Balancing Flash and Ambient Light Exposure

I think we’re all familiar with what point-and-shoot cameras do. You keep the flash off and things look great until the light in the scene gets too low. You start to get unwanted motion blur and a ton of unwanted grain or noise. You flip on the flash and your subject is now harshly exposed and the background has gotten completely dark. All traces of ambient light have vanished. This is when you give up and buy the DSLR.

Photo credit: Bark

Along the way, I’ve learned many new concepts as it relates to using a DSLR camera. Though all were new, I found many were intuitive, such as the exposure triangle. Some were less obvious, such as how aperture values work and how your camera meters light. These are the basics so do watch those linked videos if that’s new to you.

After I digested those, and once I got an external flash, I had to start learning how to balance ambient light while using the flash. Not so easy. Though I try to avoid using my flash generally, sometimes it really does make for a much better picture. The question is how to make it look natural and how to get the technology to work for you, not against you.

To be fair to the non-DSLR cameras, there is usually a “scene mode” with a name like “Night Portrait” or “Slow Sync”. They do for you what I’m talking about today — they modify your camera’s settings to allow the ambient light to be part of a photo. From my experience, however, they barely succeed.

So you’ve got your DSLR, you bought a flash, and here you are in a similar situation. Your photos with flash simply don’t look natural. Chances are your subject is much brighter than their surroundings and the light is flat.

In my second blog post, I linked to two great videos on this topic so be sure to watch episode one and episode twenty of Digital Photography 1-on-1 with Mike Wallace. Wrap up that viewing with one more video from that series, episode 17, which covers the concepts of flash sync speed and flash duration.

Once you’re done watching all those, head over to Niel van Niekerk’s blog post about Dragging the Shutter (the images above are from that tutorial).

Though it’s a great post, it’s made better by reading his entire set of 17 posts dedicated to flash photography techniques. I guarantee you it’s worth the read.

Here’s are the direct links to each post in that series…

1. Introduction
2. Natural Looking Flash
3. Flash + Ambient Light
4. Dragging the Shutter
5. Bouncing Flash
6. Wireless TTL Flash
7. Flash Outdoors
8. Metering Techniques
9. Flash Exposure Compensation
10. More Examples
11. Just Ambient Light
12. Which Flashgun?
13. Flash Brackets
14. Flash Photography Tips
15. Off-Camera Flash
16. More Articles
17. Recommended Books

Enjoy!