Ashley with Natural Light

[Anita]

I usually use studio lighting with portraits; however, on this one I decided to use the available light with a west window in late afternoon. Please tell me what you think. Thanks!

 

[EJBPhoto]

Anita, I can see you used a flash. Usually when going for the natural light look you want to turn the flash off. Did you have it on auto and let the pop up come up?

 

[Anita]

Actually the flash did not fire on this one. I used all manual settings with 1/125 ss f/10 and ISO 400. Does that help?

 

[Anita]

Actually I am wrong; I just checked my settings and the flash did fire. I must have used it because it was so dark. But, the settings above are correct.

 

[EJBPhoto]

A good way to tell if the flash fired would be to look for pinlights in the eyes That's how you can tell with an on camera flash.

It sounds like you had your camera on automatic. I highly suggest you get the book Understanding Exposure and figure out how to shoot on manual. There are no reason to have an aperture of f/10. If you had lowered that you could have brought up your ISO a bit and still had a high enough shutter to not use an on camera flash. On camera flash is not generally flattering to a subject because of the pin lights and 'flashy' skin.

 

[Garbz]

Even with the flash you could make it pop a bit more. The natural light can give it a bit of background pop. And get it to dominate the flash.

You could do that by under exposing the flash by around 2.5Ev using the flash compensation setting, and then increasing the image exposure by dropping the shutter speed or aperture. This is basically called fill flashing then, where by it is lit naturally and the flash is used to fill in the face.

 

[THORHAMMER]

nice idea, but the harsh flash killed the natural light.

Still good idea.......

 

[Anita]

Thanks for the help! I do have the book Understanding Exposure; it has taught me a lot.

This photo was taken before I got my 403EX flash and so I used my on camera flash. If I shot this photo over, I would probably bounce it.

Thanks again for the comments.