just be aware of the ambient light and whether you want that to register in the picture or not does it really matter and that's what's great about digital as you can see right now what you got in the film days we had to wait a week and you didn't even know whether you screwed up and that's what kept a lot of people out of the wedding photography business you know yeah so here's an example and this is going to blow your mind all right Vincent okay so ambien exposure compensation in combination with flash all right and this is not flash exposure compensation we already talked about what that does that's making our subject brighter or darker and being exposure compensation when you're using flash controls the background alright and this is turning the rear dial on the back of your camera we're not changing anything with the flash on this picture so this is the first picture normal fill flash looks pretty decent right maybe the backgrounds a little bit bright it's okay it's acceptable let's do this we turn the exposure compensation to the - on the ambient exposure now that's taking the background it's getting a faster shutter speed which is making that background a little darker do it again this is - one stop here's - two stops now where does your eye start going to the subject so we went from here which is you know the tones are all over a place right like your eye doesn't really go to any one particular place it's short lands on her but it takes more effort to that now your eye really is drawn to where you want it to be the background is actually looking really great now the flash appears more prevalent in this is that okay it depends it's all a taste thing whatever you like now we even go three stops you can darken that down to a point to the point where you've reached maximum sync speed on the camera so what will hold them yeah if you don't mind there's still a lot to cover here but the flash exposure look at her skin tone from shot to shot now her skin is gonna look a little brighter there because it's surrounded by dark stuff but it's gonna be very very close from shot to shot okay that make a little sense this is a really great tool when you're working outside or even inside you know you can just change that that same ambient exposure compensation and make the background brighter or darker in aperture priority mode by just doing that yeah it's the back dial right here this time so when you're in a pitch okay so you have a rebel camera so you okay with rebel users I want to be fair to the rebel users so when you're if you have a rebel camera there's a little AV minus plus plus minus button on the back of the camera hit that and turn the main dial and you'll see that that hash mark from the on the exposure indicator moved to the left or right so all right so flash controls let's talk about there's lots of different flashes my recommendations if you're gonna buy a flash or a smaller flash like this is is going to give you more power than the pop-up flash but this is going to give you a lot more power and of course that's going to give you the most power most a lot of people go in the middle there and that for 30 X 2 and 4 30 X 3 RT flash just because it's it most people gravitate toward the middle road type of product and that's totally fine there's about a stop difference of light power output from this one to this one and of course there's more features on the 600 series but regardless of that you heard me earlier talk about the cone of light that comes out that the myths from the flash this gives you an idea at 14 millimeters now at 14 millimeters there's a little in order to get that there's a little panel that comes down which is called a wide-angle pattern it spreads the light even further when you have a really wide angle lens on the camera just pops out and comes down this is a little bounce card that's built into there that will you see a lot of press photographers use this they it just kicks a little bit of light forward and then bounce some light off the ceiling that's in there too no extra charge so that's 40 Miller now watch as we go to 28 you're gonna start seeing as we go into 50 millimeters and then now 200 millimeters that cone of light is narrowing so if you're using a lens like an 18 to 200 or 18 to 135 something in that range you'll start seeing you know that you'll hear it the the zoom head will be moving as you zoom your lens the the zoom head on the flash will go with it if you're in automatic mode where the the flash is auto zooming you can now you could take the flash head and override that auto feature and maybe let's say you want to create a little spotlight on your subject you can zoom the head in to a tighter beam of light and get this little spotlight on your subject and override that so that's kind of a little creative function that you can do with it so alright so knowing what we know about direct flash meaning right now how that background falls off there's one thing you can do I already talked to you about it just changing the the head like I showed you over here we just moved ahead a little bit this way to get some distance that way but there's another way where we can also extend the range of the flash so that it's not you know hitting directly you're going to bounce the flash and this is bouncing off the ceiling so now we went from this where you don't see nothing you know this is a great picture of a buffet but whatever it's there you know but you're seeing now the flash exposure on the table is much more even throughout now you're also seeing it's a little bit more amber it could be you know this could be at the local VFW where the smokers have taken care of the ceiling tiles and they're all yellowed but you're the whole idea here is you look at the shadow difference here between this and this see the hard shadow here I know that's direct flash because it's hard shadow this is a much softer shadow and it looks we talked about you know some of the things in the beginning that disturbed people about flash photography is that unnatural flash type look this doesn't really look all that much like flash it looks like natural room lighting and that's because generally speaking room lighting comes from overhead this looks very similar to that so all we're doing is we're taking the flash head aiming it up maybe not straight up but add a little bit of an angle and now all of a sudden the light source