My son and I were heading to dinner this night when we saw they had lit the Christmas tree on the mall, so I asked him to pose in front of it so that I could get a picture of him. He of course went right up to it and started to make goofy faces, ha! This was okay while I got myself into place and set the camera to capture this.
Knowing that I was going to use a flash and that I wanted the lights from the Christmas tree to be exposed properly, as well as allowing for some of the background to be seen I knew I would be shooting in manual mode. So while my son was goofing I got a quick meter reading. I could tell that I would need to bump up my ISO to allow for a fast enough shutter speed to hand hold this shot, so I set it at 1000. This was going to be my baseline to dial in my settings.
After setting the camera to iso 1000 I decided to open the f/stop to f/4.5. This would allow me a little wiggle room with my aperture setting if needed. Then I pointed the camera at the scene and adjusted the only setting that I had left which was my shutter speed. Now here is where my cameras meter was telling me one thing due to the lights being bright, but my knowledge and experience kicked in. My meter was telling me 1/80 of a second was the “correct exposure”. So I took a quick test shot and just as I expected, the lights on the tree were the only thing visible. So I opened up the shutter speed and dialed it down to 1/13 of a second and shot another test shot- Perfect! The Christmas tree and background were in nice exposure. I was not worried about my son as he was very dark, actually almost a silhouette. But I was about to fix that.
Next I popped up my flash and asked my son to make another silly face for the camera and fired off a shot. Whoa! WAY too much light was on him, he was extremely over exposed. Because he was so close to me, about 3 feet, I knew that I would need to lower the flash output. So I pushed the FLASH COMPENSATION button and moved it down to a -1.0 output. I then took another quick shot and he was now slightly dark, so I opened up the f/stop all the way to 3.7 (my lens was a variable aperture lens) and took one more shot. Perfect. Now that I had the camera now dialed in it was time to try to get a good smile out of him. Good Luck on my part. Why do 5 year olds decide that a smile is gritting their teeth? HA!
As you can see, it really is pretty easy once you have an understanding of how to shoot in manual and how to read your cameras meter. Remember, you control the camera to create your visions, don’t let the camera control you. For a more in depth understanding on flash photography please read How To Shoot With Flash. Thanks.
This was shot with my Nikon D700 and the camera’s pop up flash. So like I said, you can do this too!
