Scott_Quier
Feb-14-2007, 03:33 PM
I received a PM from another DGrinner asking the following questions.
I want to ask some advice. Adjusting exposure settings and flash compensation.....both of these I'm sure are important but I know nothing about them and never use them in my work. However, I can't help but wonder if I am missing out on something that might help me. I keep seeing people mention stopping down the lighting on this or that, but I have no idea what they are talking about. Short of buying a bunch of books, what can I do to get a better grasp on these things?
Thinking this might be something that others are interested in knowing, I thought I would post the question here, take my best shot at it and let others with more knowledge/skill than me add the $.02 to the mix. So....
Adjusting exposure settings. It sounds like you've not yet explored the Tv, Av, OH BOY, M modes of your camera. It's when you start that exploration that the fun really begins! If, indeed, you haven't yet explored these modes, then yes - you are missing out on a big part of the fun. Let me be the first to recommend you pull out your camera owner's manual and play with at least the Tv and Av modes. Then you can start on the following.
EC - This is a way to over-ride the exposure set by the camera. For example, say you're in Av mode and shooting a backlit subject. There is a good chance the camera will be metering all of what it sees and will not sufficiently expose the "dark" side of your subject (the aspect of the subject that you can see) - so you get a dark face. Not good. What do you do? Well, you dial in some positive EC, thus telling the camera that it's close, but you need it to expose it just a bit more so you don't end up with a dark/shadowed face.
FEC - Take the same situation as above but we are going to further assume our subject is our SO and the backlight is supplied by a beautiful sunset - almost as beautiful as our SO. What we would like is to be able to see our SO's face and also get the colors of the sunset. If we just dialed in +EC, we get the face alright, but we would blow out the sunset - not our intent. But wait, we have a flash! So we turn it on. If we were to press the shutter, the flash would attempt to light the near objects (our SO's face) to "full exposure". But, this would look really, really fake - our SO's face is not being lite by the sun - remember. So, we set the FEC to -2/3 (or so) and let the camera meter for the sunset (no EC). Assuming the camera selected a shutter speed slower than or equal to our shutter sync speed, we should get a nicely expose sunset and our SO's face should be filled with just enough light that we can see it without it being so much that it looks really, really fake.
Other sources of information? Well, you can read this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=33703) I started not so long ago to which Andy supplied some useful information. If you check the date on that thread, you will note that I started that thread less than a year ago. Almost all the "knowledge" I have gained since then has been from reading posts on a couple different forums. There is no substitute for reading and testing what you have read. It's not really your knowledge until you have actaully used it a couple (or more) times.
I want to ask some advice. Adjusting exposure settings and flash compensation.....both of these I'm sure are important but I know nothing about them and never use them in my work. However, I can't help but wonder if I am missing out on something that might help me. I keep seeing people mention stopping down the lighting on this or that, but I have no idea what they are talking about. Short of buying a bunch of books, what can I do to get a better grasp on these things?
Thinking this might be something that others are interested in knowing, I thought I would post the question here, take my best shot at it and let others with more knowledge/skill than me add the $.02 to the mix. So....
Adjusting exposure settings. It sounds like you've not yet explored the Tv, Av, OH BOY, M modes of your camera. It's when you start that exploration that the fun really begins! If, indeed, you haven't yet explored these modes, then yes - you are missing out on a big part of the fun. Let me be the first to recommend you pull out your camera owner's manual and play with at least the Tv and Av modes. Then you can start on the following.
EC - This is a way to over-ride the exposure set by the camera. For example, say you're in Av mode and shooting a backlit subject. There is a good chance the camera will be metering all of what it sees and will not sufficiently expose the "dark" side of your subject (the aspect of the subject that you can see) - so you get a dark face. Not good. What do you do? Well, you dial in some positive EC, thus telling the camera that it's close, but you need it to expose it just a bit more so you don't end up with a dark/shadowed face.
FEC - Take the same situation as above but we are going to further assume our subject is our SO and the backlight is supplied by a beautiful sunset - almost as beautiful as our SO. What we would like is to be able to see our SO's face and also get the colors of the sunset. If we just dialed in +EC, we get the face alright, but we would blow out the sunset - not our intent. But wait, we have a flash! So we turn it on. If we were to press the shutter, the flash would attempt to light the near objects (our SO's face) to "full exposure". But, this would look really, really fake - our SO's face is not being lite by the sun - remember. So, we set the FEC to -2/3 (or so) and let the camera meter for the sunset (no EC). Assuming the camera selected a shutter speed slower than or equal to our shutter sync speed, we should get a nicely expose sunset and our SO's face should be filled with just enough light that we can see it without it being so much that it looks really, really fake.
Other sources of information? Well, you can read this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=33703) I started not so long ago to which Andy supplied some useful information. If you check the date on that thread, you will note that I started that thread less than a year ago. Almost all the "knowledge" I have gained since then has been from reading posts on a couple different forums. There is no substitute for reading and testing what you have read. It's not really your knowledge until you have actaully used it a couple (or more) times.