portraiture Genevieve

Comments always welcome. Thank you for your time.

Did you use just a fill flash? Was this a single exposure? Sorry if these are uninformed questions. I'm just beginning to learn.

Hi Brian, this is a singe exposure shot and yes I was using fill flash.

I bracketed several shots to obtain the exposure that I was looking for. When doing this I typically obtain a reading from the in-camera ambient meter and underexpose whatever it reads by 1 stop. I was also using off camera flash and dialed it down 1/3 stop while in ETTL mode. Once again, it just becomes a matter of bracketing the stops from your flash too until you obtain the result that you are looking for. What makes everything so difficult is that you lose light very quickly once the sun starts setting so you can't use the same shutter speed and f-stop for every exposure. If you are post-processing the image in RAW then you can also tweak the exposure if it wasn't bang on in-camera.

There are a few other methods that will allow you to get the same result in the end but this is the way that I have found that worked for me.

Your question was not uniformed and I really hope that my explanation has helped you out. All the best!