Today’s tip is about balancing foreground and background while shooting with a flash indoor. Photographer David Bergman from AdoramaTV will share his technique to overcome the problem of a dark background overpowered by the flash.
Mr. Bergman explains: “The first step is to take full control by going into manual mode on your camera. That way you dictate exactly what you want, and tell the camera how you want the picture to look.”
“You probably know there are three main settings that affect the exposure of your final image aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Let’s say we’re doing a group shot indoors, we want everybody to be in focus, so we’ll probably have our aperture in the middle somewhere around f/8.”
“Also, we want the noise of our image to be as low as possible so our ISO will be down around 200”
“So the last part is your shutter speed, your instinct might be to keep it relatively high, so you don’t get any motion blur in your picture. The auto modes on a lot of point shoot cameras are going to do that. The problem with that, is your background will tend to go really dark because you just don’t have enough light coming into the camera at that point. So the key here is to slow down your shutter speed to bring in more ambient light into your background.”
“The light that’s hitting your subject from the flash won’t change at all, and as long as you’re far enough away from the background the light won’t affect exposure. So now that you’ve got a slower shutter speed, you might find that you have some motion blur in the background.”
“It’s really no big deal at all, because the light from the flash is going to freeze your subject. Once you are dialed in on manual, you can just shoot away and forget all the technical stuff. So remember.. take control of the ratio of light between the foreground and the background, and give your pictures a sense of place that they wouldn’t have otherwise!”
*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with David on Instagram and Twitter @DavidBergman. LATEST UPDATE: David opened up new IGTV episodes where you can ask him questions live! find out more at http://www.AskDavidBergman.com
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Watch the full episode with David Bergman and Adorama TV: