Chapter 11 — Exercises

Flash is learned by placing light and looking at what it does, so most of these put a flash (or a cheap LED, or even a friend with a phone flashlight) in your hand and send you to make frames. There is no wrong kit here — a single external light, moved off-axis, teaches everything that matters; phone-only readers should read each exercise's mobile note. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything you shoot — your off-camera frame may feed your Portfolio.

A reminder of the two ideas you'll lean on constantly: the two-exposure model (shutter sets the ambient, flash power sets the flash; aperture and ISO move both) and the inverse-square law (double the distance → a quarter the light; close light = steep falloff, far light = even).

Part A — Diagnose the betrayal (Read the Frame & Fix the Photo)

Exercise 11.1 ⭐ — Spot the three failures. Find three direct-on-camera-flash photos in your own camera roll (everyone has them). For each, label the three signature failures from §11.1 wherever they appear: the flat frontal light, the hard wall-shadow, and any redeye/glare/startled look. One sentence per photo. The goal is to make the failures visible on sight.

Exercise 11.2 ⭐⭐ — Fix the Photo: the void background. A reader describes their flash photo: "Indoor party, person three feet away looks fine but they're floating in total blackness — you can't tell what room it is." Diagnose exactly why the background went black (in two-exposure terms), then prescribe the specific settings change that would bring the room back. Name the dial and the direction.

Exercise 11.3 ⭐⭐ — Fix the Photo: the orange face. A reader bounces their flash off the ceiling to soften it, but every portrait comes out warm-orange on the skin. Diagnose the cause using a Chapter 5 property of light, and give two fixes (one in-camera/on-location, one in editing).

Exercise 11.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Read the Frame, then re-light it. Write a six-field Described Photograph (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON) of a bad on-camera-flash snapshot you have. Then write a second Described Photograph of the same subject re-shot with the flash fixed — bounced or off-camera — describing precisely what changes in the light, the shadows, and the effect. You are re-lighting in words before you re-light in pixels.

Part B — How flash works (Settings Drill)

Exercise 11.5 ⭐ — Power in stops. Your flash is at 1/2 power and the subject is one stop too bright. Write three different single changes that would each fix it by one stop — one using flash power, one using aperture, one using ISO — and name the creative side effect of each.

Exercise 11.6 ⭐⭐ — Sync-speed trap. Your camera's sync speed is 1/200 s. You're shooting flash and set 1/640 s; a black band appears across the frame. (a) Explain in one sentence why. (b) Give the simplest fix. (c) Name the feature that would let you keep 1/640 s with flash, and the cost of using it.

Exercise 11.7 ⭐⭐ — Inverse-square arithmetic. A flash 2 metres from a subject gives a correct exposure at 1/8 power. (a) You move it to 1 metre and change nothing else — roughly how many stops too bright is the subject now? (b) To keep the same exposure at 1 metre, what power should you switch to? (c) State the rule you used in one sentence.

Exercise 11.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Two-exposure recipe from scratch. You're shooting a portrait at dusk: you want the deep-blue sky behind your subject to register richly and the subject cleanly lit by flash. Write a complete starting recipe — mode, aperture, ISO, shutter, and flash approach — and explain, dial by dial, which setting controls the sky and which controls the subject. (Stay at or below a 1/200 s sync speed.)

Part C — Bounce and diffuse (Shoot This)

Exercise 11.9 ⭐ — Bounce vs. direct, same face. With one external flash and a room with a white ceiling ~2 m up, shoot a willing subject twice without moving your feet: flash direct, then flash bounced off the ceiling (tilted up and slightly forward). Compare the wall-shadow and the modeling on the face. Keep both; write one sentence on which you'd use for a portrait and why. (Mobile path: hold an LED light at the camera for "direct," then aim it at the ceiling for "bounce.")

Exercise 11.10 ⭐⭐ — Three bounce surfaces. Bounce one flash off three different surfaces in turn — the ceiling, a white wall to your left, and a white wall behind you — keeping the subject still. Shoot each. Rank the three by how much shape (directional modeling) they give the face, and note which looks most like window light.

