Evening flash problem

[kstace]

Im having a problem shooting with my shoe mount flash in the evenings. Its an SB600 mounted on my nikon d80. Im shooting in A mode and using the TTL metering on the flash.
My backgrounds look dark. Included are a couple shots from last week. Any help on correcting this would be greatly appreciated.

[Chip]

The 15 or so articles on the right hand side of this planet neil site should help quite a bit.

It will basically show you how to better balance the ambient light and the light from the flash. It makes thing more predictable to put your camera in manual (while keeping your flash in TTL) - that way, you control the exposure for the background and the flash can work out the exposure on your subjects.

Hope this helps.

[inkista]

I think you're pretty much doing all that you can, without using a tripod or a faster lens. You've got your iso up to 800 and you're using a relatively slow shutter speed, and you're still underexposing the ambient.

You can't have the flash light the background. It's too small and too far away for that. You want light like that, you need a big plug-in strobe. What you have is a small light that runs off AAs. And from the hotspots on the family you may actually need to dial it down a little.

It's the ambient exposure that's controlling how the background registers. So, what you want is to let more ambient light into the photo, which is controlled with iso, shutter speed, and aperture. Your iso and shutter speed are already near their limits, so the aperture being ~f/7 may be the only thing you have left to work with. Usually, you'd be dragging the shutter, but it looks like you don't have much slower to go on the shutter speed, unless you're willing to have some form of motion blur from subject/camera movement, with the flash freezing the main action.

I'd recommend this Strobist blog entry to get an idea of what's going on.
Strobist: Lighting 102: 3.3 - Balancing Flash/Ambient Indoors

And these two from Planet Neil:
http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/f...g-the-shutter/
http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2...ter-revisited/

[sybren]

Either use the available light (longer shutter speed) or take your flash off the hot shoe. Strobist has all the info you'll need.

[Michel.Paez]

Originally Posted by kstace

Im having a problem shooting with my shoe mount flash in the evenings. Its an SB600 mounted on my nikon d80. Im shooting in A mode and using the TTL metering on the flash.
My backgrounds look dark. Included are a couple shots from last week. Any help on correcting this would be greatly appreciated.

In low light situations such as this, when I want to properly expose the background as well, here's what I do:

1. Shoot in Manual Mode
2. Meter for the ambient light of the background
3. Set the flash on manual mode - you'll probably have to shoot trial-n-error for the power level settings (if you're shooting close, start with 1/2 power, adjust as necessary)
4. Set the camera for the lowest ISO - in the D80's case, this would be ISO200.

I usually tend to shoot with wide aperture to get a nice bokeh. If this is what you want to achieve, set your aperture to f/4 or less.

So, in short, set the camera on manual, ISO200, f/4 and then meter for the ambient light. Shoot with the flash.

I recommend shooting off-camera flash, you can at least control the direction of where the light is coming from.

Shooting on-camera flash is like shining a flashlight in your subjects' faces.