size that went from here which is like a one and a half by three and a half now you're taking that you're banking the light off a ceiling or a wall or something now that light source is enormous compared to this and that's where you're getting softer shadows because the light source is much bigger so on a sunny day when you're outside walking around right what's happening on the ground with your shadow very hard shadow from the Sun right what happens during a cloudy day very soft the light source is the entire cloud Bank over ahead of you so the softer the light source the softer those shadows great portrait lighting so anyway 200 250th again that's the fascist shutter speed we're talking about in normal camera operation but now we're gonna go into a thing called high-speed sync and this is one of the most underutilized features of the speed light and if you were to go outside on a sunny day you would not be able to use in an under normal flash operation the camera won't blow or two hundredths of a second so what happens if you want to take a picture with us with a wide open aperture outside on a sunny day what's it gonna look like you're gonna nuke your subject right so high-speed sync allows you to take your shutter speed all the way up to whatever the maximum is on a rebel series camera it's for thousands of a second on most other cameras bless you it's eight thousands of a second so you now have when you hit one little button on the back of the flash it's a little H with the squiggly mark at squiggly arrow now that overrides the cameras ability to lock you down at the maximum sync speed 200 or 250 ahthe now you can go over that now that the mechanics of it I I'm not going to get deep in the mechanics because it's kind of something that you'll forget in five minutes and you don't need to know it's not worth some of the geeks out there will want to know about it and like me and I have to understand the mechanics of how it work but the one thing you need to know about high-speed sync is that it diminishes the power by a fair amount on your flash so you need to work fairly close to your subject when you use high-speed sync so but it works in you know normally like if you just have the camera on on you know the flash on camera it's going to behave you're still working in ETTL you could also do a high-speed sync in manual mode if you want some people do that because remember that little inny TTL you've got that pre flash that comes out that may be robbing a little bit of the power so some people will go in manual mode when they're using high-speed sync and it just adjust the exposure accordingly so that they're not wasting power on the pre flash and you're getting all the energy you can out of that flash so here's an example here's my son this is a picture at two hundredths of a second um at two hundred at sorry F 2.8 why why 2.8 well in portrait photography generally it looks great if you're shooting wide open in the backgrounds blurred your eye goes to your subject right but knowing what we know have you ever heard the sunny sixteen rule alright it's basically if you're outside on a sunny day 100 ISO f-16 you know so that presents an issue so when I go outside I'm using flash at my maximum sync speed again you take a picture like this and you say flash sucks I hate it look what it did to my picture no it it did what it was supposed to do it's not supposed to go over that in normal flash sync modes so we hit the H with a squiggly arrow and that's high-speed sync if we want to blur the background we can but now here look at this so this is two hundredths of a second at f/16 now my son is wearing red so your eye kind of goes to him but there's a lot of stuff in the background that I really don't need to see you got houses back there you got the crossbar from the goal and if I want to draw more attention to his face I turn high-speed sync on right get these distracting stuff in the background and now same picture high-speed sync on I went from f-16 to F 2.8 done you see the background is all blurry now [Music] so that's what high-speed sync can do for you and all you're doing now with high-speed sync is you're changing your shutter speed or your your ambient exposure compensation to get that shutter speed higher than the maximum sync speed so it's a really good way to understand this is to put your camera in manual mode and what I suggest doing when I start a good starting way to figure this out is look at how your sky like photograph turned flash off photograph the background and get a good exposure of how you think you want that to look in other words I know I want to shoot a 2.8 because I want the blurry background so now the only other thing I really want to change is my shutter speed so all I'm gonna do is change my shutter speed until I get this to look how I want it in the background whether it's dark light or somewhere in between because remember we're controlling our background with our shutter speed if I want a dark background I ramp my shutter speed high if I want a light back light background I bring it low but there's a balance in there fine find what you're comfortable with as far as where the where the exposure should be and set it now just turn your Flash on hit the high speed sync button and take the picture now chances are if you're just at even flash exposure compensation there could be a possibility of underexposing your subject because remember it Rob's a lot of power from the flash so use the flash exposure compensation and ramp it up now you're getting more light locally on your subject here but the background is not changing that make sense so this works really well when you're you're outside on a sunny day and that background may be you know you say look I'm shooting at f-16 or whatever and the background looks great at f-16 I can see all the blue sky and everything but as soon as I go down to like f8 or 5/6 the subject looks fine still but I'm getting a lot of washed out background so that's where high speed sync comes in ramp the shutter up to maybe two thousandths of a second for thousands of a second and that background will get darker now you're also the one thing with high-speed sync normally with flash use shutter has nothing to do with flash in high-speed sync that changes a little bit the more you ramp your shutter up the more power gets robbed from the flash unit only in high-speed sync so there's