Exercise 11.11 ⭐⭐ — The colored-surface test. Deliberately bounce a flash off a strongly colored surface (a red book cover, a wood door, a green wall) onto a white object or a hand. Photograph it. Then bounce off white. Compare the color casts side by side. This burns the "neutral surfaces only" rule into memory the easy way — by seeing it fail.

Exercise 11.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Diffuser truth-test. Test the claim from §11.4 that a small diffuser alone barely softens light. Shoot a subject with hard side-light from a bare flash, then with a dome diffuser cap on the same flash, aimed straight at the subject (no bounce). Compare the shadow edges. Then bounce the diffused flash off the ceiling and compare again. Write what actually produced the softness — the diffuser, or the bounce.

Part D — Off-camera: placing light (Shoot This & Five Conditions)

Exercise 11.13 ⭐ — Get it off the camera. However you can — radio trigger, optical slave, or simply a friend holding the flash/LED — get one light off the camera and light any simple subject from the side, raised slightly above. Compare it to the same subject lit by an on-camera flash. Note the single biggest difference you see. (This is the leap; even one frame counts.)

Exercise 11.14 ⭐⭐ — Five conditions: one light, five positions. Pick one subject and a dark-ish background. Light it with a single off-camera flash from five positions, keeping power/distance constant: (1) front (at the camera), (2) 45° to the side and raised, (3) 90° side (split light), (4) behind-and-to-the-side (rim), (5) below, pointing up. Shoot each. Self-select the best three and write why each works and what mood it creates.

Exercise 11.15 ⭐⭐ — Falloff by distance. Light a subject (in front of a wall a metre or two behind them) with one off-camera flash at three distances — close (arm's length), medium, far — adjusting power so the subject stays equally bright each time. Shoot all three. Compare how bright the background wall is in each, and the steepness of the shadow across the subject. Explain the difference with the inverse-square law.

Exercise 11.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Manual vs. TTL drift. Shoot a moving sequence (someone walking toward you, or you stepping nearer/farther) twice: once in TTL flash and once in manual flash at a fixed power. Compare how consistent the subject's brightness stays across the frames. Write which mode held steadier and why — and name one situation where you'd still prefer the other.

Part E — Fill flash outdoors (Shoot This & Fix the Photo)

Exercise 11.17 ⭐ — Backlit, with and without fill. Put a subject in front of a bright background (a bright sky, a sunlit window, the sea). Shoot once exposing for the background (subject goes dark/silhouette), then again with fill flash added to lift the subject. Keep both. Note that the background looks the same in both — only the subject changed. (Mobile path: use the phone's LED flash forced on, or have a friend hold an LED; or tap-meter the bright background and let HDR lift the face.)

Exercise 11.18 ⭐⭐ — Noon rescue. Find a subject in harsh overhead noon sun (raccoon-eye shadows). Shoot it with available light, then add low fill flash aimed straight at the face to open the eye-socket and chin shadows. Compare. Dial the fill down until it's invisible — the photo should look kindly lit, not flashed.

Exercise 11.19 ⭐⭐ — Fix the Photo: the obvious flash. A reader's daylight portrait looks "flashed" — the subject is brighter than the scene and the light reads artificial against the natural background. Diagnose what they did wrong with the fill ratio, and prescribe the specific correction (name the control and the direction). State the one-sentence rule for good fill.

Exercise 11.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — The ambient-first habit. Shoot a fill-flash portrait against a bright, colorful background (a sunset, a graffiti wall, a blue sky) by the book: set the ambient exposure for the background first with no flash, confirm the background looks right, then add fill. Make three frames at three fill levels (full, −1 stop, −2 stops) and choose the one where the fill is least noticeable while still opening the shadows. Explain your choice.

Part F — The red door and the Portfolio

Exercise 11.21 ⭐⭐ — Recreate It: the red door at night. Find your own "red door" — any textured, single-strong-color subject — and light it at night with one off-camera flash raking across its surface from the side, close, so the texture pops and the light falls off toward the far edge (recreate Figure 11.6). Kill the ambient with your shutter so the subject glows out of the dark. This is a direct rehearsal for the Portfolio Checkpoint.

