What am I doing wrong?? with Flash/night pictures

wildviper · October 25, 2006

This is by far the hardest things to do for me. I want to take pictures at night with low-light yet not show the "flash".

I have to use flash as I do not have those expensive fast lenses. I have a Nikon 18-70 DX lens. I also have the SB600.

I have tried so many things, but the pictures all come out with that terrible "flash" light.

Here is what I have tried:

1. Use TTL-Fill mode on the SB600 attached directly to D70s.
2. Used TTL mode
3. Used Manual mode and lowered the exposure by -2.
4. I use P mode and A and M...also Auto

I mainly want to use ISO 200 due to noise. So what am I doing wrong?? What is the secret???

I can't bounce certain places cause mainly it is outdoors. I also bought the Sto-fen...doesn't work well for me yet.

Help appreciated.

Steve Cavigliano · October 25, 2006

I hate that "flash-look" too. But sometimes you have to use a flash

I'd suggest:

1.) Getting comfy with TTL and experimenting enough so you understand how much FEC you need to dial in, under most situations.

2.) Getting to know your Sto-Fen. If you can't bounce, the next best thing might be to diffuse. If you can experment to get the best results out of your Sto-Fen, this should also get you where you want to go.

3.) Do the above using the Manual camera mode. The "In-the-ballpark settings I use are F4-F5.6, ISO 200-ISO400, 1/60-1/200".

Your flash may even have a wide angle diffuser screen built right in. These are useful on occassion.

I would also recommend shooting in RAW. It makes it easier to correct white balance and exposure problems. Especially, until you get comfortable with using your flash and are able to get predictable results.

Steve

LiquidAir · October 26, 2006

I have spent some time trying solve that problem myself. It is a big topic, but there is a quick summary of my conclusions:

There are three things that make on camera flash look bad:

1. Ugly highlights. There is a lot of theory behind this, but boiling it down to a nutshell the illumination from the flash appears brightest where the skin acts like a mirror (angle of incidence = angle of reflection) between the flash light and the camera. When the flash is coming directly from the camera the highlights appear on the tip of the nose, symmetrically in the cheeks, the tip of the chin and in the center of the eyes (sometimes turning into red eye). This is the main signature of flash light and my guess is that it is what you are trying to fix.

2. Underexposed backgrounds. If the subject is any distance from the background, the background typically is underexposed which is survivable if it is a stop or two, but a problem if the background is more than 2 stops dark.

3. Flat lighting. Because the light source is the same as the point of view of the camera there are no visible shadows so everything appears flat.

As far as I can tell, all of the small flash diffusers like the Sto-fen work by scattering light off the room; essentially they are all different spins on the basic technique of bounce flash. The most dramatic impact of them is reduce the light on the subect (by almost 4 stops!) and increase the light in the background. That helps quite a bit with issue 2. They also help some with issue 1 because the room reflections also illuminate the subject. The price you pay when they work is that the lighting is even flatter than it was before. But flat light usually looks better than direct light so they are an improvement.

The key thing to understand is that the only way to improve the quality of your light is to move the flash away from the camera. The various small diffuser/reflector attachments don't by themselves move it far enough away. Rather they rely in one way or another on bounce off your envrioment to dramatically change the angle of incidence on your subject. My take on the Sto-fen and its ilk is that they are much better at lighting the room than they are at lighting your subject.

When you are outdoors life gets even more difficult because there is nothing to bounce the light off so the only real effect of the pocket flash modifiers is to wear your batteries down quicker but cutting the effieciency of your flash. In that situation you have only one real choice to improve your ligtht quality: get the flash off the camera. At short range (portraits with a 50mm) you can hold the flash in your left hand and the camera in the right, but further away than that you will need a light stand or an assistant. Compounding your troubles, if you are shooting more than about 2 stops above ambient the off camera flash will create its own bad effect: underexposed shadows. In that case you only really have two recourses: faster lenses (and there is a limit to how far you can go there) or a two flash system with the second flash filling in the shadows of the main light.

The "I want better flash pictures" conundrum is a slippery slope with very few good compromises short of light stands, multiple flashes and pocket wizards. Fortuantely there is very good guidance if you find yourself at the bottom of that slope at the Srobist website, http:\\www.strobist.com.

Shay Stephens · October 27, 2006

It looks flashy probably because the illumination is all coming from one direction (usually from the camera) and there is no fill for the shadow areas (i.e. everything behind the subject).

You can help solve that by using more than one flash, and better still off camera flash. One will light the subject and one or more will light the background in a pleasing way.

Failing that, you could try dragging the shutter, having a long enough shutter speed to get some ambient light to act as general fill and the flash providing the main subject light.

Remember, photography means drawing with light. No light, no pictures worth looking at.

This image is primarily lit with flash using the multiple light idea:

Tanuki · October 27, 2006

flash settings
You certainly have the right idea when you were adjusting the exposure, but did you also know you can separately adjust the flash output?

Also check to see whether you were in spot meter mode. If so, try again in matrix or center weighted, which puts the camera into fill flash mode. Also make sure you set the flash to slow sync mode.

By the way, the SB600 is overkill for fill flash unless you are using it off camera. It doesn't hurt, per se, but it adds some unnecessary complexity to the situation. I would suggest trying the in-camera flash unless you are worried about draining your in-camera battery.

It would be helpful to see some of your previous results (with EXIF data) and maybe a reference photo showing the effect you are trying to achieve.

wildviper · October 28, 2006

wow..thank you all for the helpful tips. I am going tonight to do my first night shoot at a party and will see how I do.

The people I am going to photograph know that my pictures may not turn out....they accept that for me not charging them.

I am going to see if I can just use the on camera flash. If not, I may use the SB600 as a slave unit and place it somewhere.

I have been practising with all the tips given here...so far, the one that seems to work for me is using a slow shutter speed 1/20(handheld) with a wide open aperture of f3.5 or f4.5(don't have the expensive fast lenses). On ISO 800, most pictures come good....however, the noise becomes the big issue for me. I am trying hard to use ISO200 only, but I think I will have to go up to ISO 400.

Will post pictures here after I am done...

wildviper · October 28, 2006

Is the Lumiquest pocket bouncer good?? It seems too good to be true.

Art Scott · October 28, 2006

wildviper wrote:

Is the Lumiquest pocket bouncer good?? It seems too good to be true.

Lumiquest products are very good....personally I use a Lumiquest Softbox...and really like it if it were only Octagon shaped I would be jumpin' with joy......

LiquidAir · October 29, 2006

wildviper wrote:

Is the Lumiquest pocket bouncer good?? It seems too good to be true.

I have a pocket bouncer. It costs you 3-4 stops of light to roughly double the linear dimension of your light source. Compared to a silver umbrella, that is a really bad deal. With a silver umbrella I also lose 3-4 stops of light but I get a much larger effective light source.

That said, I do use the pocket bouncer in a couple ways when I want really lightweight lighting. Both of them involve using the ST-E2 on camera to remotely trigger my 580EX.

1. Hand holding the flash for candid portriats. I set the flash power about 1 stop above the ambient light and hold it in my left hand. The camera is set on manual exposure about 1/3 stop above the flash which accounts for the combined ambient + flash intensity. If the ambient is a little variable, that is ok because mostly it only affects my shadow level. I hold the flash as close as I can to the subject while keeping it out of the frame. With a 50mm lens on my 5D, that is close enough that the softening from the Lumiquest really helps.

2. This little setup lets me use any flat surface as a light stand:

Note that the sensor for remote triggering is facing up. I have a CTO gel on there as well to match the flash to incandescent lighting. With the gel I can set the camera white balance to incandescent so my shadows don't end up orange. This little setup is easy to move around as needed.

What am I doing wrong?? with Flash/night pictures

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