no need to go up to eight thousandths of a second right off the bat start a little lower and see what's comfortable but this is how you remember go home and practice this just set your kit up or whatever you know and and go through the shutter speeds from 8,000th all the way down to you know five hundredths or whatever and see the effect difference and so next time you will know how to make those changes there's not really much of a need to use it indoors there's always there's always an exception again it depends if you you know if you're shooting yeah okay so the answer generally to your question is no but there's always a reason not to so like if I'm taking a picture of a kid inside swinging a bat alright the bat speed is going to be blurry even probably at 250th of a second so in that situation yeah I'll probably turn high-speed sync on so I can get my shutter to a point where in fact I have an example of him with a bat that I'll show you all right so here's another example 250th of a second and then this is for thousands of a second see it looks like nighttime now alright so there's a happy medium in there here's a here's another good example right so 800 per second to thousands of a second and for thousands of a second so you're just looking at the background the exposure on her is the same with the flash well the whole idea was to keep the aperture wide open all right now this is a wide-angle shot so you're gonna see more detail in the background just because of physics the way optics are but if you're using a telephoto lens that's where that background then can start blurring because of how just physics of how telephoto lenses work but you the idea here was to show you that on the on the right or the left here you've got a sky that's fairly washed out and the more I ramped that shutter speed up the more you're starting to see the blue sky in there so but now this is going dark right because the aperture didn't change just the shutter sure you could do that you could also shoot manual the reason why I suggest manual is because the whole idea just to have independent control so you can wrap your brain around it as you're getting to learn this you just just change the shutter you know your aperture is good you want that to be wide open in a lot of cases there's always reasons to change it but start to learn about it with wide open apertures and all you're changing is the shutter speed and if you're not getting enough light on your subject get the flash exposure compensation to the plus side until you get enough light on your subject and if you still don't get enough light on your subject move it closer to your subject okay until it's not you know you don't want it in the frame but usually within like five to eight feet is is where I would keep it you know this distance here to me to you is a good working distance that's fine for most high speed sync situations side of the building with everything that's so dark well the shutter speed because the ambient light the flash isn't going over here when I lower the shutter speed you're starting to see more detail in there because the ambient light is is taking over and filling in those areas not unless you put flash on it so yeah so okay here's the bat all right this is two hundredths of a second sunny day right that's moving I mean it's a kid right so it's not like major-league but it's moving pretty good all right so here's the situation now same picture eight hours six thousands of a second if you're looking to freeze action with flash when you have a fast-moving subject like a bat you know running may be fine because it's not at the actual speed may not be as fast but you're have to do your own testing and see it all depends on how fast that thing is that you want to freeze but but you'll notice here but actually between this and the last one the background I've opened up my aperture right so the background is a little blurry here here it's a little more sharp between the two and it's a little bit difference but not not terrible but the shutter speed is really what's important there so so the limitation I talked to you about is the the actual power now what you can do is if you have the wireless capabilities with your flash you can gang these up in multiple flash units now you can't put multiples on camera but if you you can get one off camera or two of them or three of them off camera and control them from the camera you can I ganked as many as eight up if I need to that's a lot of money in flashes but I'm not suggesting you go do that but I can and I do because I have to teach this stuff so you know plus it looks cool when you you know you got a bunch of a mine so one thing I this is another one of the most common things I think that you'll want to use when determining flash exposure using the spot meter now when I say this I don't mean change the metering to spot metering this is called flash exposure lock and what flash exposure law uses is the center area of your frame you don't have to physically change the metering to spot metering it it will automatically use that center area so if I know I want to get a good skin tone and I'm in a kind of a weird lighting situation or even a normal lighting situation where I've got lots of you know tones highlights shadows mid-tones I just take my camera and I point it right at your skin tone or your face or whatever I hit the exposure lock button which is the asterisk button on the back of the camera use your thumb it's a second button in from the right right here a little asterisk hit that button they'll be a little flash that emits and that camera will lock the exposure on whatever that center of the portion of the frame is seeing and then you can recompose and get the shot so I'll show you here we locked in on her face and [Music] let me see here hang on this is a good example okay so we've got that that very dark scene right so here we go lock the center of the frame in on your subject skin tone whatever you want okay this is if you want to get the picture right the first time and not have to to say all right I took the first one it's overexposed now I gotta adjust if you only get one shot at it quickly take the center of the picture frame the the spot meter part portion of the frame very Center pointed at the skin tone you want to be properly exposed hit the asterisk button that will then hold that locked exposure for 16 seconds if you want to recompose now and get her off the center of the frame you can take the picture up with up within up to 16 seconds so we do this right then we can recompose and put her way off to the right and that exposure remains the same on her face so now you don't have to worry about you know going into flash exposure compensation it's automatically going to lock it on the skin tone you can yeah focusing is irrelevant with this because focus doesn't have anything to do with exposure so you could be out of focus and point that at the skin tone and it will still read those tones well her skin tone is she I think I can't remember what part of the world she's from but she's got a little she's not Caucasian she's a little darker so that's very if you were to take her skin tone and match it up with a gray card it's probably gonna be very similar and so that worked really great but I do it all the time with Caucasian skin tones and it works great african-american may cause a little bit of an issue so if you can find something a little in-between there like if there like I'm wearing an 18% gray shirt you know you could hang it right off of this and that's kind of peak giving you good exposure every time but try it you know it like Vince if I were to photograph you I would you know I'll try the flash exposure lock first on your skin tone and if it's too bright I know that the meter is looking at that and saying it's a little dark so it gave me more flash power nothing wrong with it but you just if you go into it knowing that ahead of time then you'll know how to react okay like a medium area with the exposure life together yeah blue jeans are really close if you were to take your blue jeans and make them black and white right the tone reflectivity coming off your jeans is very close to 18% gray now jeans come in different colors so you have to look at it you know it's a little difficult you have to learn how to kind of see in black and white which isn't easy but look you could if it doesn't work the first time you can always you know change it use your flash exposure compensation just this is just a different way to to use it rather than [Music] now it'll only block will only hold one area yep but that won't see my regulars yes yes yes what's gonna happen here is it's looking to set the the exposure the flash output on her face you could lead you could be in manual mode and leave your aperture and shutter speed you know all that stuff the same all right remember if you're in ETTL that's automatic flash that is changing all the time without you knowing it so even if I'm I'm in manual mode I can come up take a flash reading boom on your face now you can't get closer if you're if you're if I'm moving closer to you to get that flash reading the flash to subject distance is closer so I have to take that reading from where I'm gonna be at the time I'm taking the picture you with me okay yeah yeah any any of the EOS cameras hit the asterisk button with a flash on board and you will see a little it's a little blip of light and that's what the meter is looking at it's looking for the reflectivity coming back into the camera so we you know play with it and you know it's gonna work for you pretty well most the time but you know then you also have the you know if you take the picture and it's too bright you use your flash exposure compensation the way we first talked about so specific situations okay we talked about you know if flash photography out of light okay distant subjects how do we deal with distant subjects well we talked about higher ISO s using wide apertures those two things alone will get you more distance out of your Flash okay slowing the shutter down will also bring the ambient light up to a level to it it almost will look like it'll break the hole it'll brighten the whole picture but it'll look like that flash is working harder for you even though you're it's really not it's just the ambient light around you that you're seeing more like we just made reference to that building that was black when we used on the right hand side of the frame when we're using high-speed sync slowed the shutter down now all the sudden you're seeing more of that building come in and then you know aiming the subject the flash directly at the subject with no diffusers when we talk about diffusers there's a couple of things here that I have these are called light modifiers and you could use whatever you could use a three by five card you could use your hand there's any number of different things you could use like if I if I don't have any modifiers with me I could just take my hand like this and I'm kicking some light forward now it's gonna be a little warmer because of my skin tone because it's not pure white but if I were to in a bar this if I just take a picture and I put this white piece of paper up here now I'm kicking white light forward and anything will work there's all kinds of things out there this is this little attachment here you see on this is made from a company called magmod magnet mod.com I love their modifiers because these are all exactly what it is magnets and now I can take this and bounce it off of anything I want have already got a softer light source here and if I don't like that I can take this little scoop and put that on top of there and now I've got some light going up and forward because it's bouncing off of this thing it's cool these when I like specifically to scoop this is called but I think the mag bounce I think when I have really high ceilings and bouncing off the ceiling is gonna just waste too much light like if I'm in a wedding venue and the ceilings are 30 feet tall forget it people if they're far away no that's not going to really carry you're gonna have that swai set in here at far away subjects you're gonna have to like bend a little bit and take that off and aim the flash directly now the other thing you can do is make sure that the zoom head is a little you know make it out it at a maximum of whatever the maximum is on that flash that you have whether it be 105 or 200 depending on the flash so no diffusers are going to make the light harder but if it's a matter of getting a shot or not getting it then it is what it is thank you everybody for coming for those that are online

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Length: 117min 37sec (7057 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018