How often ttl system is confused

Hi all,
I am testing my TTL flashes at home and everything looks to work great.
When I get to a church to shoot an event (baptisms, weddings) I find my flashes to be way more unpredictable. I am not sure why this happening bt my speculation is that the Greek churches I typically shoot in have a lot of glimpsing surfaces.

The priest clothes have a lot of tiny fake jewelish items. The holy bible is made of semi-gold reflective surface and so on. So many times I find getting really funny TTL exposures. For a reason reflective surface tend to give me strong over exposures.

Do you have same experience? Which are the tough cases and how do you handle those?
Regards
Alex

My guess is that the larger and probably dark church background is causing increase in exposure. Dark would seek greater exposure. Bright reflections ought to have the opposite effect of reducing exposure (contributing towards already bright enough).

Regarding ambient, you might try Center Weighted metering instead of Matrix. Might help ignore dark frame edges. I know it can ignore bright highlights at frame edge. The flash metering is already a variation of center metering (regardless of ambient selection).

If you are shooting people pictures, you might want to consider spot metering right on their faces? Also some example photos would be useful.

A little more detail may help any sample photos you could post and flash model.
Shooting in a closed home is not the same a a open church setting, distance from subject also would help.
As mentioned you would not want to be in matrix metering for sure, Samples of a shot in home and church would be a big help.

ttl system is confused often


any bright light source or something bright will confuse the system. Ive been shooting weddings in manual for more than a year now. I know the distance I need to be at, I set aperture and iso on the go if I need to. ttl sucks ass.

one think I can say is that everything has advanced in cameras except ttl accuracy. its the same crap as it was when I was shooting f5. the system is too analog and based on 18% grey so it sees a bright object and underexposes, it sees guys in black suits and overexposes. if you compose closeup shots it will overexpose. the whole system is just crap.

rocketman122 said:

ttl system is confused often


any bright light source or something bright will confuse the system. Ive been shooting weddings in manual for more than a year now. I know the distance I need to be at, I set aperture and iso on the go if I need to. ttl sucks ass.

one think I can say is that everything has advanced in cameras except ttl accuracy. its the same crap as it was when I was shooting f5. the system is too analog and based on 18% grey so it sees a bright object and underexposes, it sees guys in black suits and overexposes. if you compose closeup shots it will overexpose. the whole system is just crap.

Click to expand...

I used to shoot weddings in the old days of film and manual was the way to go. The distance is easy to evaluate and once you've worked with your flash a few times, you know what aperture to use.
But Hasselblads and Pentax 6x7 were a lot heavier than today's Dslr.

rocketman122 said:

one think I can say is that everything has advanced in cameras except ttl accuracy. its the same crap as it was when I was shooting f5. the system is too analog and based on 18% grey so it sees a bright object and underexposes, it sees guys in black suits and overexposes. if you compose closeup shots it will overexpose. the whole system is just crap.

Click to expand...

Things will go much better and easier if you stop and think about it being Reflective metering. The color black is reflected from the suit, and black does not reflect light well, so the meter reads low (it is low), and the camera will overexpose it trying to get it up to middle. The white brides dress reflects much light and reads high (it is high), and the camera will underexpose it trying to keep it at the middle. Middle because the dumb camera has no smart to know it is a suit or a dress or an elephant or a cloud.

This "middle" concept is all because the camera simply has no human brain and experience helping it. It's just a dumb chip. It only sees a blob of light, and has no clue it is a dark suit or a white dress. That has no meaning to a chip. Middle is its best guess, not too dark, not too bright. The photographers brain and experience is expected to help identify what the subject is. Photography has expected this help from human brain power since light meters were invented. For humans, it's not that hard with a bit of experience, simply just first look at the subject and give it a bit of thought. We quickly learn what to expect.

However, an incident meter instead just directly reads the actual light level incident on the subject (does not see the subject, is not influenced by the subject), and it normally gets it just about right. The meter still tries to put the light in the middle, but now at that correct level, black things come out black, and white things come out white (instead of both gray). But the incident meter has to be used at the subjects location, not as convenient as just aiming the camera from afar. Incident cannot be used built into the camera at camera location. Reflected meters only see the light reflected from the subjects colors.

