Photographs By Me

Something bright lately, I’ve tried using fill flash on my subjects. Most failed, however, because I was doing things wrong! By accident, I still did one wrong, but it actually turned out nice, as if I did things right! Maybe next time, I will use the right camera settings, and the photograph will be right the first time.

The idea behind fill flash is that there are two light sources to light up an image. The first is a bright source in the background.

Here is an example of a photograph with a bright background:

Daydreaming, originally uploaded by ~hera~.

What’s the problem with this photograph? Depending on whom you ask, there may be no problem at all. Or, the problem may be that the subject, Gabriel, is cast in shadow. This is because the source of light–the setting sun–is behind him. The only way to avoid this is to change the aperture, found on my own point and shoot camera as “AE Metering”.

My camera’s AE Metering setting allows me three options:

Average

Entire scene is used to calculate exposure.

Center-Weighted

Large area in center of scene is used to calculate exposure.

Spot

Small area in center of scene is used to calculate exposure.

The problem with my point and shoot’s simplicity is that the exposure and focus are determined at the same time. If I try to expose for the background, I’ll have to expose away from my subject, and I will not be focused on my subject. If I focus on my subject, the exposure will be based on the dark shadow cast on my subject. To get around this, I should set my camera’s AE Metering to “Average”.

An SLR camera offers more control, but I’ve never used one, so I’ll let Wikipedia do the talking:

To use fill flash, the aperture and shutter speed are adjusted to correctly expose the background, and the flash is fired to lighten the foreground.

This quote takes us to the second source of light. What if the camera’s flash fired on Gabriel in the photograph above? He would light up, but the flash would have no impact on the background. Let’s face it, the flash isn’t going to reach the sky, bounce back, and negatively impact the photograph. Since the camera is exposing for the sky (the background), the sky will come out with the correct colors and lighting. The flash ensures the same is true for the subject.

I used fill flash when photographing Alyss today:

I had the AE Metering set to “Spot”, which was the opposite of what I should have done. My first two photographs (not uploaded) had washed out white skies because of this. The one above I was simply lucky on! I should try this shoot again, using the proper camera settings. Maybe I can reshoot it in a way so that her face doesn’t have such a shadow cast on it, but at least it’s a soft, light shadow thanks to the flash.

With a fill flash, we can brighten the subject without washing out the background, and we can properly color the background without shading the subject. How’s that for nifty?