Flash question

[Village Idiot]

Mr. Zack Arias is a studio photographer. I have no studio. My flash to subject distance changes when I'm on the floor amongst people who move. Automatic TTL exposure gives me the most consistent light from shot to shot.

That's why there's a time and a place for everything.

 

[Plato]

Luddites use the "manual" setting.

 

[JerryPH]

Luddites use the "manual" setting.

Well, this luddite would have had one SB-800 more had I set the flash to 1/4, left it there and moved my body instead of trying to catch the people from 15 to 5 feet away and let the flash adjust.

There are advantages, perhaps... but there are downsides too. I used both and saw the good and bad from both. I now can make a more educated decision because I have done both and experienced the worst both sides have to offer. I would way prefer having manual settings in place now in dynamic situations and a functional flash at the end of the night rather than a burned out flash becuase I was too lazy to adjust my distance using my feet. I will also have just as many keepers in the end.

 

[Derrel]

Let me give a few comments about the underlying system of the OP's flash, the Vivitar 285HV, a flash that I have used for news shoots,in pairs balcony-mounted for both basketball and volleyball,and weddings and general indoor flash events, almost all using the Quantum Battery 1 for rapid-fire recycling, and the Quantum Turbo Battery for the few occasions when it was necessary to have the flash fire as FAST as possible. A 285HV will also not overheat,and can be used for night-time light painting firing as many as 40 full-power pops on one time exposure of only 90 to 120 seconds with the Turbo battery. I have never melted down an SB800 or SB16 or SB20,SB24,or SB 28DX either. I have no idea how melting down a flash by abusing it has anything to do with one's chosen flash technique,and think that is a total non-starter as an excuse to advocate manual flash exposure when a nearly foolproof system was developed in the early 1970's.

Adjusting exposure with one's FEET? And therefore zooming the lens to get the picture one wants? What about a thing called background control? That goes out the window if you need to change your focal length to suit your flash power! It's ridiculous to advocate manual flash and foot-zooming to get the exposure correct when there's a far better, easier system that has been around since before TTL flash was developed.

Strobist: The Return of a Classic

The Rod And Cone: Flash Durations for Canon 580EX II and Vivitar 285HV

As somebody with a lot of experience with the Vivitar 285 and 285HV flashes, which use a technology known as Auto-Thyristor, I can tell you that the automatic mode has one really,really BIG advantage over full manual mode, and that is a significantly faster flash duration,capable of stopping motion very well, while at the same time, putting out a lot of light AND giving the 285 significantly faster recycling than full-power manual flash does. Visit this page Flickr Photo Download: calc
from strobist to see a close-up photograph of the 285HV's power calculator dial, set for ISO 200. Yellow mode is for f/2.8,good from apprx. 55 feet down to 4.5 feet. Red mode is for f/5.6 and good from about 29 feet down to 3 feet.
Blue mode auto is good for 13 feet,all the way into the macro range. Purple mode is good for 10 feet to the macro range. Boosting the ISO to 400 will make the Yellow mode your aperture for f/4 flash exposures.

You might be surprised to find that the Yellow auto-thyristor mode on the 285HV tests out with an open-room flash duration of 1/4601 seconds,while in close-range shooting, such as at eight inches, Yellow mode yields a flash duration of 1/7731 seconds.The author's testing at rodancone.com shows that the 285HV's flash duration times at FULL power manual had timings as slow as 1/82 second and 1/101 second, and half-power durations of 1/567 second to 1/655 second. In other words, by using the Yellow auto mode on a 285HV, the author obtained flash durations over TEN TIMES FASTER than a half-power flash, and using Yellow auto mode, he obtained flash durations over 76 times faster than the fastest manual flash at full power. That's not a typo : Full Manual 1/101 versus Yellow Auto mode and 1/7731 second.

Keep in mind that you can also shoot the 285HV is Auto-Thyristor mode at Half-power or 1/4 power levels, making for incredibly quick recycling that can keep up with close-range motor-driven sequences, or provide ultra,ultra-short flash durations, or to more-perfectly fine-tune flash exposures and fill-flash exposures. The analog-style calculator shown in the photo linked to above shows how the system shows the photographer what the suggested settings are for ISO, f/stop, aperture, and usable range. Press the blue button in the middle of the dial, and the calculator is illuminated for use in darkened conditions.

