1. Find your background One thing I’m particular about is that my background should be complimentary, or non-intrusive. A fast telephoto zoom is an indispensable lens for me in compressing the perspective when shooting a portrait.
[ image 4-06 ]
2. Base your ambient exposure on your background If your subject is under-exposed, you could then elevate the exposure of your subject via additional light, such as flash. I generally don’t want the background to not blow out completely, (though there can be situations where we want to do that), nor do I want the background to be too dark. Hence, I metered for the background, zeroing my exposure meter in my camera, while looking at just the background. The turquoise tint here is due to the green-ish tint of the windows of the MGM hotel.
3. Add light to your subject – in this case, on-camera bounce flash If I hadn’t based my exposure specifically off the background, but had instead chosen random settings, the TTL flash exposure would still give me correct exposure for my subject. This is important to understand - TTL flash exposure will follow your camera settings. [ image 4-07 ] Your camera [ image 4-07 ] will control the speedlight to give enough light for correct exposure. (Or what the camera deems to be correct.) This implies that for a variety of camera settings, you’d still get the same TTL flash exposure. This is another important thing to grasp about TTL flash - you can change your settings and still get the same light. However, in this case, the background is too over-exposed for my liking. Having metered properly or the background, I set my camera to: 1/250 @ f4 @ 800 ISO. The camera adjusted the TTL flash exposure for the change in settings, to still give me correct flash exposure. 13