How to underexpose with studio lights..

Hey guys,

I'm really a fool when it comes to studio lights..outside. I want to shoot a band outside. Posed stuff for publicity purposes. Anyways, I want to use say, 2 lights, and make the background/sky/everyth​ing other than them... -1 EV. How do I go about setting this up. I'm just confused when balancing the light output with the incamera exposure stuff. Any guidance is greaty, greatly appreciated!

If you mean shoot them after they play, like a group portrait, just try to put them under some shade like a tree and position them so the sky or whatever you like as the background. Now expose for the background using your camera. Now put the band in the shot and set the strobes and use the LCD/ histogram on your camera and adjust the power. Good luck!

What Austin Manny said. the flash is only going to expose things that are close to the camera (ie; the band). the shutter speed and aperture is going to expose the ambient light (although aperture also affects the subject. So, set your shutter and aperture to under expose the background. If you can't use FP flash, set your shutter speed to the flash's sync speed, then adjust your aperture to underexpose the ambient light. When you have that, set yur flashes so that they expose the band properly.

Click on the link in my signature and look at the tutoriaal about using manual flash. That should help you out in more detail with what you need to do here.

To underexpose the background the flash units must be one stop more powerful than the ambient reading. For example, lets say the ambient reading is f/5.6 @ 1/60. To underexpose the background one stop the flash reading on the subjects must be f/8.0 @ 1/60.

Benji

Let's imagine outside in the sun. Sunny 16 says with ISO 200, 1/200 f/16 is the right exposure for sunlight. So you expose -1EV at 1/200 f/22 (you cannot use faster shutter speed than 1/200 with a studio light since it has no HSS mode!). So you need a studio light strong enough to meter f/22 with the flash. Simple concept, simply hard to find a flash strong enough when too far away from your subject!