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Author Topic: Flash photography  (Read 3889 times)

Gpowell

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Flash photography
« on: November 06, 2007, 01:11:05 pm »

I use a Digital Rebel and a Canon external flash (don't remeber the model)  I recently took some pictures of a freinds wedding and many of the pictures are dark.  I have read several articles on this and it seems that with digital it is a common problem.  Does anyone have any advice on how to reduce the dark effect?

Thanks

Gary
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sojournerphoto

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Flash photography
« Reply #1 on: November 06, 2007, 01:46:32 pm »

Quote
I use a Digital Rebel and a Canon external flash (don't remeber the model)  I recently took some pictures of a freinds wedding and many of the pictures are dark.  I have read several articles on this and it seems that with digital it is a common problem.  Does anyone have any advice on how to reduce the dark effect?

Thanks

Gary
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There could be lots of reasons - was the flash used on camera? Was it direct or bounced? is the background dark and the foreground light or OK? You could post a couple or visit the Flikr Strobist group.

As to fixing, if you shot raw you may be able to do some reasonable post with exposure and brightness. If jpeg (tell us that's not what you did!) levels, curves brightness etc may help. But you will probably suffer an image quality penalty e.g. noise and posterisation.

Good luck

Mike
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mahleu

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Flash photography
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2007, 02:13:11 pm »

Was the flash set to ettl or manual? Was the camera on manual?
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Robert Spoecker

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Flash photography
« Reply #3 on: November 06, 2007, 02:45:47 pm »

What has worked for me in PhotoShop CS2 is to take the JPG files and do an

Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight

With the default settings my pictures came out very good. It pulls the detail out of the shadows while leaving your correctly exposed areas alone.

For one shoot where I had over 150 pictures that were too dark I quickly wrote an automated action to do them all for me with excellent results. Then I got smarter and bumped my iso up to 400.

Robert
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DarkPenguin

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Flash photography
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2007, 09:11:50 pm »

You need to explain what you were doing and post some examples.

Flash photography takes a while to figure out.

One thing to note is that ETTL can be an adventure.  Particularly with a camera like the original digital rebel without flash exposure compensation.  With the digital rebel I had better luck with the sunpak pz5000.  Doesn't work on any of the later canons but on the digital rebel it was great.   In auto mode it almost always worked.  If that didn't work I'd flip it to manual and use the histogram.
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Jonathan Wienke

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Flash photography
« Reply #5 on: November 11, 2007, 07:33:57 am »

Post a sample image showing the problem. There's too many possible issues to give you meaningful advice otherwise.
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Hank

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Flash photography
« Reply #6 on: November 11, 2007, 09:50:07 am »

As the others say, there are lots of possibilities, and more info about your camera settings and techniques is needed to help you hone in on the cause(s).

Without knowing more, one of the key clues in your post is the word "wedding."  If you were shooting on straight program settings while the bride is in white and the setting is white, there's a pretty good chance that white was dominating in many of your scenes.  The light meter and strobe sensor try to average the tonality of what they see, so they are likely to be holding down the exposure to try to turn the whites gray.  In that case, everything else is going to be darker, too.  I'd bet that in scenes with lots of white, your underexposures ran as high as -2.

When shooting wedding formals we meter our studio lights and shoot on manuals settings, which overcomes that problem.  But when we move on to the casual scenes we often switch to on-camera strobes set on TTL with the camera set on one or another form of program.  Experiments and experience have taught us to use the +/- control on the camera to adjust for more exposure to compensate, depending on each specific scene and how much white is in it.

Another issue is in large scenes with your principal subjects close to the camera while there's lots of space in the background.  The camera is likely to give good exposures on the foregournd subjects while much of the background simply falls beyond the "reach" or power capabilities of your strobe and falls dark.  In this case we are forced to either increase the ISO and potentially suffer image degradation while only using the strobe for fill, or to add more light to the larger scene.  

All that's speculation, but a pretty good road map of our most common wedding "hot buttons" and issues we plan ahead to overcome.  If your circumstances are unrelated, we'll have to know more before we can offer additional interpretation and advice.

Good question, though!
« Last Edit: November 11, 2007, 09:52:37 am by Hank »
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kaelaria

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Flash photography
« Reply #7 on: November 11, 2007, 09:56:54 am »

'with digital' - ah, no.  With improper use, yes.

Don't blame equipment for ignorance.

Canon has excelent tutorials on their site for using flashes - check it out, they cover most everything.
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