Trouble with ambient light and flash

Thanks this makes a lot of sense. This is kind of what I meant but worded it awful. I have seen forget his name something Brady on youtube where he uses a light meter that gives ambient and flash ratio. He says 30% (1/3 stop) to fill in the shadows on the face is a good starting out in afternoon light.
So you if the ambient was 1/125 f/2.8 ISO200. I would just have to adjust the shutter 1/3 stop faster. If change the ISO or aperture it will affect the flash. I got it.

I was also having trouble at night time getting ambient bright enough. I was using the ISO but then the flash was too bright even at a low setting. So I slowed down the shutter speed, lowered the iso and everything worked great.

Thanks for the links. Very helpful and input everyone.

I realize that everyone wants to be considered a "real" photographer and not chimp.
The reality is that when facing complicated shooting situations with complicated lighting. i.e. ambient and strobe/speedlite the LCD on the camera is a useful tool.

When I was a young commercial photographer we went through cases of Polaroid film to test and confirm lighting on a shoot. The LCD, is in my view, an electronic polaroid. I welcome it.

The discussion here took longer to read than it takes me to balance ambient (outdoor or indoor) and flash.

Most of the time, if its inside and a small enough area, a bounced ETTL speedlite gets the job done and gets the amount of fill I want. worst case, I ride the FEC a bit.

A ratio is meaningless to me. What matters is the look of the shadows, and the only way I can tell that is to look at the LCD.

Morning sun, two speedlites in a softbox set to ETTL:

Right concept, not quite right execution. Your computation is in error.

When you add light, it is like adding water to an already full bucket...it overflows! If your ambient reads 1/250 f/16 with ISO 250, ANY light you add via flash will 'overflow' the sensor (overexpose it) so you do not want to simply adjust the shutter 1/3EV faster. (For simplicity I deliberately choose to ignore the question of available headroom that allows the ETTR increase in exposure!)


It really depends upon how intense the flash contribution is.

• Let us assume our flash is set to FEC 0EV...in addition to ambient, it adds 1EV of light, 50% 50% ambient:flash contribution, it overexposes by 1EV. Not good, we need to increase shutter speed by -1EV to 1/250 to offset the light added by the flash. But we have 50:50 rather than 75:25 contribution
  
  
• Let us assume our flash is set to FEC -0.33EV...in addition to ambient, it adds 0.66EV of light (75% 25% ambient:flash contribution, it overexposes by 0.66EV, not too bad. So if we increase shutter speed to 1/400 (-0.66EV), we cut back to same amount of total light as our ambient-only exposure.
  
  
• But wait, we cannot simply shoot at 1/400 shutter speed with flash unless we turn on HSS. And therein lies another flaw in your approach, as then the effective flash range is cut IN HALF as soon as we select 1/320 on an APS-C camera, plus we lose yet another 0.33EV of light (and flash range) when we select 1/400! Keep that in mind, never exceed X-sync or pay the piper in lost flash range.
  
  

dmward wrote in post #17813193
The reality is that when facing complicated shooting situations with complicated lighting. i.e. ambient and strobe/speedlite the LCD on the camera is a useful tool.

...The LCD, is in my view, an electronic polaroid. I welcome it.
...A ratio is meaningless to me. What matters is the look of the shadows, and the only way I can tell that is to look at the LCD.

David, I agree in principle what a useful tool it can be for use of the LCD to obtain an initial starting appearance.

The problem that I find now, however, in examining the same 5 shotseries of my earlier (post 24) test (100% ambient, 25% flash, 50% flash, 75% flash, 100% flash) on LCD vs. on LR conversion viewed on IPS monitor, is that the LCD seems to greatly exaggerate the contrast difference of the flash-illuminated vs. ambient-illuminated sides of the subject!
And that is using 'Faithful' as the Picture Style preset contrast setting which was used to create the preview image in camera vs. using my very standardized Contrast setting in Lightroom! And this in spite of the fact that I use my LCD on 3 (out of 7) in Brightness, I do not crank it up for bright ambient viewing!

Wilt wrote in post #17813214
David, I agree in principle what a useful tool it can be for use of the LCD to obtain an initial starting appearance.

The problem that I find now, however, in examining the same 5 shotseries of my earlier (post 24) test (100% ambient, 25% flash, 50% flash, 75% flash, 100% flash) on LCD vs. on LR conversion viewed on IPS monitor, is that the LCD seems to greatly exaggerate the contrast difference of the flash-illuminated vs. ambient-illuminated sides of the subject!
And that is using 'Faithful' as the Picture Style preset contrast setting which was used to create the preview image in camera vs. using my very standardized Contrast setting in Lightroom! And this in spite of the fact that I use my LCD on 3 (out of 7) in Brightness, I do not crank it up for bright ambient viewing!

