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Lesson Info

Flash Modes: TTL & Manual Mode

we're gonna do this afternoon is we're gonna continue the journey. Yesterday we talked about the two exposure triangles. We figured out how to do the appropriate amount of light. Today we're talking about two things, really. One was modifying the light. So we talked a little bit about putting on a sock Locks and that umbrella and getting our camera are flash off our camera. We showed you how to do that. We showed you that we could trigger a quantum flash off camera. That's not a branded thing. Using Pocket Wizard plus threes. We talked about radio triggers and all kinds of things. And so that's all along the journey to modifying the light. We have to get that light off the camera and we can do some things. But we still have mawr foundational work we need to do before we get to tomorrow. Where we're going to the scenarios where shooting portrait's were doing some zones and we're adding soft boxes and we're getting shallow depth of field and we're doing the kind of stuff that you see up ...

here on the wall. We have to learn even more. There's even more that are flashes can tell us specifically. Yesterday we did camera modes. We did aperture priority shutter priority in full manual mood. But what we've been doing this entire time is through the lens of metering with our speed lights. And we know what a few things about through the lens meet Oring. Um and I want to just sort of give us a refresher on some of the challenges and some of the benefits of using through the lens meeting. One is there can be metering issues with through the lens metering and specifically there is an issue that you can get. I like to call it blasted faces, but this is something that can happen outside when you're shooting in a very, very dark space. Specifically, if you have, like a wedding reception or an outside event, maybe any kind of outside of barbecue doesn't matter where there isn't anything behind the subject. It's just like an open space of field or, you know, a metal whatever. Just a large, large amount of space. So, Sarah, I'm gonna have you come out here just so we can sort of help you understand what is going on here. So let's say that we have a camera over here where Josh is. So we're gonna have you turn around this way and let's say are are flashes over here, and I'm trying to take a picture of Sarah from this direction. Okay, What's gonna happen here is if Sarah is in that shot and I have sort of a white England's this this is really this happens a lot with wide angle lenses. If you have a wide, wide shot, what happened is Sarah is gonna be a very small portion of that photo. Just a very small piece of the photo back here. Remember, use your imagination. This is a wide open field, right? Or it's something that doesn't just open space, maybe some trees or something. And we're talking about at night when it's really, really dark. So what? The Flash sees the flash season on image of this entire space. That's sort of the frame. But when the camera takes a picture, what it does is it first tries to expose for the ambient light, and it's gonna look at this light back here, and it's pretty much pitch black, right? It's gonna go. I can't do it. I would have to rely on the flash that's on the camera. And so when the flash on the camera sends out the pre flash our little Ninja, well, it's going to come out here. It's going to hit Sarah. But it's gonna keep going back here because remember, if we have Sarah as a very small part of that frame, it's thinking that this is the majority of the picture. This open space back here and what's gonna happen is no light is going to come back. So the ninja leaves but never comes back. And so what happens is the camera thinks, Wow, I'm getting nothing back. What I need to do is set. My flash is powerful is it can possibly be as much light as I can possibly throw out because I'm trying to illuminate this. But our flashes stupid right? It doesn't know that there's nothing here that just sees darkness. So what happens is the flash fires it comes over here. It hits our friends, Sarah in the face and it's so powerful it just totally over exposes her totally overexposed, and it keeps going and it just falls out. There's nothing for it reflects. So what you can do with some cameras. There's a thing called flash exposure lock F E l. And not all cameras have this. But what you can do is you can zoom in right here on Sarah's face. Zoom in, push that little flash exposure lock button the pre flash fires. It reflects off the subject. You can lock in the exposure, then zoom out and take your photo. That can work, OK, Not all cameras have this. And the cameras that do have it all works. So if we try to show you this right now, those two cameras I have both were differently and years all work differently. So this is definitely a go to your manual and check to see if your camera has flash exposure. Compensation are flash exposure lock. It works essentially the same way as exposure lock works. So if you're familiar with exposure, lock where you point your camera at what you want to expose for you lock it in and then recompose and shoot. It works essentially the same way. The other thing that we know that we can use this high speed sink so we can use high speed sink. Teoh, Go faster than our camera's shutter speed. And last night, what do we learn? High speed sink takes a lot of the energy away from the flash. So we showed you that last night when we were outside at our secret location where we put our camera in high speed sink. We took a picture we didn't get very much light out of the camera are out of the flash, and we actually dialed are shutter speed down, closed or aperture down took a picture. And we found that we got more light from our flash without using high speed sinks. So sometimes it works great. Sometimes it's not the best thing. So high speed sink is something that I really love for. Shooting outside is long as you know, the limitations