A little bit of How to?

[Bram]

Alright I got my Flash radio triggers in the mailt he other day and was wayyy too eager not to try them out.
Alright so I got them mounted and I got it to fire. Now, the issue I had was whenI fired the flash I had the top of the image wayyyy to bright and then the bottom half was literally BLACK.
I don't know if I had a setting mixxed up or what not but I was in a hurry and didn't have too much time to fiddle with it. I have a crim midterm tommorrow so I needed to study. Anywho, Would this be an easy settings fix or what? I am currently at work so all trials will have to wait ill I get home.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Did you surpass the maximum sync speed?

Did you read your manuals?

Did you do any reading about using flash?


http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html

 

[GooniesNeverSayDie11]

You probably exceeded the max sync speed ( most likely 1/200th or 1/250th of a second )

 

[Bram]

How would I fix that on my SB600? I just hooked it up and set it to auto just to see how it would go and check the settings.

 

[bigtwinky]

max sync speed is your camera, not the flash. Make sure you are shooting in manual and that your shutter is slower than the max sync speed.

I'm in the same boat, learning off camera lighting. I find the best thing to do is keep it simple and learn in manual. This whole auto thing is nice, but just as with your camera, you need to know what it is doing in auto. Auto might change from shot to shot. Get consistency by shooting in manual. That way, you can shoot something, check the result, adjust a setting (flash power, flash height, flash zoom, camera aperture, camera iso,...) shoot again and check results.

 

[Bram]

Thanks bigtwinky, guess i'll be going home after work and changing around some settings. So my shutter speed needs to be slower then what I got on my flash sync speed?
How much slower? We talking one stop? or several?

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

www.Google.com

 

[mwcfarms]

The black half is where you shutter curtain is still up. Change your shutter speed and it should fix it.

 

[bigtwinky]

How much slower depends on you, but it cannot go faster than the max sync speed.

When using manual off camera flash, your shutter will NOT control the exposure of the subject. That will be light by the flash and control by aperture/iso/flash power/flash distance. The shutter will control the ambient light.

So let's say you setup your light on a beach with a subject to shoot. Just for examples sake, the settings to give a proper exposure of the scene without the subject is say 1/60th shutter, f/5.6 and ISO 400. This exposes the beach scene well without any flash on.

You put subject in the scene, keep the flash off, and you snap using the above settings. Scene looks good, but the subject is dark.
So you then turn on the flash.
Let's say to get the person properly exposed using the same camera settings above, your flash is set to 1/8th power.

Now....to answer your question about the shutter...
Lets say you want the background to be just a tad darker than the properly exposed setting as this will give you more colour and more contrast and make for a nicer sky.
You dial your shutter up to 1/125th. Shutter is faster, less ambient light coming in, background darker. But because you didn't change the aperture, flash power, iso, flash distance, the person is still perfectly exposed.

Now say you want it even darker! More drama!! So you dial up the shutter again to 1/250th. If this is your max sync speed, then you are fine. The background will now be 2 stops darker but the person will still be properly light and exposed.

If you dial up that shutter again to 1/500th, then you will get the dark band on the side because you are faster than the sync speed.

Hope that is making sense!

 

[mwcfarms]

Great explanation Twinky.

 

[Bram]

Thanks alot bigtwinky that made alot of sense. :thumbup:

 

[mwcfarms]

Hey Bram what did you go with for Triggers?

 

[Bram]

Just a cheap $32.00 one off ebay, shipped from china. Don't even think its brand named ahha.

 

[KmH]

The black half is where you shutter curtain is still up.

Well, maybe your shutter curtain is down. When the bottom of the image is black, it was the rear/second shutter curtain that was in the photo.
The lens projects the image onto the image sensor upside down with the bottom of the image at the top of the image sensor.

The 2 shutter curtains open from the top to the bottom of the camera when the camera is held in landscape mode. The front curtain (called the first curtain by Canon) drops to open the shutter, the rear curtain (called the second curtain by Canon) then drops to close the shutter.

Both curtains then reset to the top of the shutter assembly to be ready for the next exposure. If the camera is rotated into portrait mode with the shutter release at the top, the curtains move from left to right.

Most dSLR cameras can be setup to trigger the strobed light to when the front shutter curtain has fully opened (front/first curtain sync), or to when the rear shutter curtain begins to close the shutter (rear/second curtain sync).

Most dSLR shutter's are fully open only at shutter speeds of at or less than 1/200 or 1/250. At faster shutter speeds the shutter is never fully open. Rather the gap between the 2 shutter curtains is a slit and one or both curtains block light to some portion of the image sensor. The faster the shutter speed the narrower the slit between the 2 curtains becomes.

FP-sync (HSS on Canon's) fires a strobe multiple times during a single exposure. That way, as the slit in the curtains moves down across the image sensor an even strobed light exposure can be made on the entire image. Obviously the faster the shutter speed, the smaller the the gap in the slit is, and the more times the strobe light has to be fired during a single exposure to light the entire image.

That's why FP-Sync/HSS is hard on batteries and requires powerful strobes (speedlights).

It requires the more expensive radio triggers/receivers to be able to use FP-Sync/HSS.