You've just flown for 12 hours strapped to a worn out airline seat, eating whatever morsels were put in front of you more out of sheer boredom than hunger......but now you're THERE!
Waking up the next morning with camera in hand.....ready to walk the streets of an exotic new city, hoping to blaze new visual trails in the early morning sun....you walk out the front door of your hotel to find...GLOOM!
Fear not, O ye, of little faith! With the simple application of some " supplemental flash ", even the gloomiest weather can provide a visual cornucopia of options. The secret is to slightly underexpose the background, while setting the flash to correctly expose the foreground. In the image shown below.....I underexposed the background skyline 1 stop, set my TTL flash on auto.....did a test shot with my Canon 7D...and then adjusted the flash exposure compensation to correctly expose for the kiosk.
It's easier for me to let the flash TTL have a first go at setting the exposure correctly, and more often than not it gets it right. When I need to adjust it somewhat, I just use the flash exposure compensation to "tweak" it rather than go to a manual flash setting, since that would require constant readjustment for every flash to subject distance change.
Simple solutions are always better when you need to shoot fast. With digital cameras, we get instant feedback on how well the TTL flash units are lighting the subject, and can achieve a much better "keeper" rate than back in the days of film.....when we sometimes waited until a trip was over before we knew how well we did!
In this example, I used a Canon 7D with 16-35mm lens set at 1/250th sec at f 5.6 at iso 400 with built-in TTL flash.
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