Forced Flash During Daylight

On 2011-09-12 04:15 , pago wrote:
I was shooting on a beautiful sunny day (9am – 2 pm) with my nikon
d5000 kit lens (18-55). Due to the directional lighting of the sun, I
set my camera to aperture priority and forced the on-camera flash to
“fill’ in some shadows that I wanted to fill.

Even though I had my on-camera flash set to TTL, some of my shots
still turn out to be overly exposed, losing details and colour along
the way.

What can I do better next time?

Such a shot is two exposures:

1. The _natural light shot_. This is what you want to expose for in
terms of aperture and shutter speed. (and ISO).

2. The _fill light_ shot. This you control, wrt to aperture and ISO
with the flash power.

typically you want the fill light to be about 1.5 - 2.5 stops less than
the natural light exposure. (You want to 'lift' the shadows, not
obliterate them, not blow out colours.

As Eric says, look at the histo - but the _highlights_ should be those
of the natural light shot - the shadows should be _lifted_ not whitened
into highlights.

For such I usually set the flash comp at about -1 to -2 and adjust after
a test shot.

If you have an incident flash light meter then it is much easier to set
a specific aperture power relationship. (eg: if the shot is f/8 set the
flash power for f/4.5 or so). More time to set up, however.

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