But photographers soon learn how to help their camera meter too. It is a big part of photography.

thats all nice and good and I understand that but the fact its been used with this tech for so long and nothing has been upfated just says to me they arent trying hard enough. I guess fps is more important.

I dont know if you know but they boasted the f5 metering system to have over 50000 actual scenes inside and it had 1004pixel 3rd COLOR matrix metering. what a crock a shit. the cameras today dont meter any better then in the past. they have face detection and tracking but shitty flash/camera accuracy.

im no engineer but the current tech sucks ass and isnt working consistently. they should have perfected it by now. maybe adding actually scenes where the system could understand what was being shot and adjust instead of a primitive reflective system. I shot a afternoon wedding on friday...you cant image how much ec I had to use. I felt like my finger was going to break from nonstop changing the setting.

If I have to help the camera, then its time to find a different way. wedding photographers dont have options for no accuracy. we must get the shot. less stress for me to focus on getting the shot and let the camera get the exposure. I enjoyed watching a friend shoot with a mirrorless get perfect exposure shot after shot by seeing exposure in the vf. even with the d3s and matrix metering (no flash) its not accurate. underexposing one time over the other. I have to throw a lot of images because of the crap metering accuracy

there must be some new tech for that.

oh sorry 30000 scenes not 50000..

https://www.nital.it/download/pdf/reflex35/f5.pdf

page 5

they could have wrote 5 million. it sucked then and they suck now. shame.

rocketman122 said:

thats all nice and good and I understand that but the fact its been used with this tech for so long and nothing has been upfated just says to me they arent trying hard enough. I guess fps is more important.

I dont know if you know but they boasted the f5 metering system to have over 50000 actual scenes inside and it had 1004pixel 3rd COLOR matrix metering. what a crock a shit. the cameras today dont meter any better then in the past. they have face detection and tracking but shitty flash/camera accuracy.

Click to expand...

Well, Matrix metering is said to have a database of 30,000 images. That doesn't mean it contains 30,000 images, it means data complied from 30,000 images, whatever that means. I imagine it means things like if the top half is bright, that's probably sky. The camera does not otherwise know it is sky, and it still can't be sure now.
Photography Glossary | Photography Terms & Video Terminology | Nikon

under M, and then Matrix Metering...

I'm not a big fan of Matrix Metering either. I use Center Weighted, because my subject is often near the center, and it seems fewer surprises, I can almost understand it. But of course, it is still always reflected metering.

If I have to help the camera, then its time to find a different way. wedding photographers dont have options for no accuracy. we must get the shot. less stress for me to focus on getting the shot and let the camera get the exposure. I enjoyed watching a friend shoot with a mirrorless get perfect exposure shot after shot by seeing exposure in the vf. even with the d3s and matrix metering (no flash) its not accurate. underexposing one time over the other. I have to throw a lot of images because of the crap metering accuracy

there must be some new tech for that.

Click to expand...

I think that new technology is called Incident metering.
But Reflective metering is necessarily affected by the colors of the subject reflections.

You want perfect point & shoot exposure. But to improve, the camera is going to have to recognize the subject. Supposedly the 30,000 image database helps that, but it is still just a dumb camera chip. Other brands of cameras cannot improve that. Still just a dumb camera chip. Just how life is.

Novices of course do expect the camera should always get it right, but in practice, it's a much different problem. The camera has no clue what it is aimed at, no understanding. But the photographer does, and skill involves him helping a little.

My experience with D3300 and SB800 is as follows
. In spot metering mode SB800 shows TTL and in Matrix metering mode BL (balance).
. BL works fine in all conditions, but not at long distance.
. TTL I discovered outputs more power at short to medium distances so images are a bit harsh. For long distances - birds TTL works perfectly.

So in your case it is best to shoot in Matrix Metering and BL Flash Mode.