I consider my self better than amatuer photographer. I am just starting to get into Strobe photography. There are three main Technical variables that you have to balance: ISO / Shutter Speed / Aperture.

ISO more of less is easy to tackle and generally stays the same in a session. Its the F-stop and Shutter u have to worry about. You can have a perfect exposure with many different values (with varying depth of field). For example, you can have F5.6 with 1/125 and then F4.0 with 1/250th may yield the same result.

Now my question is that how do you know you have gotten PERFECT exposure. The closer the exposure is to extreme (over or under) you can easily point it out in LCD or through histogram - but what if its slightly off from being perfect. What is the logic / technique to know you have gotten perfect exposure.


Note: We are talking about portraits and not potential exceptions situations such as sunset / sunrise etc. Also, lets assume light meters don't exist (since I don't own one) :p