Exercise 11.22 ⭐⭐ — Found vs. made, same subject. Photograph one subject twice on different occasions: once in the best found light you can wait for (window or golden hour, per Chapter 5), and once with made light you place (one off-camera flash). Put the two side by side. Write a short paragraph on what each approach gave you and what it cost — this is the through-line of Part III.

Exercise 11.23 ⭐ — Light Log, the flash entry. Add the chapter's Light Log prompt: for three days, in any artificially lit space (restaurant, shop, office), write one line on where the light comes from, hard or soft, and what color. Flag one room with well-handled (soft, shaped) lighting and one with bare flat lighting. No camera required.

Exercise 11.24 ⭐⭐⭐ — Portfolio: the placed-light keeper. Execute the Portfolio Checkpoint: a portrait or still life lit primarily by one off-camera flash you placed, worked in manual with the two-exposure model. Shoot at least 20 frames, varying the light's position and distance; keep the best 1–3. Write three sentences: what the light is doing, why the frame works, and how it sits beside your Chapter 5 golden-hour (found-light) keeper.

Part G — Eye Training & the Light Log (no camera required)

Exercise 11.29 ⭐ — Read the light in restaurants. For three meals out (or three visits to lit indoor spaces), write one Light Log line each on the room's made light: where it comes from, hard or soft, and its color. Then judge it: does it flatter faces and food, or flatten them? You're building the seeing skill behind §11.4 — recognizing good made light the way Chapter 5 taught you to recognize good found light.

Exercise 11.30 ⭐⭐ — Reverse-engineer the flash. Find three photos (yours or others') that clearly used flash and deduce, from shadows and highlights alone: Was the flash on-camera or off? On-axis or to the side? Bounced or direct? Close or far (look at the falloff and the background)? Write your reasoning for each. This is the professional skill of reading a lighting setup backward from its result — the same logic you used for daylight in Chapter 1.

Exercise 11.31 ⭐⭐ — Predict the two-exposure dials. Without a camera, write the dial-by-dial plan for three scenarios: (a) a candle-lit restaurant portrait where you want the warm glow to survive; (b) a subject against a bright window where you want the view outside to register; (c) a dramatic shot where the subject should glow out of total black. For each, state what the shutter does, what the flash power does, and where you'd place the light. Then, when you can, go shoot one and check your prediction.

Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 11.25 ⭐⭐ — Flash meets depth of field. Shoot an off-camera-flash portrait at f/2.8 and again at f/8, adjusting flash power (or distance) to keep the subject equally bright. Compare the backgrounds. Explain — using Chapter 4 (depth of field) and the two-exposure model — why both the blur and the ambient brightness of the background changed.

Exercise 11.26 ⭐⭐ — Flash meets composition. Take any off-camera-flash frame you've made and critique it purely on Chapter 6 grounds: is the subject on a power point? Are there leading lines or distractions? Does the falloff direct the eye where you want? Re-shoot once, improving the composition and the light together.

Exercise 11.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — Flash meets the decisive moment. Combine Chapter 10 with this chapter: with an off-camera flash set up and dialed in (manual, fixed), capture a gesture or moment — someone laughing, pouring, turning — lit by your placed light. The challenge is that your lighting is fixed while the moment is fleeting, so you must anticipate. Keep the one frame where light and moment both land.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 11.28 ⭐⭐⭐ — One light, one subject, ten looks. Pick a single subject and a single off-camera flash. Without changing the subject, produce ten visibly different photographs by varying only the light: its position (front/side/back/below), its distance (falloff), its modifier (bare/bounced/diffused), and the ambient level (shutter). Lay the ten out together. The lesson — that where and how you place one light is a near-infinite creative space — is the foundation of the entire studio chapter ahead. Note which look surprised you most.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a light in your hand before reading them — in flash photography, the test frame is the lesson.