Balancing flash with available light. This is a gallery of a few shots put together for a class drill. The idea is to light the foreground subject with the flash and the background with available light. The lightness/darkness of the background is controlled by changing the shutter speed. The aperture is held constant for all photos. The P-TTL flash keeps the subject lit at the desired level.
For the Pentax folks here's a little additional info. The Flash is a 540 set in the wireless mode. It's set to +1/2 stop flash exposure compensation. It's zoomed in as far as possible to narrow help keep light from spilling onto the background. There are only seven images in the gallery, but I did a lot of experimenting and fired the shutter just short of 100 times. The flash is very close to the subject so it probably didn't need to use much energy. Even when I was experimenting with very small apertures requiring noticeably more powerful flashes the flash recycled almost immediately. The AA alkaline batteries seemed to work OK for this application. The lens is the DA* 50-135mm f/2.8. The focus point is the black queen in the back row. The camera is the K20d, flash set to wireless control mode. Manual mode for this series. Though I had set the white balance to daylight, it didn't make any difference. I had custom setting at "WB auto when flash attached." I've since set it to "unchanged" so it will use the WB as set on the camera. No matter, I was shooting raw files. Here's the link <http://Georges.smugmug.com/gallery/5066768_nv8WE/1/304882093_iUGLx> Oh, the opening image documenting the setup was shot with a Canon G9. This was time well spent, if only to learn about the custom settings on the camera and flash that interact. I've only had the K20 and 540 for a short time. GS <http://www.georgesphotos.net> -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
