Dark Background using D80

[cycling1]

I have a D80 and when i use the flash outdoors the backgound of buildings or scenery is always dark, i got another flash a speedlight SB-800 but still my backgrounds are dark, only seems to focus on the forground picture.. How can I fix this?? I want to do photography classes but due to the region I am in seems not to be such a thing here...

[marxz]

Basically it's the inverse square law... double the distance from the flash you loose 4 times the light.

Subject is close so it gets lots of light... enough to be correctly exposed

Background... is ... well in the background, way away from the flash and so gets little light.

what you need to do is either shoot in manual mode and set the shutter to stay open longer than the default (usually 1/60th. sec) flash mode shutter speed. this will allow enough light through from the background and the flash will still illuminate the subject. Try starting at 1/60 and increase it a stop each time (60 30 15 7).
Although the flash will generally "freeze" the foreground subject you might want to change your camera's flash sync to second curtain.

Otherwise you can use the scene mode for night portrait - does the same thing though you might find it disables some other settings (don't know Nikon SLR menus - maybe stop you from shooting in RAW?)

[dang]

I agree with Marxz, to better explain check this article: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/06/li ... tance.html

[bertone61]

I too agree with Marxz. What most people do not know ist that you also can use the 'SLOW' (instead of the 2nd curtain) function to solve such problems...


CU
Steve

[dougj]

Cycling1, you have great advise posted here that should help you. The basic technique of letting more ambient light into the shot is sometimes called 'dragging the shutter'.

Google will provide a lot of information; the following site & author has a good description with a few excellent examples.

http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/flas ... e-shutter/

[marxz]

here's the Strobist article... (finally found it) about ambiant/strobe balance by working the exposure time....


http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/09/lighting-102-33-balancing-flashambient.html