Shoot in living room w/TV on.

[tecboy]

I shoot in my living with a flash straight up and the TV on. In the photo, the whole room lights up, but the TV screen is dimmer and unclear. Is there a way to improve the photo, or do I have to live with that?

 

[pgriz]

Well, if you want the TV to show, then you need to get the exposure right for the TV. You'll need to first get the right shutterspeed to get at least one full refresh cycle, then adjust your aperture to get the right exposure. Once you know the "TV" exposure, you can work on your flash exposure (by adjusting the power of the flash) to get enough light so expose the room without overwhelming the TV light.

 

[jeph]

Turn your flash down. Balance it to the tv.

 

[EIngerson]

Shoot in TV mode.

 

[tecboy]

Good tips, didn't think about that. Thx guys!

 

[tecboy]

I found out that the higher ISO helps.

 

[Derrel]

I've done this quite a bit. You need a slow speed that will not show too many scan bars on the TV. 1/6 and 1/8 second are the best speeds. ISO 400, f/8. You are trying to combine the right exposure for the TV with flash for the room. You WANT the speed at 1/6 to 1/8 second. Making the TV image brighter or darker must be done with either ISO or aperture shifting. It is not that hard once you get the hang of balancing an ambient light exposure (that of the TV screen) with the right amount of flash for f/8. If the TV is really bright, you might be able to lower the ISO a bit.

 

[tecboy]

Got it, Bro!

 

[ktan7]

Higher ISO will definitely help.

 

[tecboy]

The natural light from the windows give me good pictures from the tv screen than the flash I have with ISO100. I have a hard time to understand the science behinds that. Maybe some of you smart guys can shed some lights here.

 

[TCampbell]

You can also use a technique called 'dragging' the shutter. The idea is that you set a lower shutter speed than you might ordinarily use and this allows the camera to collect more ambient light from the room.

The brightness of the flash will quickly decrease based on the "inverse square law" -- so suppose you had a foreground subject with a TV in the background. While the subject might seem correctly exposed (due to the flash) the background will be dim (the light has spread apart more by the time it gets to those distances... so the light concentration is much weaker making the background appear much dimmer.) By "dragging the shutter" (setting a deliberately slow shutter speed) the foreground subject wont change by much at all, but the background will get considerably brighter.

Incidentally this only works for the shutter speed... not the ISO or f-stop. If you change either the ISO or f-stop then EVERYTHING will get brighter (including your foreground subject... which will possibly appear to be blown out). The reason it works for shutter is because the duration of the flash is VERY brief (less than 1/1000th sec.). That means the scene is _very_ bright for an extremely short duration, and then comparably dim for the rest of the duration. If you open the aperture or increase the ISO than you allow the camera to collect even more light when the flash is lit. But by increasing the shutter time, you are _only_ collecting more ambient light (no more light from the flash is collected since the flash is no longer emitting light.)

 

[Josh66]

The natural light from the windows give me good pictures from the tv screen than the flash I have with ISO100. I have a hard time to understand the science behinds that. Maybe some of you smart guys can shed some lights here.

It's probably just that the ambient light level was close to the light level that the TV was putting out. The settings happened to work for both.

With the flash, all or most of the exposure is probably from the flash, so the ambient light (the TV) is not bright enough to register on the sensor.