--- Gary Kaplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> it seems that in AV and TV mode the flash is
> basically just a fill
> flash. This seems ridiculous.
It is counter-intuitive. It's kind of like a very
sophisticated "night shot" mode, like the ones on the
command dials of the older EOS Rebels. It took me a
lot of manual reading and experimenting to figure it
out, but I am convinced it's a better way of doing
things.
I think it's great... I have a few shots of people
standing in front of sunlit gardens and the like, but
underneath a shade. E-TTL properly exposes the person
AND the background; it's a terrific way of decreasing
contrast in photos. If I'm in a lazy snapshot mode,
and I know flash is going to be the main light source,
I'll usually switch to program mode anyway.
> If the only way
> to get a faster
> shutter speed or smaller aperture with a Canon is to
> use Manual mode and
> basically guess that does not seem right.
You're not guessing. Since the flash is output 100%
under the control of the camera, whatever you set the
camera to will result in a proper flash exposure, with
some caveats. The caveats are:
1) The flash has to be physically capable of supplying
the required amount of light. If the subject is too
far away, you'd be out of luck anyway.
2) You cannot exceed the maximum flash sync speed of
the camera. You can play some games with FP sync (high
speed synchronization) on EX flashes but this
drastically reduces flash range as the shutter speeds
go up.
3) The exposure system (TTL, A-TTL, or E-TTL) is going
to determine what "proper exposure" is based on what
the flash sensor is looking at. If the subject is
particularly reflective, dark or light, you need to
apply flash exposure compensation, or FEC, based on
experience.
The little table someone else posted for birds and
spot meters is a good starting point for FEC... if the
AF/flash sensor is covering something that's pure
white, you dial in +2 stops of FEC. If shooting
negative film, I usually only worry about FEC in the
plus direction if the subject is really reflective,
since neg film is really tolerant of overexposure.
In practice, I find that on my Elan II if I enable
CF-8 (set to "1", so that the selected focus point is
the primary E-TTL sensor) apply FEC based on the
reflectivity of what the AF/ETTL sensor is covering,
use flash exposure lock (FEL, the asterisk button
under the right thumb), and the green light comes on,
I'm home free. I then recompose and shoot. It's MUCH
faster than it sounds, and you remember it about the
third time you read through it in the book with the
camera in your lap. ;-)
The thing that I dislike about this setup on the Elan
II is that you can't have CF4 set up to do depth of
field preview if you want to use FEL, it's the same
button. I understand that's fixed on the Elan 7. :-)
MadMat
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