GET THE BALANCE RIGHT

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to master the art of controlling light in your outdoor images by balancing ambient light, flash power and camera settings

- Jason Parnell-Brookes

1 HOUR In this project we’ll show you how to balance camera settings, ambient light and flash to isolate a subject. The most important factors when isolating a subject from its background are lighting and focus, and in this case we’re going to be using two methods to control these variables: changing the aperture and changing the shutter speed.

We’re using a flashgun on a light stand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light, placed camera-left of our still-life subject. For the first method we’ll only change the aperture value of our lens (the f-stop) to darken the background, and then light our subject with flash to make the fruit stand out from the scene. For the second method we’ll change the shutter speed to darken the background, and again illuminate our subject with the flash light.

Both techniques have their pros and cons, but we prefer the shutter speed method. This requires the use of highspeed sync mode (so the camera, flashgun and wireless triggers need to be capable of operating in high-speed sync mode). We’re not changing our ISO, as this will adjust the overall exposure of both ambient and flash light equally, rather than allowing us to control them independently – and if you’re shooting outside during the day you’ll likely have enough light to allow you to keep your ISO at the base value.

METHOD ONE BALANCE LIGHT WITH APERTURE

WORKABLE, WITH FLAWS