No Flash

I've needed to learn how to take photos with my camera with out a light set up and with out a flash. Now, outdoors is easy, there is lots of light and all you would need at most is a bounce. Although some would say a strobe will help with the "fill light" But what happens if you want to take a picture of something/one indoors and all you have is sunlight.

I decided to put this to the test. I grabbed my dog and put her in the living room. After many many different camera settings I finally came up with something that works, but would still need tweaking in post production.

It' still a little dark, but if I slow down the shutter speed any more I would need a tripod and well, the do would most likely move. In the photo below I adjusted the color temp, since it came out a bit yellow in the original. I never did adjust the Metering, it was set to Matrix, I wonder if spot metering would have lightened up her dark side of the face?

Image Stats
Exposure mode : Shutter
ExP + : +5
Flash : None
Metering : matrix
Focal length : 32mm
Shutter : 1/20
Aperture : 4.5
ISO : 800
White bal : SUNNY
Light source : Large window on camera left, small window behind the subject slightly to camera right.



Here is a similar image without any post adjustments taken with the same settings. I'm not really sure which one I like better. But I do know I wish i had some fill light. Maybe all I needed was a reflector on camera right.










Now this image is with the flash... even Piper didn't like this setting. Obviously I forgot that adding a flash in the manual settings will not work. The camera will not adjust settings for the flash, I would have needed to do that. But since I didn't want to change any of the setting of the camera so I could remember them for this posting, I stopped using the flash.