Kostas Kavoussanakis wrote:
Are these with pre-flash, Dave?
Well, here's the problem I'm having with the AF330FTZ.
If I shoot at night with the AF330FTZ, with no intervention via the
flash EV menu, any shot in flash range will be highly overexposed. This
is particularly a problem if the background is out of flash range; in
other words, the subject is close but the background is distant. But
regardless, there is an overexposure issue when shooting with the flash
at night.
If I shoot with the flash in twilight conditions (ie, dusk) the problem
remains, but isn't as significant.
If I shoot in daylight conditions using the flash as a fill flash, the
problem is pretty much gone, which is to be expected, I suppose. Though
sometimes I think the flash punches the foreground up just a little too
much even in daylight conditions.
I can back the flash off a bit using the flash EV menu in the *ist-DS.
Usually I need to back off at least -1ev, but sometimes even -2ev isn't
enough. Particularly at night, -2ev in the flash EV menu isn't enough
to balance things out. In this case, I have to switch the camera over
to manual mode and manipulate the flash's effectiveness via f-stop
settings for the lens.
What is a real challenge with the AF330FTZ is shooting a night shot of a
cityscape while using the flash to illuminate the subject in the
foreground. I attempted such a shot in Hong Kong (for those of you
familiar with Hong Kong, we were at the mountain peak via the cable-car
tram). There, I wanted to take a shot of my wife with the city lights
in the background and her properly exposed in the foreground. I've
taken this sort of shot with my ZX-5n and the AF330FTZ. But I just
absoutely couldn't get it right with the *ist-DS and AF330FTZ.
It shouldn't have been that difficult of a shot; use a tripod, meter for
the city lights in the background, and allow the flash's TTL to cut the
flash short when the foreground reached proper exposure. Heck, the
camera's "night shot" mode is pretty much MADE to do this. But even
without night-shot mode, I should be able to switch to Tv mode and set
the shutter speed relatively slow. The rest should be handled by the
camera and flash.
The fact is that I never got what I thought was a decent result until I
switched the flash to ML mode (low power manual mode) and the camera to
Manual mode so that I could take care of the shutter and aperture
myself. By then my wife was pretty much tired of the whole situation
and the shot was ruined by her boredom. ;)
The AF330FTZ doesn't have a prefire mode, only TTL (not P-TTL).
--------
By the way, someone earlier mentioned that it was curious that I would
like the combination of the 16-45 and the 28-105 rather than 16-45 and
50-200.
In my opinion there are a couple of ways to look at zooms. The first
way (the way I used to look at them when I first got into photography)
is that zooms allow you to cover a lot of focal lengths with few lenses.
From that perspective, it makes sense to have no overlap in your
lens's focal lengths. A 16-45 and 50-200 would give the maximum
possible breadth of zoom range with only two lenses.
But as I've spent more time with photography I've found that I prefer to
look at zooms as lenses of convenience; a means of reducing how often I
change lenses. With that in mind, overlap of zoom ranges is good if it
means that each lens is a comfortable range of focal lengths to use.
What I mean is I can put the 16-45 on my camera and just keep shooting
until I have a shot that really requires something longer. I can put
the 28-105 on my camera and also keep shooting until I come across a
shot that really requires something wider. Each of those lenses is a
good working lens; just that one is more convenient when I have more
shots that need longer focal lengths, and one is more convenient when
more of my shots need shorter focal lengths.
If I were carrying the 16-45 and 50-200, on the other hand, I would not
be able to keep the 50-200 on the camera and just keep on shooting as if
it were a normal lens. It's a telephoto lens, that's all.
So while I'm losing the 105-200 range by carrying the 28-105, I feel I
more than make up for in convenience.
And with a DSLR, I frankly don't often have much need for anything
longer than the 135mm lens that I also mentioned is in my camera bag. I
do own an 80-320, but left it home for this vacation because I knew it
would be only used for one or two shots.
Dave
