Chapter 15 — Exercises

Mixing light is learned with a flash in one hand and an eye on the ambient. Most of these exercises send you out to balance, gel, and drag — but several are pure seeing, because half of mixed light is recognizing what colors and brightnesses are already in a scene before you add to them. 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. You need a flash you can set to manual power and get off the camera (Chapter 11) for the shooting exercises; a phone-only reader should do the Eye-Training and blue-hour (available-light) items and read the rest for the thinking.

Keep everything you shoot — your dusk portrait feeds the Portfolio.

Part A — The two-exposure model (Settings Drill)

Exercise 15.1 ⭐ — Which dial? For each situation, name the single dial you'd change and which way: (a) subject perfectly lit, background too dark; (b) background perfect, subject too bright; (c) you want more depth of field but everything else is right; (d) the whole frame — subject and room — is one stop too dark. One line each.

Exercise 15.2 ⭐⭐ — Set the ambient first. Pick any indoor scene with a lamp on. Write the full exposure you'd use to record the ambient a stop darker than "correct" (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO), with the flash off. Then state what you'd do next to add a subject with flash, and why you set the ambient before touching the flash. Explain in five sentences.

Exercise 15.3 ⭐⭐ — Walk the spectrum. Take one subject in a lit room and shoot it at three points on the ambient/flash balance spectrum: flash-dominant (background near black), balanced (both visible), ambient-dominant (flash a barely-there fill). Change only the shutter (for ambient) and flash power (for subject) between them — never move the subject or the light. Lay the three side by side and label which dial you moved to get from each to the next.

Exercise 15.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Kill the daylight. In bright daylight, make a portrait where the background goes dark and dramatic and the subject is lit by flash against it. You'll need a fast shutter (up to your sync speed), a narrow aperture, low ISO to crush the ambient, and a strong flash on the subject. Write down the settings that finally worked and how many stops below "correct" your ambient ended up. (This is "midday to midnight.")

Part B — Dragging the shutter (Shoot This)

Exercise 15.5 ⭐ — Front vs. rear curtain. With a moving subject (a friend walking through frame, with permission) and a ~1/4 s shutter plus flash, shoot the same motion once on front-curtain sync and once on rear-curtain sync. Compare where the motion streak falls relative to the sharp frozen subject. Write one sentence on which looks natural and why.

Exercise 15.6 ⭐⭐ — The sparkler / torch loop. After dark, have someone (with permission) draw shapes in the air with a sparkler or phone torch while you shoot a 1–2 second exposure with a low-power flash on rear-curtain sync. Make 15 frames. Keep the one where the light-writing is clearest and the person is sharp. Note your shutter, flash power, and which one you'd change for (a) a longer light-trail, (b) a brighter person.

Exercise 15.7 ⭐⭐ — Two dials, separated. Set up a dragging-the-shutter frame (any moving ambient light + a still subject). First, holding flash power fixed, shoot at three shutter speeds (1/15 s, 1/4 s, 1 s) and observe only the streak changing. Then, holding the shutter fixed, shoot at three flash powers and observe only the subject brightness changing. Write what this proves about the two-exposure model.

Exercise 15.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Energy as content. Go to a place with moving colored light (a fair, a busy lit street, a stage if you can). Deliberately swing or zoom the camera during a slow exposure while a flash freezes a sharp subject, so the ambient lights smear into ribbons. Make 25 frames; keep 3 where the streak feels intentional, not chaotic. Write why the keepers work and the rejects don't.

Part C — Color temperature and gels (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

Exercise 15.9 ⭐ — Diagnose the cast. For each, name which light is the "wrong" color and which gel + white balance would fix it: (a) bare flash fired into a warm tungsten living room, white balance on daylight — what's orange, what's the fix? (b) bare flash at blue hour, subject looks slightly warm against the sky — fault or feature? One line each.

Exercise 15.10 ⭐⭐ — Gel and balance, together. In a warm tungsten-lit room, make a flash portrait three ways: (a) bare flash, white balance daylight; (b) bare flash, white balance tungsten; (c) CTO-gelled flash, white balance tungsten. Describe the color of the subject and the background in each. Which one makes the flash invisible, and why are (a) and (b) each wrong in a different way?

Exercise 15.11 ⭐⭐ — The half-and-half test. Tape a CTO gel over half your flash head (or shoot one frame gelled, one bare, same room and white balance). Put both results side by side against the warm room. This is the fastest way to see what a gel does. Write down, in kelvin terms, what the CTO did to your flash's color.

Exercise 15.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Match a tricky room. Find a room lit by something other than clean tungsten — warm LED, or fluorescent. Get a clean flash portrait where the subject's skin looks natural and the room looks natural. You may need to combine a CTO with a green-correction gel, or fine-tune white balance in RAW. Document what the ambient turned out to be and what it took to match it.

Part D — Blue hour and fill (Shoot This — feeds the Portfolio)

Exercise 15.13 ⭐⭐ — Expose for the sky. Half an hour before sunset, with the flash off, practice exposing only for the sky: make the blue rich and slightly dark, the horizon afterglow saturated. Shoot the sky every five minutes as it deepens and watch how much you must slow the shutter to hold the exposure. The subject will be a silhouette; that's correct. Keep the sequence as a record of how fast blue hour moves.