Will,
Two things:
A) the LCD does offer a reasonable expectation, based on the "Kodak moment" high contrast, high saturation expectation that most people have for snapshots.

B) What I do is decrease the contrast to it's max in the options for the camera LCD JPG. That gets it closer to what I expect to see in Lightroom. I also have a camera custom profile that I use when loading raw images from the camera into Lightroom.

As with Polaroids of yesteryear, it still takes some experience to properly interpret the LCD based on what one expects to see in Lightroom.

The final consideration, given the digital environment, is that we are dealing with an unprocessed image. The final result is always going to be the result of some processing in appropriate software.

We no longer live in a photographic world where the image as exposed on the emulsion and processed is the final result. Even with film, the only time we were locked into the result was with transparency film. And then we did lots of bracketing to get things just right. Even after using polaroids.

After a couple years of trying to use a flash meter for ratios when trying to balance ambient, I took the recomendation of another member and started chimping. This lead me down the path of setting up my camera such that the LCD allowed me a nice visual tool. It's not what winds up being my final contrast, but works very well for getting my ratios where I want them.

dmward wrote in post #17813388
Will,
Two things:
A) the LCD does offer a reasonable expectation, based on the "Kodak moment" high contrast, high saturation expectation that most people have for snapshots.

B) What I do is decrease the contrast to it's max in the options for the camera LCD JPG. That gets it closer to what I expect to see in Lightroom. I also have a camera custom profile that I use when loading raw images from the camera into Lightroom.

... Even with film, the only time we were locked into the result was with transparency film. And then we did lots of bracketing to get things just right. Even after using polaroids.

windpig wrote in post #17813661
After a couple years of trying to use a flash meter for ratios when trying to balance ambient, I took the recomendation of another member and started chimping. This lead me down the path of setting up my camera such that the LCD allowed me a nice visual tool. It's not what winds up being my final contrast, but works very well for getting my ratios where I want them.

I will weigh in on the use of camera LCD on this issue only to make this single point:

• Given the fact that the LCD is not a great portrayal of the final shot as viewed on our editing monitors (techniques for workarounds are that, merely workarounds to the inherent limitations of the camera LCD...if I even change camera bodies and the Pciture Style settings are not identical I can end up with the wrong assessment!) one should simply adopt an SOP and KNOW IN ADVANCE that it will work.

dmward wrote in post #17813193
I realize that everyone wants to be considered a "real" photographer and not chimp.
The reality is that when facing complicated shooting situations with complicated lighting. i.e. ambient and strobe/speedlite the LCD on the camera is a useful tool.

When I was a young commercial photographer we went through cases of Polaroid film to test and confirm lighting on a shoot. The LCD, is in my view, an electronic polaroid. I welcome it.

The discussion here took longer to read than it takes me to balance ambient (outdoor or indoor) and flash.

Most of the time, if its inside and a small enough area, a bounced ETTL speedlite gets the job done and gets the amount of fill I want. worst case, I ride the FEC a bit.

A ratio is meaningless to me. What matters is the look of the shadows, and the only way I can tell that is to look at the LCD?
Morning sun, two speedlites in a softbox set to ETTL:

A summation from Syl Arena's Speedliters Handbook
As a I learned the LCD shows composition. It shows where the light is. Also shadows and highlites. Also shows placement of catchlights.
LCD is not necessarily the best for judging exposure.

Nick5 wrote in post #17813838
LCD is not necessarily the best for judging exposure.

I use it all the time with great results.

Stupid question but only way to learn is ask... Is FEC the same as controlling the flashing power in TTL from Odin?

Yes. Applies under ETTL not Manual flash.

With Odins, you can apply an FEC by Group (3) - and - you can apply an overall global FEC from the camera top-plate controls.

Thanks I need to look into this

When shooting people, the histograms on the LCD will give a pretty good idea of exposure if you know how to interpret them, especially if you pay attention to the red channel. For balancing flash and ambient, you can chimp it if you have agreeable lighting and patient subjects. But there will inevitably be times where, due to bright sunlight, the LCD is going to be useless and barely visible. There are LCD hoods and loupes for making the LCD more usable in bright daylight, but if you know how to use a lightmeter that can do ambient and flash, it will probably save you a little time and at least get you in the ballpark.

Whether or not chimping is bad depends on the nature of the shoot. If you're doing a family photo, who cares, do what you like. Still life on your own time... chimp away. It's when you have paid talent, crew, art director watching, etc... you don't want to work this way because it makes you look like a noob and it wastes peoples' time. It's particularly important to know how to take a meter reading and to do the mental math for how much you have to then adjust your lights, to quickly converge on the right settings and keep the number of test shots to a minimum (as opposed to trial and error where you adjust exposure in the right direction, but by an arbitrary amount or a guess, rather than by how much the meter indicated).