Typical Power Settings for Your Flash

If you’re using your flash indoors, or outdoors in anything other than bright daylight, you’ll be running your flash 99% of the time at less than half-power. In fact, you’ll probably be often running it at 25% power (I’m sometimes at 1/8 or 1/16 power during a typical shoot). Why so low? Because the idea is to balance the light from your flash with the existing light already in the room (or already available outside), so you usually want just a little bit of flash (or your flash will look like flash). The goal is to make your flash look like natural light, so your power setting will probably stay real darn low.