5DM2 in manual mode

fliptongue

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Should I ignore the exposure meter in manual mode while shooting with a flash??? I did a dark indoors party shoot with the 5DM2, 24-70, and a 580EX2 on a CB Junior. I set the flash to +2, shutter sync (below 200), zoom, and shot in manual mode and got results I was very happy with. But the exposure meter was constantly off and I just had to rely on my instincts. So should I ignore the exposure meter? Or am I just making a classic noob mistake?

Please help!

thanks,

Flip
 
If it's not broke, don't fix it.

If you were pleased with results, what more could you ask for?

Well, it would help if you understood why, from a technical point, your results were in fact pleasing to you.

If it was just dumb luck, you need to hit the books and learn how exposure works when using strobed light, so you can recreate those shots at will.
 
I would love to hit the books! Can you recommend any? It was not all dumb luck as I was able to recreat the shots as the evening got darker and darker. I just payed attention to how the pictures looked and histogram, instead of the Canon exposure meter. I'm just curious if INDEED the Canon exposure meter in the viewfinder is NOT supposed to compensate for readings with flash. Anyways, would love your advice on books!

thank you,

Flip
 
I would love to hit the books! Can you recommend any? It was not all dumb luck as I was able to recreat the shots as the evening got darker and darker. I just payed attention to how the pictures looked and histogram, instead of the Canon exposure meter. I'm just curious if INDEED the Canon exposure meter in the viewfinder is NOT supposed to compensate for readings with flash. Anyways, would love your advice on books!

thank you,

Flip

It's not. It exposes for the scene and then the flash calculates the proper exposure. What you were getting was very little ambient light and almost all the exposure from the flash. If you were to want to balance out ambient with the flash, you're meter as normal and have your FEC set to 0 or maybe +1/3
 
When shooting with a flash, you can pretty much ignore your meter (assuming you are shooting TTL) The flash will only fire as long as it thinks it needs to to correctly expose the shot. The meter only knows what its looking at BEFORE the flash fires... It has no idea what the exposure will be after. When using your flash as a fill, then you can use your meter as a guess... but when your flash is doing most of the lighting, your meter will be pretty much useless.
 
When shooting with a flash, you can pretty much ignore your meter (assuming you are shooting TTL) The flash will only fire as long as it thinks it needs to to correctly expose the shot. The meter only knows what its looking at BEFORE the flash fires... It has no idea what the exposure will be after. When using your flash as a fill, then you can use your meter as a guess... but when your flash is doing most of the lighting, your meter will be pretty much useless.

Not really. The meter allows you to tell how much ambient is in the scene and adjusting your FEC allows you to control how much of the exposure in the scene is in the flash.

Say for instance, you're shooting in an environment with a typical light bulb that creates a warm color temperature and you want to over power it because for some reason, you don't have a CTO gel, you'd use your meter to kill the ambient exposure and the flash would expose the shot accordingly based on the reading in the camera and what your FEC is set to.
 
The camera displays the meter reading for the ambient light, not the flash. So if most of the light in your photo will be coming from the flash, then you don't need to have the meter at or near the --0--.
But if you do want to try to balance the ambient with the flash, then you can consult the meter.
 

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