Just a little practice with on camera fill flash.

[Tazman32]

I recently took my neice and son out to Pittsburgh for some goof off time and to practice with the flash on camera. I prefer off camera flash to on camera but I have little experience with on camera flash pointed directly at the subject for fill and I prefer to bounce if the flash is in the hotshoe. So this trip, for me, was all about directing the flash straight on. I think it was around 2:00 and it was somewhat hazy some of the time but was mostly sunny for most of the time. I was trying different metering modes, spot and matrix, and was shooting apeture priority while bumping flash comp and exposure comp around.


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Feedback is good.

 

[tirediron]

Looks pretty good!

 

[emdiemci]

Pretty cool not bad. I need to practice using fill flash as well.

 

[frommrstomommy]

Looks pretty good to me! I see flash giving a lot of deer in headlights looks, but these look okay in that aspect.. lol not too forest animal. lol I need to practice as well!

 

[Tony S]

The pictures look good, but looking at your EXIF info I am going to say that your fill flash was not doing anything except in images #1 and 6 (#3 no flash fired). The reason I don't think you got any fill flash in the others is a combination of things, shooting with small apertures, your distance from the subjects (based on focal lengths and composition of the subjects), the way other shadows are falling on the scenes, and the strong ambient light the flash would not have enough power for fill on a bright overcast day like this looks to be. To get an idea of what your fill was doing, compare #3 with no flash firing to #4 with the flash firing, there is no difference in the light hitting the shadows on your son's pants and your niece's skin tones (also note where the natural light shadow falls on the scene, it's a pretty good angle on it's own without needing fill flash). That giant softbox that is the overcast sky gave you nice lighting, but made it difficult to experiment with fill flash since there seemed to be no harsh shadows to fill without the flash.


Shooting in aperture priority and making changes to experiment is good in theory, but you don't get consistent results as the camera is always making exposure adjustments to the aperture and flash power to get what it's computer thinks is a good exposure. Find and set a manual exposure and then work your flash for fill from there.
To get fill flash on brighter days you need to have the flash closer to your subjects or get a more powerful light source. Filtered sunshine is much brighter than one would think and at times it even makes it hard to fill flash with portable studio type strobes.


Hey !!! and good on you getting the kids interested in photography at an early time in their lives.

It's just too bad their camera straps have annoying yellow print on them.:hug::

 

[Tazman32]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Tony S I see what you are saying and I went back and had a look at the exif of some of the shots from that day. With the exception of #3 for obvious reasons :blushing: I don't agree with your point that the flash was not lifting shadows here and comparing #3 to #4 will not help my argument any but.. Look at #5 which to me looks to be the most "flashy" shot I put up here(I did edit out the bright spots from the flash that were in her glasses). Exif shows F/18, 1/250, ISO-720, 70mm Focal length flash did fire. Doing the math GN for my flash(sb-700) @ 70mm zoom head position=34 ISO factor for iso-800 is 2.8 Distance=(GN)x(ISOfactor)/F-Stop. So for the subject to be exposed properly the flash Distance = (34)x(2.8)/18 or ~5.2 meters or about 15ft. So if I was at ~30 feet according to inverse square law the light would be 2 stops down, @ ~45ft 3 stops down @~ 60ft 4 stops. I know I was closer than 60 ft for #5 so I am going to say that indeed the flash did impact the shot. For #2 flash head zoom was @ 105 which gives a GN of 37 and exif says f-10 iso-100 so Distance=GN/10 = 3.7meters ~12ft for proper exposure @24ft 2stops down, @36ft 3 stops, @48ft 4stops. I am not sure, of course, how far I was standing from them for each shot but I do think that the flash did lift the shadows. Don't want to kill the shadows just lift them...I do remember shutting the flash off occasionally to see if there was an improvement and there was(probably what happened to #3).

I could be wrong here so don't be afraid to point out my mistakes. I am nooooo expert

...and I always thought yellow rules red drools