Shooting Your Flash in Manual Mode

The flash manufacturers won’t be thrilled to read this, but I’m not a big fan of TTL flash (Nikon’s is called i-TTL and Canon’s is called E-TTL, but they basically do the same thing—they use “through-the-lens” [TTL] metering to give you a better flash exposure automatically). When it works, it works really well. The problem is that it doesn’t always work, and you don’t always know why. That’s why, when I work with hot shoe flash, I work in Manual mode on the flash (where I raise and lower the power manually, rather than having the flash make the decisions for me). For a location shoot, I set my flash to Manual mode, then I start with my power setting at ¼ power and do a test shot. If the flash is too dark, I crank it up to ½ power and take....⅛