of that. We want to continue on our journey with a new load that I like to call manual mode and sort of the manufacturers so manual mode. I want to show you two ways to do this. We're gonna first show you how to use a light meter. I'm gonna show you how to use a light meter. It's actually really, really simple. For those of you that saw how to shoot in manual mode yesterday. It's essentially the same thing, Same thing. So we're gonna show you how to use a light meter with the flash. We'll show you how to trigger it. We're gonna do that right now, and then I'm gonna show you something called the Tomorrow Levin Metering Method. Tamar Levin is a spectacular photographer in Hollywood, California. She's a friend of ours, and she has a different metering method that I will show you. And it's something that anybody can do if you have the eye for it socially, if you don't know who tomorrow. Levine is just looking up Google er she is spectacular and then sent her a note and say, Mark Wallace told me to say hi. She'll love that. She doesn't know I'm talking about her today. Okay, let's start with something called the exposure Triangle. You guys tired of hearing about this yet? No exposure triangle. I s O shudder And then aperture. This is what we need to know when we when we make a photo, we have to know what these values are. Okay, no matter what, it doesn't matter if you're shooting in shutter priority mode, aperture priority mode or full manual mode. You always do this. You set two things and then you have to figure out in the third always right. If you are in shutter priority mode on your camera, you figure out the I s o right. You just said it's OK. It's at 100 or 200 whatever it iss And then did I say shutter priority mode? Yeah, So then you say what this shutter is going to be and then the camera figures out the aperture, right? That's what it's doing. So you set two things the camera figures out the third. If we're an aperture priority mood, it's just the opposite. What we dio is we set the I s o right. We set the aperture, say F 4.5 and in the camera figures out what this is, right. It will tell you it's to 50 or whatever it ISS was making numbers up. So we're always getting two parts of this and solving for the third. So when a light meter, what you'll do when your meat oring for flash? Let's remember what happens with flash. We have a flash exposure triangle. We know a few things about our camera. Number one. We have to set the I S O correctly right? Correctly. Correctly. Yes. So we know we need to set the isso on our camera, and we're also going to set that on our light meter. Somebody going here? I'm gonna do this in Blue I s So we're gonna set that on our camera and in our light meter. So in this example, what we're going to do is we're gonna set our eso at came. So I said I s a 100 on my camera on my light meter, and they're different kinds of light meters. I'm gonna walk over here so you can see this. This is a say, Connick l 7 58 It's a fancy shmancy one, but it's really cool. I can push eso won after I turn on my battery and very top right hand corner There there's an ice Oh, value. I can roll this and it will tell me what the is. So is so I'm putting that at 100 right there. Okay, That's how you said it on this meter. Gonna steal it on this meter. Here same kind of thing I haven't I s o button. I can push that. Roll it around the very top It'll say what the I s o value is now in both of these meters, there's eso won and I s o to the reason you have that is, let's say we're shooting with a cannon and a Nikon cannon can go toe. So icon, the lowest it goes 200. And so instead of having to do the math all the time, you can make I s 02 and I eso won 100. Take a reading. And if you want to know what the 200 reading as you just push that in the meter will tell you the shutter speed does not affect our exposure with our flash correct, it only affects ambient light. And so, normally, what you'll do here is you'll set your eyes so to whatever you want it to be pretty low normally. And your shutter you set to your sink speed or ex ST. That's normally where you put that at your sink speed. We're going, Teoh, just say that our cameras sink. Speeds are 2/100 of a second. Why? Because they are. I know your cameras. They're all 200 of a second. If you don't know what your cameras sing, speed is. You can look in your manual the other way. You can figure out what your camera sync speed is is turn on your camera. Put in shutter priority mood. Turn on your flash without high speed sink being on and then just see how faster shutter will go, and what you'll find out is it stops at about 200. Whatever it stops. That's your sink speed. If you don't know what you're seeing. Speed is it's almost always 200 or 2 50 right around there, and you'll see that when you're using yeah, so around there. Okay, so if you're using high speed sink or if you're doing some other things, you can always just match this to what your camera's settings are. But we always want to match this and this to our camera, and then what our meter will tell us is this. It'll tell us what aperture value to use based on the output of our light. Okay, so what I normally do there's two ways to do this, we can meet her a light and just say whatever it tells me. That's what I'll set my camera to. That's not a good way to do it. The best way to do it is to have an idea in mind and say because of depth of field, I want this to be F 10. Let's say Okay, let's say that's our target. It's F 10 when I meet her, the light I can see what it says in its it If it says F 5.6, then I know I need more light from my flash when I take my flash and I turn the power up and meet her again until it gets to F and once it does, I'm locked in and I can shoot all day long at those settings and it's going toe work unless I crank my light up and it just won't ever get won't get there. That means I don't have enough power in that light. I can start moving the light closer, are farther away. There's some things we could do