New To Speedlite Photography

inspired_impressions

inspired_impressions

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Hi,

I've been taking natural light landscapes for around 7-8 years now, However i got myself a canon 430ex II and have been experimenting with speedlite photography, both on and off camera, mostly in manual mode. (my TTL pictures seem to all come out underexposed?)

Am I right in thinking ISO is still a factor in bringing in the ambient light to a picture or is there another way of doing this? Most of the images I have taken have been ISO 100 as i'm used to keeping noise to a minimum in my landscapes but have been getting some dark backgrounds.

I took a couple at ISO 400 and the images were quite grainy, however my camera is a 400d and 'getting on a bit' so that may be a factor.
 
Hi ... yes the ISO will effect the ambient light.. think of using the flash as mixing 2 shots together, the ambient light and the flash light.

if you want to see how the background will come out, turn off your flash and take a shot. that is your ambient background, so you adjust your settings to get the background how you want it (obvisouly the 400D wont let you go up to high ISO without giving you noise)

if your subject is coming out underexposed then you need to up the flash power (Flash exposure compensation if you are in ETTL mode)
 
Read Syl Arena's book or watch his vids on youtube. A master on "speedliting".

You're better off controlling the ambient light via the shutter speed (if in manual), or exposure compensation if in AV-mode.

TTL will work out what the camera thinks is best. Just like calculating exposures, the flash aims for a certain value. You can use Flash compensation to adjust to give more or less flash than the camera calculates.

Yes, ISO will help but use a tripod and a lower shutter speed to allow in more ambient light if required. If you've reached the limit of what you want via aperture and shutter, then by all means boost the ISO.
 
^^^ and that, use your shutter speed to control the ambient light (along with ISO)
 
Thanks to both of you for the help. I am indeed shooting in manual so will try the techniques with turning off the flash and playing with the FEC or flash power to achieve the look I am going for, and will look into the books by this author. Have seen two of them on amazon which have caught my eye, 'speedlighters handbook' and 'lighting for digital photography'.

Thanks again.
 
Speedlighters Handbook is great - starts with uber-basics, ends with not-at-all-basic 16-light rigs!

His method is as described above (with a fixed ISO):
Flash in manual (so you can change things and know what's happening.
Shutter speed to control the ambient
Aperture to control the brightness of the subject

As the flash freezes motion anyway, it's the aperture that determines how much of the light is captured by the camera.
 
I have a couple of books specifically aimed at Speedlite flash photography, but in the Kindle editions.

A very informative one is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-Speed...TF8&qid=1391609226&sr=1-3&keywords=speedlites

The Speedlighters Handook is also available as a Kindle edition.

I found that most photography books contain an awful lot of surplus information, that is to say, stuff you already know, or have reference to elsewhere, so I started looking at the Kindle editions of books that I was interested in, as it offers a significant saving over the printed edition.

If you don't have Kindle Reader, as I don't, then you can download a free copy of the Kindle Reader for PC or Tablet. If there is a particular page. or pages, that I would want to have around in printed form, then I just copy it and print it out. Albeit, I mostly find that reading it on screen is all I need.

Dave
 
inspired_impressions said:
Thanks to both of you for the help. I am indeed shooting in manual so will try the techniques with turning off the flash and playing with the FEC or flash power to achieve the look I am going for, and will look into the books by this author. Have seen two of them on amazon which have caught my eye, 'speedlighters handbook' and 'lighting for digital photography'.

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

I have both. Bought the first one and it taught me a lot about speedliting. Going through the second one and it appears to be more about light in general rather than flash photography. They complement each other.

I think Syl did a couple of videos for B&H on youtube - have a look first - you may get enough info just from the videos. I found they boosted my understanding from the books.
 
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