Flash - Putting it all together!

Putting it all together using the Genius2!

Whoa! That was a huge mouthful and if you don't have it all 100% don't worry! This article is meant to put it all together! With time and practice all of this will become second nature so don't get frustrated and it will come to you!

DOWNLOAD A HIGH RESOLUTION PDF OF THE GENIUS SQUARED BY CLICKING HERE

The Genius Squared was a little thing I came up with while I was part of lightenupandshoot and it really is the best way that I could think of to put it all together so I decided to migrate it over to unknown photographer and share it with the world.

The Genius Squared is two intersecting squares (or rectangles) as you can see. The dashed square on the left contains all of the variables that control your Available Light Exposure. The square on the right contains all of the variables that adjust your Flash Exposure. Anything that is in a square by itself will ONLY control the exposure of either Available Light or Flash Light. For example, Shutter Speed is in a square by itself in the Available Light Exposure Square, so it ONLY controls Available Light. The Flash Power and the Inverse Square Law are in a Square by themselves in the Flash Exposure Square so they ONLY control Flash Exposure! For example, if you adjust your shutter speed from 1/200th of a second, to 1/100th of a second, you are only allowing in one stop of available light exposure.

The settings that are in the square that intersects control both Available Light and Flash Exposure at the same time! So anytime you adjust your Aperture or ISO, you are controling both your Available Light Exposure and your Flash Exposure. For example, if you open your aperture by one stop, let's say from F/8 to F/5.6 you are allowing one stop of flash exposure in, as well as one stop of available light exposure in.

I came up with the Genius Squared so that you would have a way to visually see how the settings interact with each other. It's a great way to practice imaginary situations while you don't have time to actually go out and shoot.

Let's put this baby to work.

ROLL YOUR MOUSE OVER AND LEAVE IT ON TO SEE DIFFERENT EXPOSURE

In this first exposure you can definitely see it's too dark. Both my Available light exposure and my Flash Exposure. I need to allow more available light in as well as more flash light in. By looking at the image I'm thinking that the Available light is underexposed by two stops and my flash exposure is underexposed by 1 stop. This is just a guess, so don't start thinking how I did it. In the histograms article I'm going to teach you how to visually analyze your image so that you have more educated guesses. For now, just know that I'm assuming this is what the shot needed.

So let's deconstruct it using the Genius Squared. We know that anything that is in it's own square only affects it's exposure and anything that is in the intersecting squares affects both exposures equally. We need 2 stops of Available light and 1 stop of flash light.

So the first thing I'm going to change is my Aperture. Why because my aperture is affecting both my Available light and my Flash Light. So I can essentially kill two birds with one stone. I opened up one stop from F/8 to F/5.6. By opening up my aperture, I just let in one stop of Available Light and one stop of Flash light.

I'm still needing one stop of available light because my aperture exposure only gave me one stop of available light exposure. So my next move is to adjust my shutter speed, which ONLY controls my available light. I slow down my shutter from 1/200th to 1/100th. Anytime I halve or double my shutter speed it's one stop. From 1/200th to 1/100th is one stop of extra light.

If you roll your mouse over the image you are going to see the second exposure, which in my opinion was still too dark. From the looks of it, I'm thinking I'm going to need another 2 extra stops of available light, and one extra stop of flash light.

So once again, I'm going to adjust my aperture by one stop and open it up to F/4. This gives me one stop of flash light and one stop of available light. I then adjusted my shutter speed from 1/100th to 1/50th to get an extra stop of only available light. The image above is what I had previsualized in my head.

I could have adjusted different settings to get the same exposure result, and that's the beauty of the five variables of flash exposure. you have different options for different situations. The beauty of the genius square is that it shows you your options visually.