Nikon CLS Practical Guide: 12 Speedlight Trick #1

One of the situations I run into regularly is that I am fairly far from a subject who is in a dim ambient setting, and there is something closer to me that is affecting the flash metering. This could be a plant, a wall, another person, a wedding cake, or anything that can reflect the preflash pulses back to the camera.

For example, lets say your subject is standing inside a dim room and you want to shoot a picture of her from outside the room through a doorway. If you simply set TTL on the flash and place the subject in the center of the frame and shoot, the reflections from the doorway will make the system think your goal is to shoot the doorway and you will get a great shot of a slightly overexposed doorframe and the subject will be pitch dark. The doorframe will be slightly overexposed, because it is not in the center of the frame, but it will still cause the flash to reduce power drastically leaving the subject dark.

The trick is to first aim the head of the flash forward and remove any diffusers that don't push the little switch on the flash head (so distance information can be used by the flash). Then switch the flash to TTL-BL and frame the shot and hit FV Lock.

Then, the distance to the subject is used in addition to measuring the strength of the reflected preflash pulses from the center of the frame. The flash sees that the distance is much farther away than the doorframe, so it increases its power accordingly. This usually doesn't brighten the subject fully, but it definitely brightens the subject far more than using TTL. Of course, once the subject is brightened to proper exposure, the doorframe will likely be blown out, but that can't be avoided.

The way to make this trick easy to implement is to start with the camera in manual mode and matrix metering and the flash in TTL-BL. Then, switch the camera to spot metering. That will force the flash automatically to TTL which is usually best indoors in dim ambient. Spot metering doesn't do anything to the camera settings since manual mode has been selected. It only affects the flash mode.

Then, when you run across the situation mentioned above, switch the camera metering to matrix, and the flash will automatically switch back to TTL-BL, and the shot will be exposed the best way possible. However, the flash may still need increased compensation to get the exposure on the subject exactly right.

If you don't want to remove the diffuser, another way to do this is to zoom in on the subject and hit FV Lock. The flash metering system will only look at what is in the frame center weighted. Then, zoom back out to include the doorway or whatever is between you and the subject, and take the shot. Of course, the doorway will be blown out, but that's normally OK in this type of shot.