balancing flash with available light - drill

[georges]

This is a gallery of a few shots put together for a class drill. (http://Georges.smugmug.com/gallery/5066768_nv8WE/1/304882093_iUGLx) The idea is to light the foreground subject with the flash and the background with available light.

The lightness/darkness of the background is controlled by changing the shutter speed. The aperture is held constant for all photos. The P-TTL flash keeps the subject lit at the desired level.

The Flash is a Pentax 540 set to the wireless mode. It's set to +1/2 stop flash exposure compensation. It's zoomed in as far as possible to help keep light from spilling onto the background.

The lens is the Pentax DA* 50-135mm f/2.8. The focus point is the black queen in the back row.

The camera is the K20d, flash set to wireless control mode. Manual mode for this series. Though I had set the white balance to daylight, it didn't make any difference. I had the custom setting at "WB auto when flash attached." I've since set it to "unchanged" so it will use the WB as set on the camera. No matter, I was shooting raw files.

Oh, the opening image documenting the setup was shot with a Canon G9. This was time well spent, if only to learn about the custom settings on the camera and flash that interact. I've only had the K20 and 540 for a short time.

[pathfinder]

The ability of modern digital camera with their associated flash systems to give one the ability to easily control the lighting of the subject, separate from the lighting of the background, is a marvelous tool to make use of.

I have written about this ability in the EOS system several times. I have a sticky (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=70330) thread at the top of this page about the EOS flash system .

In bright lights out of doors, you may find you need a shutter speed higher than the typical 1/250th flash synch shutter speed offered. In the Cannon system one turns to High Speed Synch on the flash, which allows the use of shutter speeds as high as 1/4000th with an EOS flash. This is one ability not seen with studio type flashes. I am sure the Pentax system has a similar feature.

The ability to control subject/ background lighting ratios is handy for macro shooters also - the flash is strong enough for macro work that you can drive the ambient sun lit background to black and I find this useful for macros out of doors.

Most of my flash shooting is done in ETTL with the camera in Manual Mode. This allows me to precisely control the lighting on the subject and on the background.