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Exposure Tips for Inside

When photographing small animals inside, you will most likely have to use a flash. Learning to use flash properly is one more challenging aspects of photography. However, if you follow a few simple guidelines it really isn't hard.

If your flash has film speed indicator, set it to the film speed you are using. My Nikon SB-28, as do other more recent flashes, recognizes the film speed in my camera and sets this automatically.

Before you start any flash calculations, I recommend setting your camera's exposure setting to manual. For years I tried using aperture priority and shutter priority and was often frustrated with washed out, overlit subjects surrounded by totally black backgrounds that just looked terrible. By setting my camera to manual, I was able to eventually learn how to control both my aperture and shutter (instead of letting the camera set one or the other) to take better flash photographs.

On the back of most flashes, there is a chart that will tell you what F stops will work for different distances. You will find that the closer you are to the subject, the smaller the aperture you can use (higher F stop number such as F11 or F16). As the distance to your subject increases, you will have to use larger aperture (smaller F stop number such as F4 or F5.6) to let in more light. Set your flash on automatic or TTL mode, estimate the distance to your subject, and then find what F stops will work for that distance. Set this F stop on your camera, set your shutter speed to your camera's maximum flash sync speed setting or below and you are ready to take a basic flash-lit photograph.

Sounds pretty simple right? The above advice can be found in just about every flash manual out there and most people get this far and stop. However, using the above advice, you will now get a properly exposed subject matter but will still get a black background. This can be useful if your background is unattractive and you want to hide it anyway. However, most professional photographers tend to blend their backgrounds with the flash exposure to get a nice, evenly lit exposure.

Most camera manuals recommend "setting your shutter speed to your camera's maximum flash sync speed setting or below" and most people either just set this to the maximum sync speed or let the camera set it there for them. The shutter speed setting has no effect on the flash illuminating your subject so your subject should be properly exposed either way. What your shutter speed setting is important for when using your flash is the illumination of the background. By following your camera manual's advice and setting your sync speed to the maximum setting (using 1/125th or 1/250th of a second), or letting your camera set this automatically, you are using a relatively fast shutter speed that doesn't allow enough time for any background illumination to register on the film. This is why you so often see black backgrounds in flash photographs.

The trick is to set your camera on manual exposure and set your shutter speed below your camera's maximum sync speed. For starters, set it to around the focal length of the lens you are using. For example, when using a 105mm lens inside with a flash, my camera will allow me to use a shutter speed of 1/250 but I often choose 1/125. This effectively doubles the amount of light that registers on the background. If using a 70mm lens, I set my camera to 1/80th of a second to get even more light on the background. After you see some improvement in your flash photographs with backgrounds that aren't so dark, try setting you shutter speed even lower. You can often hand hold you camera with an even lower shutter speed than you would outside since your flash will keep your subject matter sharp. If you go too low however, your backgrounds will start to get blurry and you will start seeing one image of the subject illuminated by your flash and another image illuminated by the background (an effect typically called "ghosting"). Experiment...a lot... and see what works for you.

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