My friend (and Mercedes salesman) Steve Jones took a picture of me today, at the car dealership. Here is that picture:

I went through his camera setup for a flash picture with Steve, and I thought I would share that here.

• What mode should we be in? Manual, for full control. The flash is still metered, of course, but background is manual.
• What settings? In this case, in a big garage with much light, we will not go with the standard 400 ISO, 1/60th sec, f/4. Instead we will look at the light meter.
• We want the background to be two stops, say, below the ambient light. So the meter should point to “-2”.
• To get this, it needed 200 ISO, f/5.6, 1/200th second. With those settings the meter pointed to “-2”.
• The flash had a Sto-Fen type diffuser on it for a bit of light softening, and it was pointed forward (to make the light emitting area larger).
• White Balance was set to “Flash”.

And that’s it – that is how it is done: took a few seconds, means a nice shot.