Wednesday 31 March 2010

Keith Robins Photography goes flashing at the seaside! Balancing daylight and flash is not the easiest of challenges, in fact less than five percent of photographers really understand how and why flashguns work in conjunction with available light.
This blog is a mine of information about exactly that.
I'm hoping that by reading all the posts in this blog that you too will be able to handle this most creative of lighting combinations and all you'll have spent is a little time.

Burton Bradstock in early March at around 5pm is the first photo. A flash on that rock in the foreground would have given added interest and help balance the picture.
Second photo is about an hour later. I definitely should have used a flash here - set on minus 2/3rds of a stop so it is not at all obvious - which is surely the whole point of this exercise. Must clean that front filter more often!
It's getting damned cold and my trouser legs are wet through kneeling in the wet shingle with a wide angle lens. Next time I'll bring a pair of wellies, or better still a pair of fisherman's waders.
Brian is seen here struggling with the principles of daylight flash balancing, but he's a fast learner and is soon able to take pictures just like these.

I used F18 at 1/160th on 200 ISO with my canon 550EX on ETTL. Strange to say that the camera, a Canon 5D, was in the manual mode - so too was the lens which is focused on Brian.
Even though the camera is in manual mode it does not effect the ability of the flash to operate successfully in ETTL.
Why manual mode for the camera? I wanted complete control over both aperture to control the flash, plus shutter speed which governs the intensity of the daylight. Now I can make the sky as dark and threatening as I like, mean while retaining a good exposure of my maim subject - usually a figure or a portrait.

This goes against the normal everyday trend of photography where one speed up equals one aperture down to get a similar exposure.
I feel completely at ease with flashguns and this rather unusual way of operating the settings on my camera and flash and have done so for over thirty years. Some of my old manual flashes needed light modifiers such as the lenses from a pair of old Polaroid sunglasses, several layers of handkerchief, or just a thumb placed in front of the flash lens. Nowadays there are auto modes via so many menus it's baffling, plus these modern things seem to have a mind of their own and often refuse to co-operate.
The copyright was added with one click of a brush and then toned down using Opacity.
Hold down the Alt key and type 0169 in the right-hand numerical keys to get a C symbol. type your name - select it with a rectangle - go to Edit, Define Brush Preset, click OK and your logo is the very last brush in the brush palette. Open a new layer before adding your logo, then use Transform to adjust or rotate.

Tuesday 30 March 2010

Brian wants to find out about using a flashgun and comes to Keith Robins Photography to use my kichen!
Brian is reasonably new to digital photography but he took less than an hour to discover the relationship between available light and flash light using apertures and shutter speeds.
His Olympus bridge camera is able to talk to Olympus flashguns and we had two guns to play with!
This first picture took one gun aimed at the wall behind me - no wires and no little slave, not even a radio trigger in sight. The popup flash on his Olympus did the talking but needed a crisp packet turned inside out to reflect the signal towards the ceiling so it didn't effect the image.

For the next one I held a flashgun in each hand at arms length out to both sides. The one in my left hand was full power while my right-hand thumb was across the middle of the other flash lens reducing the output by a whole stop. This is a trick worth remembering when using totally manual flashguns which can be picked up from E-Bay for virtually nothing - I got a matching pair for 50 pence each.





This last photo Brian took was from about four feet away and used one flash plus a silver faced gift bag about twelve inches away to camera right in my left hand.
Brian was absolutely over the moon at these results as you can imagine, but he agreed to let me do the black and white conversion using the Black and White filter in Photoshop CS3.
Next time out is a trip to the seaside for a sunset plus flashing session.