Silly Question time

Hello

Firstly I m not a big flash user, and sometimes struggle to understand it.

My question is this.
How do I balance the flash output with the ambient room light to that I get the ambience of the room light but light the subject and some of the background.

This is what I have been doing.

Setting higher ISO and FEC set to anywhere from -1 to -2.

But this is guess work on my part and the images look fine, but is there a better more reliable way?

Cheers

Well, you can set up in Av mode, select your aperture, make sure shutter is within sync speed or het HSS, set FEC about -.5 and that will work, or set up in M mode, set exposure correctly, keeping shutter speed slower than 1/250 or select HSS, and dial in about -1 to -1.5 FEC. Either method should work fine.

Or, to put it another way, select Shutter Priority (Tv) mode, and set your shutter to say 1/125. This will allow the camera to expose for existing ambient lighting, and the flash system (ETTL) on the camera will pop the flash to fill in where it needs to.

If the subject comes out dark, (but the rest of the pic is OK) half press your shutter button, and let go. Whilst the display is still "active" press the little button on top of the camera nearest your finger. This will then display the Flash Exposure Compensation readout in the viewfinder (which is slightly smaller than the normal display at the bottom of the viewfinder). Using the wheel on top of the camera, move the dial to the left to make the subject darker, and to the right to make the subject lighter (but, importantly - leaving the background exposed correctly)

Play around with that and see how it goes.

I started out thinking that I would try and explain that in just a few words - Hmm.... guess I failed!

TJ

Reset the camera to defaults (mainly set FEC to zero) and shoot in P mode. If the background's too dark up the ISO (if it lets you, never used P so not sure you can change ISO in that mode). If it doesn't do what you want post the picture and tell us what you want to change.

Now how would I do it? I'd meter the background in either Av or Manual, set FEC to zero, then shoot.

My thoughts as well Tim... I can dig up an example or two where this worked very well.