Exercise 15.14 ⭐⭐ — Lift the face. Now repeat 15.13 with a willing subject and a single soft flash. Expose the sky, then raise flash power until the face sits naturally — present, but not brighter than the sky. Make 30 frames as the light falls. This is your Portfolio shoot; keep the best one and one "too bright" reject for contrast.

Exercise 15.15 ⭐⭐⭐ — Warm face, cool world (and the reverse). Make two blue-hour portraits of the same person: one with a CTO-gelled flash for a warm face against the cool sky, and one with a CTB-gelled (or cooler-white-balanced) flash for a cold, detached look. Same pose, same sky. Write which feeling each color produces and when you'd choose it.

Exercise 15.16 ⭐⭐ — Phone-path blue hour. (Mobile-only friendly.) With no flash, make a blue-hour portrait using only available light: place the subject so the brightest sky or a city light fills the shadow side of the face, or use a small LED / a friend's phone torch as a gentle fill. Expose for the sky; lift the face with whatever found light you can borrow. Prove the thinking transfers even without a strobe.

Part E — Mixed light strategy (Read the Frame & Fix the Photo)

Exercise 15.17 ⭐⭐ — Name the sources. Find a real multi-colored room (a café, a kitchen, a bar). Without shooting, list every light source and its rough color temperature ("warm lamps ~3200 K; cool window ~6500 K; green fluorescent overhead"). Then write which of the three strategies (un-mix / pick a winner / embrace the split) you'd use and why. Naming is the skill.

Exercise 15.18 ⭐⭐ — Pick a winner. In that same room, make a portrait using Strategy 2: set white balance for the light on the face, and let the other sources shift. Keep the frame where the subject is correct and the background's color adds depth rather than confusing. Write which source you chose as the "winner" and what the others became.

Exercise 15.19 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the muddy frame. Here is a described failed shot. Diagnose and prescribe the re-shoot.

A portrait in a warm-lamp-lit study with a daylight window behind. Shot on auto white balance, bare on-camera flash, fast shutter. Result: the subject's skin is an indeterminate grey-pink, the lamps look oddly cool, the window is blown white, and the background is nearly black. Name every error (white balance, flash color, ambient exposure, flash quality) and write the full re-shoot: strategy, gel, white balance, shutter, flash position. At least five specific fixes.

Exercise 15.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Embrace the split, on purpose. Make one frame where a deliberate two-color split is the whole point: warm subject against cool background, or a bold colored-gel wash behind a cleanly lit subject. Push the color contrast until it's unmistakably intentional. Write the job and color you assigned to each of your two lights.

Part F — Eye Training (the Light Log, no camera)

Exercise 15.21 ⭐ — Count the colors. For three days, add a Light Log entry that counts and names the colors of light in one everyday scene per day — your kitchen at dinner, a shop, a train carriage. How many different color temperatures share the space? Which one is "winning" on people's faces?

Exercise 15.22 ⭐⭐ — Spot the un-gelled flash. Look at flash photos in the wild — event photos, social feeds, news images. Find three where the flash didn't match the ambient (tell-tale: blue subject in a warm room, or an orange room behind a neutral subject). Note what gel + white balance would have fixed each. You're learning to see the mistake so you won't make it.

Exercise 15.23 ⭐⭐ — Read a mixed-light frame. Find a photograph (yours or a professional's) that clearly mixes flash with ambient well. Write a full Described Photograph of it (the six fields), paying special attention to THE LIGHT: how many sources, what colors, which is ambient and which is flash, and how you can tell.

Part G — Interleaved (mixing in prior chapters)

Exercise 15.24 ⭐⭐ — Light + composition + moment. Make a single dusk portrait that is also a strong composition (place the subject on a third, use a leading line or the horizon — Chapter 6) and catches a genuine expression or beat (Chapter 10), not just a posed stare. Mixed light is necessary but not sufficient; the frame still has to be a good photograph. Write how you served all three.

Exercise 15.25 ⭐⭐⭐ — The red door, mixed. Return to your "red door" subject (the anchor from Chapters 3–11). Photograph it at dusk with a balance of ambient (the deepening sky / streetlight) and a single flash you place and color with a gel. Compare it to your earlier red-door frames (golden hour, flat light, off-camera flash at night). Write one paragraph: the subject never changed — what did you bring to it this time that you couldn't have at Chapter 3?

Exercise 15.26 ⭐⭐ — Settings recall under pressure. Without looking back at the chapter, write from memory the starting-point Settings Box for a dusk portrait with fill (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO, flash power, gel, white balance, focus). Then check it against §15.4. List what you missed — those are your weak spots to drill.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 15.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — One subject, every look in the chapter. Pick one willing subject and one evening. Make five finished frames of them, each demonstrating a different tool from this chapter: (1) seamless matched flash-plus-ambient indoors; (2) a dragged-shutter motion frame; (3) a blue-hour portrait with fill; (4) a killed-ambient dramatic portrait; (5) a deliberate two-color split. Same person, one camera, one flash, a few gels. Lay all five together and write a sentence on each: which two-exposure decisions and which color decisions made it. This single set is, in miniature, the entire chapter — and a strong addition to your body of work.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a flash and a sky before reading them — in mixed light especially, the attempt teaches what no description can.