3 Ways To Set Your Flash Exposure with Daniel Norton

Did you know that all of our stages already come equipped with three strobe lights available for your use? While this great opportunity to enhance your photos with a professional studio light is always within your reach, many photographers decline this offer due their inexperience of working with the studio lighting. Today we are going to show how to use lights or, more importantly tune lights to a proper exposure so you would get nice light balance on the model without burning or overshadowing  the picture. Photographer Daniel Norton from Adorama TV will  show you three ways to set your exposure using flash. There will be three techniques to cover: Using TTL Metering, A Flash Meter or your Histogram, all very easy techniques. Once eliminating the ambient light from your exposure, the next step in flash photography is to set the flash to give you a proper exposure.

Using TTL

TTL means “through the lens” metering which means that you are using your camera’s meter when you are using a flash exposure. A lot of people do not use it that much in the studio due to the fact that it re-meters itself every time you take a new frame. So this technique is great when you have a lot of variables changing all the time – lights moving, models moving, locations changing, etc. On the other hand, when everything is in place, it is not necessarily needed. Yet this feature is in lots of flashes now so we would go over that first. We start at having it set at 0. With TTL metering you probably would need to do some adjustments. Most likely this technique will give you a decent exposure yet some adjusting might be required. From the photo above one can see that a few highlights on the model’s forehead are a bit hot. To remedy that use the flash exposure compensation on your camera and lower it one stop less or so.

Using a Flash Meter

Using light meter is probably more classic approach. Set the parameters in a light meter (Daniel is having it at 1/250 for shutter speed and ISO 100.) Now point the light meter at the light source close to the model. Depending in where you light power settings are, the light meter might show you that the picture is either over exposed ( F stop would rise to 16 or so) or underexposed. Make proper adjustments on your light source and decrease/increase its power level accordingly. Daniel has adjusted the power level of the strobe so his F stop would sit at 5.6. The result turned out to be a little bit dark, so we would need to make an adjustment. As with TTL technique the meter technique will also give you only approximate results. So always double check the exposure and adjust it as your eye pleases. In this example Daniel turned the light source half a stop higher to get a brighter exposure and get nice results.  

Using A Histogram

For this technique the photographer uses a nice little gadget called “Pocket digital calibration target”. It gives you three neutral  colors – black, white and grey, that you would use to check it against camera’s histogram. Have the model hold it in front of the face and take a shot to see where these colors are positioned on your camera’s histogram. Make sure to fill the frame with the target meaning that all three colors need to be in the frame. In this example the photographer uses Capture One software tethered with his camera so he can see results right away and check Capture One’s histogram for more convenient adjustment. As you can see on the picture above the histogram is located on the top left corner and all three colors are sitting nicely at the levels they need to be (evenly spread out). If you are getting the different result, try adjusting the power level on your light to get close to this example.   Watch the full tutorial video of David Bergman for Adorama TV here: