> From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Walt > > I have to admit that a good part of the resistance I have to taking up > flash photography is pure laziness. Aside from the fact that I don't > have an inkling as to what the photo is going to look like when I > decide to use it, I do find the technical aspects of it a little > intimidating.
I used to find it intimidating and I didn't learn to use manual flash until after I had TTL flash on automated cameras. But when I found I wanted to use flash on my M3 and only had an automated flash for a Pentax I bit the bullet and discovered that manual flash is really surprisingly easy, to the extent that now, on the rare occasions I use flash, always just use manual. The best way to do it subtly is to use a tilt/swivel head and bounce it off the corner of the ceiling, so it gets a good diffuse spread, and set it to about 1 or 2 stops below the indicated reading. The only mildly difficult thing about this is that you have to calcuguess the distance from flash to subject taking into account the bounce. But in general it's going to be about 2.5 times the camera-to-subject distance as the crow flies, and your focus scale will tell you what that is. Alternatively just get double the distance from the camera to the point where the flash bounces. You set the shutter speed to the flash-sync speed, set the aperture to match the flash-to-subject distance - you read this off the table on the back of the flash; it varies with the ISO - adjust by -1 stop if you want, then focus and shoot. In the good old days, paparazzi used to set things up so that they always shot their subjects from the same distance - typically a full-length, so they never had to adjust their camera settings and were guaranteed to get a shot in focus, properly exposed. B -- 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.
