FattyChalupa
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2009
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- 3
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Hello everyone!
The National Arts Honors Society at my highschool is volunteering at a Halloween festival at a park tomorrow from 3:00-8:00 pm, and as a member they have asked me to go around taking portraits of mothers and their kids.
For the first part of the festival, I will most likely be using my 50mm prime lens, but I'm worried about when night falls. The problem is that I am a complete newbie shooting portraits at night with flash, and end up blindly shooting with random settings and praying the exposure turns out good.
So as of now, I will be using my speedlight with a diffuser on, but I have a lot of question I'm hoping everyone can help me out with.
1) Since the event will be outside, it will be pointless to angle the speedlight correct? Will I be forced to point it straight at the subject and thus possibly end up with a harshly lighted picture?
2) Since I am so new at this, do you guys recommend I should leave the flash on TTL or atleast try to experiment with the manual mode a little bit?
3) Say for instance the flash is set to manual- how do I judge what aperture and shutterspeed to use? Does the camera's exposure meter account for the fact a speedlight is on (I use a Nikon d80 by the way). I'm contemplating on just setting the camera AND flash both on automatic when night comes since I'm so inexperienced with this
4)Also when night comes should I just stick with the 50mm lens?
Thanks for any help!
The National Arts Honors Society at my highschool is volunteering at a Halloween festival at a park tomorrow from 3:00-8:00 pm, and as a member they have asked me to go around taking portraits of mothers and their kids.
For the first part of the festival, I will most likely be using my 50mm prime lens, but I'm worried about when night falls. The problem is that I am a complete newbie shooting portraits at night with flash, and end up blindly shooting with random settings and praying the exposure turns out good.
So as of now, I will be using my speedlight with a diffuser on, but I have a lot of question I'm hoping everyone can help me out with.
1) Since the event will be outside, it will be pointless to angle the speedlight correct? Will I be forced to point it straight at the subject and thus possibly end up with a harshly lighted picture?
2) Since I am so new at this, do you guys recommend I should leave the flash on TTL or atleast try to experiment with the manual mode a little bit?
3) Say for instance the flash is set to manual- how do I judge what aperture and shutterspeed to use? Does the camera's exposure meter account for the fact a speedlight is on (I use a Nikon d80 by the way). I'm contemplating on just setting the camera AND flash both on automatic when night comes since I'm so inexperienced with this
4)Also when night comes should I just stick with the 50mm lens?
Thanks for any help!