With ISO 400, yellow mode is for f/4 aperture, but you can set any aperture that you wish,and thus fine-tune your exposure in relation to the automatically-determined exposure for the f/stop that goes with the Yellow mode at each different ISO value. Because a 285HV is not dedicated to the camera, it is very easy to "lie to the camera" and shoot fill-in flash by deliberately mis-adjusting the ISO on the flash, or by deliberately using a different aperture on your lens,or by deliberately using a significantly different ISO on your d-slr. These methods of "lying to the camera" allow you to shoot fflash-as-mainlight exposure or to shoot fill-flash,automatically determined, at distances of roughly 55 feet to about 15 feet with the flash at wide-angle setting--farther with the flash zoomed to normal or telephoto. Using the Red auto mode, you can do automatic fill-flash at 30 feet to 3 feet, all automatically adjusted, and YOU, the photographer control the degree of flash exposure and ambient light exposure to suit your own taste. But without the need to adjust your f/stop as subjects come closer to you or get farther away. It's impossible to shoot manual, fractional power flash as efficiently as the 285HV can adjust the flash output steplessly and automatically. When shooting outdoors in bright lighting conditions, the camera's maximum synch speed of 1/250 or 1/200 or 1/160 or 1/125 (depending on your camera's shutter and sensor) and your camera's base ISO value means that every time the flash's distance to the subject changes, using full manual flash adjustment you would have to make a power selection change somewhere between full power and 1/16 power to get the power of the flash to be correct for the f/stop in use AND the distance from flash to subject. Manual flash give you plenty of chances to screw up, and no ability to rapidly and spontaneously shoot action that is moving toward the camera or away from the camera. That's why within a few years of its introduction, Vivitar had sold more than three million of these Auto-Thyristor technology flashes. The strobist movement is why Vivitar re-introduced the 285HV in 2007. The 285HV was designed for photographers who understand how valuable flash automation and repeatability is,and is a very reliable flash. I own three of them. I had a "strobist" set-up rigged up in 1987, using umbrella mounts and ball-heads with cold shoes to mount one or two back-to-back 285's shot into umbrellas. I remember telling a professional news photographer from Texas about the system back in 1995 on Usenet, and he said he wanted something "more professional" for location shoots. I guess he was about ten years too early to understand the value of this rugged, affordable portable speedlight from Vivitar.

Using a lens with an angle of view of between 24mm and 200mm on full-frame, the Vivitar 285HV in Auto-Thyristor flash mode gives extremely short flash duration capable of stopping even high-speed motion, and delivers either full-flash (AKA flash-as-main light) exposure, or fill-in flash with extremely reliable control of light output. What the adjustable, 1/3 stop ISO adjustments on the 285HV's manual flash calculator dial does is allow you to do is to pick an f/stop and shutter speed, and get almost perfectly-exposed flash shots, with the degree of over- or under-exposure you want,automatically, over a sequence of shots or a whole shoot, without constantly needing to dial in + or - flash compensation, or fighting a TTL or i-TTL flash that tries to automatically out-think you shot after shot. The 285 HV is not TTL, it is not i-TTL, it is not E-TTL. It is an Auto-Thyristor flash, that has full manual, 1/2 power, 1/4 power,and 1/16 power fractional power settings, plus four of what are/were called "Auto f/stops".

A couple of wildlife photographers I know of have constructed 3- and 4-flash wildlife lights for high-speed photography of insects (bees and wasps) as well as for hummingbird stop-motion photography and also for remote-triggered cameras capturing birds using electronic triggering. They have both used Vivitar 285HV flashes mounted inside of a PVC pipe, with a large Fresnel glass on the front to help intensify the beam for longer throws.

Here's a very good two-page thread,specifically dealing with the Vivitar 285 flash and stopping high-speed action using multiple flash units. Had this photographer been using four 285 HV's set to the YELLOW AUTO mode, he would have had flash duration of somewhere between 1/4601 seconds and 1/6054 seconds, while having the power of two flash units to light up this outdoor whitewater scene. Unfortunately, he used three 285 HV flashes,each in Manual Full power setting and using remote triggers. Unfortunately, the actual flash duration this photographer got by using Manual power was somewhere between 1/333 second, charitably high, to perhaps as low as 1/82 or even 1/101 second.....not fast enough to prevent blurring,and the reason he posted asking why his flash units were not freezing action.

As one poster above said, "luddites use manual flash". I think that's a bit unfair, but many who are relatively new to photography don't understand how to use the older, non-coupled technology of the 285HV,let alone one coupled with a Quantum Battery pack for ultra-fast recycling.

 

[Village Idiot]

Luddites use the "manual" setting.

Or do you mean Noobs are scared of the "manual" setting.

Edit: Oh crap, where did the TTL setting on the Profotos go to?.....or anything other than a small camera mounted speed light.