7D With flash, Underexposed warning

msowsun wrote in post #11054790
...The flash is easily fooled if there are too many dark areas in the photo, or too many light, or reflective areas.

And I would add: or subjects at dramatically different distances. The most common examples are when you have a head right in front of you when you want to expose people 60 feet away... the flash will inevitably expose the head and leave the rest of the image black

Um... in M you can kill the ambient by using a fast enough shutter speed and a small enough aperture.

Flash is NOT always fill in M mode.

proxes wrote in post #11053837
If you want the flash to behave like the Sony put it in P (Program) mode. In Av, TV and M flash is fill light not primary.

Ok, I think I've pretty much got it. I've determined to only use the flash in M mode only, as msowsun had said, because when in Av mode, the shutter will remain open for an exposure without the flash, even though there is one, and everything gets blurry. I'll just start at a middle point with the settings, and adjust accordingly depending on the situation, ambient light I want in the shot, etc...

Thanks guys. This whole transition from Sony to Canon hasn't been the smoothest, but with lots of research in the manual, on the net, and help from you guys, I think I'll be okay.

RafaPolit wrote in post #11054754
So, what I take it is you just need to adjust to a different information being displayed on the metering rather than anything else... the cam will behave as you expect it to, its just the metering information to the photographer that is different.

On the contrary. The confusion here comes from the fact that the metering is not different at all. In all cases, the camera metering is concerned about one thing - ambient light.

You can't see the result of the metering of the flash when looking through the viewfinder prior to taking the shot, for the very good reason that it has not fired yet. You can't measure tomorrow's ambient light today either.

So this gives you an ability to determine how the ambient part of the light will be rendered in the image. The flash light you can't see like that - it's just a short burst. But you can see it in the image once taken, and if there's time, you can adjust FEC in E-TTL mode, or the power level in manual mode, for the flash light, in order to control how bright it will be in the image.

There are flash meters around, and if you have a 1D camera, you can actually measure a manual flash with the camera, but that's something else.

I meant different information as opposed to the Sony he is used to handling, not different information within the different modes. Sorry if that was not clear.