Photography Portrait Lighting!

Fill In Flash Simplified

Our digital photography free tutorials brings you more tips on Photography Portrait Lighting using a flash unit.

Start getting in the habit of using a speed lite on your camera and you will begin to love the effect, and greatly improve the quality of your photographs.

In photography portrait lighting it's important to remember that shutter speed affects how long the light strikes the film/CF card and that aperture affects how much light strikes the film/CF card. Keep this in mind as well as these few factors that can have a great effect on TTL (through the lens) fill in flash giving you the desired look you want to achieve.

1. A subjects size and distance-subject should be large enough to be picked up by the TTL sensor and close enough to be well within the range of the flash-unit, (sometimes a slight change in composition can change the way the meter is evaluating a given image. Changing exp comp or FEC can make unpleasant changes in image quality)

2. F-stop selected = distance of effective flash range. F-22 (short range), F-2.8 (long range). Aperture affects how much light strikes the film.

3. The TTL just like the camera meter is trying to make gray, white or reflective material will cause the flash to shut down early making the subject too dark, and darker subjects or light absorbing material will cause the flash to stay on making the subject too bright.

4. If using full manual mode the shutter speed must be set to the flash sync speed or lower, and higher will cause more problems

5. Flash is set to TTL or fill-in. Not in red-eye reduction mode or in regular auto, because if the camera sees enough light to make a good exposure it will think that there’s no need for flash to fire. This whole time, the flash is providing us with the proper exposure for the subject. We can do this only because TTL provides us with the proper exposure for the aperture selected regardless of the flash-to-subject distance. Now that's cool!

There is so much that can be written about photography portrait lighting so depending on your skill level you might want to check out the following tips as well:

Need to simplify even more? Then check out our Photography Lighting Basics If you want more in depth explanation of fill in flash you might want to read our Advanced Tips in Photography!

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