Click to Enlarge Slip an accessory flash into your SLR's hot-shoe, crank all your settings to auto, and you'll immediately get better pictures than you would with your camera's built-in flash alone. But exert just a bit more control, and you'll take your pictures to a whole new level -- no lightmeters, flash triggers, or stands required.
Without taking that extra control, you end up with those typical flash snapshots: Sure, your subjects in the foreground are properly exposed, but more than likely the background fades to black. That's never good. Whether you lose a dramatic sky or the interior of a room totally disappears, your subjects look like they're hanging out in a cave.
The trick to overcoming this problem is to set your camera so you know the background will look the way you want it, then let your flash fill in the foreground -- without overexposing your subject.
Sound hard? It isn't, because of a little miracle setting on your flash called TTL. TTL stands for "through-the-lens," and it means that the flash fires a pre-flash and uses that, along with information from the camera's meter, to figure out how much light to put out. In other words, once you set the flash to TTL, you're free to set your camera to manual and mess around with the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture until you get the background you love -- the flash will take care of the subject in the foreground with no extra work from you. (One note for old-schoolers still hanging on to the flashes from your film days: It's time to upgrade. Get yourself a dedicated flash that works with your camera model, and make sure it's got TTL in its name.)
The process goes like this:
1. Set your camera to manual.
2. Set your camera's meter to evaluative mode.
3. Set your white balance to Flash, and choose an ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. (Every camera has a maximum speed that its shutter can match -- a.k.a. sync -- with the flash. You can set your camera slower, but no faster, than the sync speed. If you're not sure what yours is, look it up or just use 1/125 sec to be safe.) Don't know where to start? Try using the program, shutter- or aperture-priority modes as your guide, then dial the mode back to manual.
4. Take a picture of the background. If you like it, you're all set. If not, change the shutter speed or aperture until you get something that looks good to you.
5. Turn on the flash. Most likely, your flash defaults to TTL. If not, find the mode button and keep hitting it until TTL comes up.
6. Fire away. Your camera's evaluative meter will find the foreground subject, the flash will expose for it, and your background will appear just as you planned it.
Since every situation calls for slightly different settings, here are three case studies to help you out. Each photographer made decisions that worked for the scene, and each produced outstanding results.
The leap
With a tripod-mounted camera and a flash in the hot-shoe, photographer Danny Ngan got our opening picture -- of himself! Look at his right hand, and you can see the remote that's triggering his shutter.
Ngan knew he wanted to freeze the action and minimize blur, so he started by setting his Nikon D70 to manual and choosing the fastest shutter speed, 1/250 sec, that would sync with his camera-mounted Nikon Speedlight SB-600.
With the camera set at a low angle, he tried several apertures until he got an exposure of the sky that looked good to him. He made sure the camera's lightmeter was set to Matrix (Nikon's term for evaluative metering) so that when he fired the camera, the meter would detect him as the subject and the flash would light him accordingly.
Then he leapt.
Try This Shot:(1) Set your tripod low to the ground, mount the camera, and put the flash in the hot-shoe. (2) Set your meter to evaluative. (3) Set ISO to 200, shutter speed to 1/125 sec, and aperture to f/5.6. (4) Use a remote trigger to take a shot, and check your LCD. Adjust the aperture to get an exposure you like. (5) Turn on your flash and set it to TTL. (6) Jump!
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