Light up my hand!

Creating good pictures in the bright sunlight is very difficult because one part of the picture will not have the correct exposure. I should also mention that all of the pictures here are SOC (straight out of camera).

The picture below is taken with the automatic setting on my camera. The looks ok and so does my hand but neither is exposed well. The camera meter is evaluating the entire scene and making the choice to expose as it "sees" best.


The second picture is just the sky in manual mode. I increased up the shutter speed to 1/500 s and left the aperture at 16. Those settings provided good detail in the clouds and a nice blue sky.

With the above settings I added my hand back into the picture and it was too dark to see any detail on my hand (the model).


To add light to the model I added some fill flash. Most cameras have a native sync speed with the flash of 1/200 s but I stated above that I am shooting at 1/500 s. A wonderful feature that most hotshoe flashes have these days is high-speed sync. It allows the camera to sync with the flash at any shutter speed. I may go into the theory behind that in future posts. The results of f/16, 1/500 s at ISO 100 with highspeed fill flash?


Not the best picture that I have taken but it is better than the first of the series that was set on automatic. If I can find a willing model I will be trying this technique soon.