# Creating even exposure between foreground and background



## laughatchris (Jun 12, 2012)

Hi all. As you can see in the attached photo (taken with an iPhone), I'm trying to take a portrait of myself in the background holding a white paper with black lettering toward the camera. Trouble is, my Canon t21 auto-corrects for the brightness of the white page by darkening the background. If I make the background brighter, then the page is washed out. How do I set my camera to ensure that everything is properly exposed?

Thanks.

Chris


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## Ysarex (Jun 12, 2012)

laughatchris said:


> Hi all. As you can see in the attached photo (taken with an iPhone), I'm trying to take a portrait of myself in the background holding a white paper with black lettering toward the camera. Trouble is, my Canon t21 auto-corrects for the brightness of the white page by darkening the background. If I make the background brighter, then the page is washed out. How do I set my camera to ensure that everything is properly exposed?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> ...



You don't. How do you stand in the middle of a room that is 15 feet wide and touch both walls simultaneously? Elastic Girl? You light the subject evenly which can't be done with a single flash on camera if the subject has depth -- the light falls off rapidly.

Joe


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## Espike (Jun 12, 2012)

What about exposing for the background and bouncing a flash off the ceiling? Or being in a well lit room? Just throwing out ideas here.


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## cgipson1 (Jun 12, 2012)

In this instance you have TWO subjects... you need to light each subject separately. If you had them on the same focal plane (or close to it) the lighting differences would be minimized. You can also get the same shot in Ambient light without the issues caused by light falloff. Or you can Faux HDR the shot... set up two or three shots at different exposures and combine them with software. Or you could just select an area and correct the exposure on it in PS or similar (which is what I did here)


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## Garbz (Jun 12, 2012)

Light fall off is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the light source. This means fall-off is far more severe closer to the flash than further away. For even lighting photographers use powerful flashes far away from the subjects, or multiple flashes lighting up subjects independently. 

Photographers also use this trick to block out the background by bringing the flash as close to the subject as possible.


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