Monday 26 August 2019

Daylight Fill Flash Saves the Day

Auburn Botanical Gardens - cherry blossom festival!
Guest speaker Costa Georgiadis, host of the ABC's Gardening Australia program, chatting with one of the officials at the opening ceremony.
These two examples demonstrate how important fill flash can be when shooting in bright, contrasty light. The problem is both the contrast and the brightness level. At ISO 100 the exposure on a day like this is going to be about 1/125s @ f16 (that's the Sunny 16 Rule). But at that tiny aperture, the speedlight has to work super-hard to produce enough illumination to work. However, by setting the Speedlite to fire in its High Speed Mode, syncronisation can effectively work at any shutter speed (if it's not in this mode, normal syncronisation stops at 1/250s). The benefit is a significantly faster shutter speed (1/1000s), no camera shake, plus the wider aperture (f5.6) means the Speedlite doesn't have to work so hard so recharges significantly faster.
Canon EOS5D MkIII, 24-105mm lens, Canon Speedlite EX580, 1/1000s @ f5.6, ISO400)
A lone bee going nuts over the cherry blossom...
Camelia flower given the JixiPix plug-in effect
Pieris Japonica or Lily of the Valley shrub.
Cherry blossom close up given the grunge, faded look using a combination of JixiPix Grungetastic plug-in and layers in Photoshop Elements...

No comments:

Post a Comment