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Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

Started 1 week ago | Discussions
DanH82 New Member • Posts: 2
Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them.  I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done?  Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Canon EOS R5
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quadrox Senior Member • Posts: 1,382
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

DanH82 wrote:

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them. I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done? Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

To the best of my knowledge, this has never been supported on any canon camera, and I seem to remember manuals explicitly stating that this cannot be done.

I suppose in canons mind there is no scenario where exposure bracketing can wait on long flash charge times.

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grovep Forum Member • Posts: 59
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5
1

DanH82 wrote:

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them. I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done? Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In this instance I would suggest not to use exposure bracketing mode at all and just take three images with appropriate exposure compensations.  Camera on a tripod of course.  Or have I missed something obvious?  I would use my phone to control the camera in this case so the EC can be easily applied.

aquacypher New Member • Posts: 4
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

DanH82 wrote:

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them. I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done? Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

According Canon, AEB cannot be used with a flash (see their Knowledge Base page for AEB). As others recommended, you could bracket manually with a flash. Alternatively, you could auto bracket normally, then do a couple of extra shots with flash and use layers in Photoshop or similar to amp up the dull areas. Definitely adds some extra work, though.

JustUs7 Senior Member • Posts: 4,327
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5
1

Seems with a decent lighting set up, bracketing isn’t necessary anyway.

Expose for the ambient light of the window.  Use the lighting to expose the room.  That’s kind of the point of flash, isn’t it?   With the flash, you won’t have shadows to bring up.  With the ambient exposure for the window, you won’t have blown highlights to recover.  Everything within the dynamic range of the sensor.  Done.

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jonby Regular Member • Posts: 399
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

DanH82 wrote:

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them. I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done? Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Probably an obvious question, but I take it you have tried using AEB with single-frame shooting rather than continuous? You really would have thought Canon would lift the restriction for single-frame shooting. However, Canon are Canon and I'm guessing they didn't!

One possible workaround (which I haven't tried) is to use the interval timer. I believe it can be combined with AEB. Interval timer can also be combined with flash. Question is, whether all three can be combined together. I've heard this works on Nikon - not sure about Canon.

On top of this, you know you have flash exposure bracketing (FEB) on many flashes, right? So if you set up FEB on the flash, and the above works, you should get a consistent ambient/flash balance on each bracketed shot.

Let us know if this works - I'm interested.

OP DanH82 New Member • Posts: 2
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

Hi,

Thank you all for the advice.  I have been away but will look into flash exposure bracketing and see if this improves things.  I have a 3rd party flash (Yongnuo YN600EX-RT) so will see if this has the capability if not then I may need to look at others.

I am also wondering if it's merging the bracketed shots Lightroom that is the problem.  A friend has suggested I make the DNG file by margining in DXO Pro Raw as this produces a better image.  Again I will look to test this and report back.

Thanks again!

Dan W Senior Member • Posts: 1,154
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5
1

DanH82 wrote:

Hi,

I am a real estate photographer using a Canon R5 with 15-35mm lens setup.

Currently using a tripod I shoot 3 exposure brackets (-1, 0, +1) for internal room shots and then merge these in Lightroom to try and get both the view out of the window and all areas of the room looking good with a few tweaks.

However, I often find walls that should look crisp and white appear dull with maybe a yellow tinge to them. I think that using a diffused flash bounced off the ceiling would help to crisp up the whites, however I can't get this to fire automatically off the hotshoe when in exposure bracketing mode.

Does anyone know if this can be done? Currently I fire a handheld flash manually which helps with the walls but relies on me timing it right!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I guess I'm confused. Expose for ambient outside of windows then set your flash to "FEB"  or Flash Exposure Bracketing + 1 stop, 0Stop, - 1 stop. As far as what walls looking yellow or dark it's always a good idea when color is critical is to shoot a white card or even a grey card. Canon usually likes white card for white balance whereas Nikon likes grey cards for white balance. This will mean if you shoot the image with a white balance using your lighting setup, white walls will look white and blue walls will look blue etc..

By doing this you should get a proper exposure for the outside and you will have bracketed flash exposures for the inside that is color balanced. It only takes a minute or two to do this. Before retirement, I was a portrait shooter for paid work. My first shot was for white balance. I never had to mess with color treatments during post.  Mixed lighting like really bad ambient light color can get tricky but thats when you try to match the flash color to the ambient colors using gels on the flash(es) used and setting camera color temp to the colored lights, again a simple shot with the light/s being used will correct any color shifts you make. I hope this makes sense.

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Expedimage New Member • Posts: 1
Re: Exposure bracketing with flash on Canon R5

I set up exposure bracketing in aperture priority mode with flash setting disabled. I then set custom setting c1 as this. 
I then turn off bracketing and enable flash settings in aperture priority mode and set to custom setting C2.

In this way, I select C1 mode, take the 3 ambient brackets, switch to C2 and take my flash frame for blending in photoshop.

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