Playing with flash fill
Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2013 7:37 am
I didn’t think the Poinciana shot was much as it turned out, I took a few shots of that bunch experimenting with the exposure balance, flash balance, to see what would work best, the light was difficult, late afternoon, so it was very difficult to use some small amount of flash fill and not make it look like a flash photo, it’s an interesting experiment for any of you if you want to try.
Even under-exposing and brightening up the shot a tad later in PP still brought out the ‘flash look’ so there didn’t seem to be any easy answer.
I know from previous recent experiments that to get rid of the flash look the best way is to set the main exposure to minus as this also seems to regulate the flash to minus as well (the default in the on camera menu is they are both connected, you can separate them ‘I think’ p.110 in the A700 User’s Guide but I haven’t tried that yet with the A700).
I have tried it with the A100 using the popup flash and the AEL button to maintain the same background exposure throughout and compare flash balance differences to the flash exposure in either ‘Ambient & flash’ and ‘Ambient only’ modes and there is a difference between the two modes in how the foreground flash is compensated, the ‘Ambient only’ with flash compensation set to -1 is slightly darker in the foreground (maybe 1/3rd stop) than the ‘Ambient & flash’ set to the same amount. Ambient range was set to 0 in both.
Thinking back now maybe because the ambient (background) was already getting dull-ish that should have been bumped to over expose slightly via the AEL button (hold) in combination with minus compensation on the flash (foreground).
I’ll have to file that away to try on a future occasion.
Here is one of the shots (camera jpeg) using minus ambient exposure (with flash fill) with all camera enhancements turned off.
And the following one is the same shot showing what Elements ‘Enhance’ does to it.
Greg
A700
Even under-exposing and brightening up the shot a tad later in PP still brought out the ‘flash look’ so there didn’t seem to be any easy answer.
I know from previous recent experiments that to get rid of the flash look the best way is to set the main exposure to minus as this also seems to regulate the flash to minus as well (the default in the on camera menu is they are both connected, you can separate them ‘I think’ p.110 in the A700 User’s Guide but I haven’t tried that yet with the A700).
I have tried it with the A100 using the popup flash and the AEL button to maintain the same background exposure throughout and compare flash balance differences to the flash exposure in either ‘Ambient & flash’ and ‘Ambient only’ modes and there is a difference between the two modes in how the foreground flash is compensated, the ‘Ambient only’ with flash compensation set to -1 is slightly darker in the foreground (maybe 1/3rd stop) than the ‘Ambient & flash’ set to the same amount. Ambient range was set to 0 in both.
Thinking back now maybe because the ambient (background) was already getting dull-ish that should have been bumped to over expose slightly via the AEL button (hold) in combination with minus compensation on the flash (foreground).
I’ll have to file that away to try on a future occasion.
Here is one of the shots (camera jpeg) using minus ambient exposure (with flash fill) with all camera enhancements turned off.
And the following one is the same shot showing what Elements ‘Enhance’ does to it.
Greg
A700