Basics of Balancing Flash with Holiday Lights Using the Olympus FL-700WR

OK so I was thinking about things that all of us shoot every year during the holidays and it was confirmed last night when I took my kids to see some holiday lights – cameras (and phones) everywhere and almost no one getting a decent photo because they fear the flash.
So that’s what I want to talk about today – three quick strategies that will get you beautiful photos that include Christmas lights.

So let’s break this down into steps –

1. The first thing we need to do is to find a good exposure for the holiday lights and because you have an Olympus camera no tripod required. Here I’m shooting at 1/15th of a second.

2. Choose the strategy for how to light your people

a. Ambient
b. Direct Flash
c. Off-Camera Flash
d. Video light (one of my secret weapons)
2. Direct flash – OK so now you want to use your flash… and let’s just put it on the camera. At this point, it’s my recommendation that you have your camera in manual exposure..

a. Find that settings that expose the lights well ISO 800, 1/15 at f2 worked for me last night.
b. Turn on the flash and make sure it’s in TTL with no flash exposure compensation
c. Now you have choices
i. If there is not really any ambient light falling on the faces of your subject then you can fire away and you’ll have a very nice balanced image with bright lights in the background.
ii. If there is some light falling on your faces you’ll want to close down one to two stops of shutter speed (in my case 1/30 or 1/60) which will bring down the background brightness and make the light on faces cleaner

3. Off camera flash – so last night I packed the FL700WR and it’s little transmitter into my bag along with the Rogue Softbox (which is bendable and packs up really easily) and I just had my wife move the light off-camera and slightly to the side. This gives the kids a “prettier” light. Super easy to do and no changes to the settings, everything is still in TTL.

4. OK, another fun, easy and cheap method is just to use a video light. You can use it with an amber gel or without for daylight balanced light. What is nice here is that you can see how the light is falling, adjust the balance with the dimmer and it gives the camera extra light to autofocus if it’s struggling at all.

NOTE: This tutorial is aimed at the scenario where you're shooting at night and your subjects are dark and need some extra light. The basics of what I'm saying apply to most situations but it's not comprehensive of every shooting scenario.

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Видео Basics of Balancing Flash with Holiday Lights Using the Olympus FL-700WR канала Joseph Ellis