Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to balance camera settings and flash

In his new series in Digital Camera magazine and Digital Camera World, the legendary Scott Kelby reveals some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of some of his favourite images.

This month Scott explains how to find the perfect marriage between camera settings and flash to create a vision of beauty.

Words and images by Scott Kelby. You can follow Scott and his work on his blog or on his live photography talk show The Grid. You can also find Scott and his KelbyOne team on their Facebook page and on Twitter as @KelbyOne.

The key to this photo is mixing the existing light in our location with the light from our flash so the image doesn’t look like it’s lit with a flash (even though, of course, we know that it is). I did this by adjusting our shutter speed to control the existing room light (the ambient light) behind our bride.

We’re not breaking any new ground here positioning-wise — it’s a classic ‘bride standing in the aisle’ shot. The area behind her is dimly lit, but we want to see it in our image as the church she was married in is very important to the bride.

So we’re going to work to control the lighting in the background and get a nice blend.

I hope to help you see the light (pun totally intended) on two points. First, you can use the shutter speed to control the amount of light in the room.

Second, your job is to keep the lighting looking soft and subtle. Do test shots and check they’re not too ‘flashy’. Less is more in situations like this.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes – Scott Kelby’s killer one-light portrait set-up

How to find the optimum exposure when using flash

1 Get the flash in position
This behind-the-scenes shot shows the simple, one-light set-up I used for this shoot. I had an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra, with one flash head running off a small portable battery pack and a small square 27-inch softbox. Of course, you can do this exact same thing  with a hotshoe flash and a 24-inch Lastolite pop-up EZ-Box softbox.

It was mounted on a lightweight, regular light stand. Why not a monopod mount, like I often use? Because when you want a break between shoots, you don’t have go looking for a place to lean it against or a table to sit it on — you just put it down on the floor. It’s just a convenience thing.

When I’m shooting with on-location flash, I have a formula for getting the look I’m after. First I turn off the flash, switch to Manual mode and set the shutter speed to 1/125 sec. It’s a nice, safe starting point that just works.

Next, I move the f/stop until the meter inside the viewfinder shows the exposure is correct – not under or over-exposed, the proper exposure. On Nikons, this meter appears on the right inside your viewfinder; for Canons, it’s along the bottom.

If you find that you can’t get to an f/stop that makes a proper exposure (it can get pretty dark in a church), you may have to raise your ISO a bit.

SEE MORE: The best studio lighting for photography – 8 top options tested and rated

2 Take an under-exposed shot
Next, I darken the exposure by around two stops. If my camera said that my exposure was correct at f/2.8, I’d raise it to at least f/5.6 to darken it by a full stop.

I took a test shot. I was trying to make the bride so dark that she was nearly a silhouette. I wanted her lit with only the light from my flash, not the ambient light in the church. The ambient light needed to light only the area behind her.

I saw one problem with the shot to the right: the background (the church) was a little too dark. This is where the shutter speed control comes in because it controls the room lights.

Think of it as a dimmer switch for the church lights. If you need to turn up the lights a bit, all you have to do is lower the shutter speed a bit. I moved from my regular starting place of 1/125 sec down to 1/60 sec to see how that looked.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes – Scott Kelby explains how to shoot on location with two lights

3 Turn on the flash
Once the subject looks like a silhouette, I turn on the flash with a very low power setting (like 1/4 power) and take a test shot. The light here looked OK – but the whole scene looked a bit too bright. That kept the light from mixing well, so it didn’t look really beautiful quite yet.

However, you can really see the difference lowering the shutter speed from 1/125 down to 1/60 made — the church behind the bride is much brighter. In fact, I decided it was now too bright: it was too big a drop in shutter speed, so I was going to have to split the difference.

SEE MORE: Off-camera flash – how to stop fearing your flashgun and take control of lighting

4 Take another test shot
Here I turned the camera to get a vertical shot and tried a slightly higher shutter speed of 1/80 sec. I hadn’t changed the power of the light yet — it’s around 1/4 power.

In this test shot, you can see we’re starting to get there. 1/80 sec seemed like the sweet spot, so now if I made any changes, I slightly raised or lowered the power of the strobe itself to make sure the light wasn’t too bright — a common mistake.

If we want it to blend and look natural, it can’t look ‘flashy’. It has to make you wonder, “Is that lit with a flash?”

SEE MORE: Flash portraits: creative off-camera lighting techniques you have to try

5 Add a reflector
After looking closely at the previous image, I felt the area around her eyes looked a little dark, so I had my first assistant Brad Moore bring in a reflector, to bounce some of the light from the flash back into her eyes.

We took a test shot using the silver side of the reflector and it was just too bright and too harsh, so we filled over the reflector to the white side, and that did the trick.

SEE MORE: In-camera flash settings: exploring your built-in flash options

Photoshop tips for enhancing your lighting

1 Darken the edges
There’s a technique I use to make the lighting look even better and more dramatic. Once I have a shot where the balance looks pretty good, I take it into Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in (or Lightroom’s Develop Module — they are the same thing).

Next I go to the FX panel. Under Post Crop Vignetting, I drag the Amount slider to the left a little bit, which darkens the edges all the way around your image. This helps to create a more directional look to your lighting — it looks like the light is centred on your subject, and it falls off to darkness. It’s a simple thing to achieve, but it has a big impact.

2 Remove distractions
When I posted this image on Twitter, someone pointed out the bright area of light in the stained glass window to the left of the bride and noted that if this was someone else’s image, I would say that it was distracting.

He was right — so I used Photoshop’s Patch tool. You draw a loose selection around what you want to remove, click inside the selection and then drag to an area with similar tones. In this particular case, I dragged straight downward to another area of stained glass, and it worked perfectly first time.

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