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The peak power at work when a flash is being discharged is extreme.
Example: a classic Metz 45CT (a large but still handheld unit) on full manual power delivers around 90 watt-seconds of electrical output to the flash tube in 1/300s. That means there are 27000 watts at work for a short time.
A 27000 watt lightbulb (BTW, your flash is much brighter than ...
19
The idea is I will be down below, looking up at them to take the photo, so a flash would be useless.
Only if you limit yourself to a camera mounted flash.
The key to such a shot is to get the lights off the camera and onto the subjects from angles other than the optical axis of the lens. You'll probably need at least a couple of off-camera flashes with ...
17
I want to know the needs/thinking in photography that leads to it
It starts off with you needing more light in a given situation. Either you getting extremely grainy photos due to low light, or you are in need of a wider lens but can't afford the slower maximum aperture, or you are struggling to eliminate camera shake with slower shutter speeds.
However ...
17
Maybe the picture is already overexposed because of the sunlight? Then you do to the flash settings what you want, and it won't help you. Verify this first.
1/200 with 2.8 ISO 125 seems to be very bright for a sunny day. If you want the aperture open, and cannot go with shorter times because of the flash, you need to find another way to get rid of the extra ...
16
Ruined? That's a great photo! (If you were going for a sort of Halloween effect.) The position of the key light – off to the side and elevated – was perfect for this subject, and is typical of how beauty dishes are used.
Now, if you didn't want the shadow here are things to consider:
Using a single source you can't have the subject against a ...
16
The reason you were triggering the other flashes is that the other photographer is a rookie.
She was probably using the flashes as optical slaves... bad decision.
Even if she was using a radio signal she could easily set up a different radio frequency.
It is a rookie mistake leaving the flashes as the frequency 1. Because most likely other nonprofessional ...
13
There is a very real danger of producing a very low quality photograph of your baby while disturbing them at the same time if you use a flash from less than 1m away.
Bounce the flash off a white ceiling or a large reflector to avoid the danger of having to shake your head every time you look at these pictures 10 years from now.
13
No question: adding an external flash. See previous question Prime lens or flash: which upgrade will most improve baby photos?, which covers some of this. A flash can freeze motion, and makes it easy to get enough depth of field to get the whole scene in focus. And when you can move the flash off camera, you can create nice light where it doesn't exist ...
13
You're shooting with a shutter speed faster than your sync speed (most likely 1/200 or 1/250). Your camera's shutter consists of two curtains -- the first one opens to begin the exposure, and the second follows it -- closing to end the exposure. At speeds slower than your camera's sync speed, these two curtain movements allow at least a tiny fraction of ...
12
You could use an ND filter or even a polarizing filter (which you probably already have) to give yourself another couple of stops.
12
Yes. There's a "close" mode you can use on the X1T and XPro transmitters that will help to trigger a flash more reliably when it's close to the transmitter. This mode was added in firmware updates for the Canon, Nikon, and Sony versions of the X1T, so if you have one of these versions, it may need to be firmware updated. To check the currently loaded ...
12
So, what you have here is a mixed lighting situation. The background and star notes are being lit via flash (check out their shadows. Nice and soft and from top to bottom. The main bulb cluster is on the left and yet it has no impact on those shadows) and the bulbs themselves are being lit...by themselves :-).
(There's probably a speedlight with a soft box ...
11
Despite the name of your modifier (Profoto White Softlight 20.5" Reflector), this is no soft light at all. The light source is far away and small enough to produce hard light on the subject. The most common property that makes light hard or soft is how smooth the shadows are. This can be seen from the shadow under the chin on the neck. The shadow has a sharp ...
11
One good solution is to get a Hot Shoe Flash Adapter so you can use your old external flash right on the camera, or get a smaller Manual only flash to trigger your external optical slave flash.
$10 Amazon Hot Shoe Flash Adapter MSA-10 for Sony NEX 3
An even better solution is to get this Wireless radio transmitter/receiver:
$10 Wireless Flash Trigger ...
10
You need something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/DL-0418-Tripod-Female-Thread-Adapter/dp/B0049UPNV8
Or maybe this one, for a lot less money:
http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Stand-Adapter-4-inch-Tripod/dp/B005HTZJBY/ref=pd_cp_p_2
There are lots of other models. Some, like the top one shown here, provide a hot shoe so that you can trigger the flash using a ...
10
Editing out the eyes removes a metric tonne of information that might have been helpful in answering your question — please don't do that if you're asking about studio lighting problems — but there is still something to be seen in the photos you have posted.
Apart from the makeup and post-processing that have already been mentioned in the comments, it's ...
9
Refer to page 19 of your ST-E3-RT manual. It specifies that when used with camera models released prior to 2012 (so, anything but the 1DX and 5D mark III at the time of this post) you lose high speed sync and your max sync speed is "one increment slower" than whatever it would normally be.
The flash sync speed is 1 increment slower
Check the flash ...
9
I got a Frio as a freebie in a photography class grab bag. Its a nice option: it mounts directly to the tripod mount stud, and since its all plastic, it doesn't harm your flash contacts at all. It is about the size of a thumbdrive, so it fits in your pocket. Its overpriced as a piece of plastic, but quite affordable compared to other more complex options.
...
9
Two things seem apparent to me looking at this setup.
First, the position of the subject appears to be a little further from the camera than the lights. Before you fool with the position of any equipment which can take hours to do or : ( re-do, move the subject slightly to and fro.
Once you get the optimal contrast in the edges, you could move your lighting ...
9
I'm shooting in Manual on bright, sunny day. ... Settings: 1/200 SS, f2.8, ISO 125.
Did you look at your meter? It was likely telling you that you were overexposed. Purely on the ambient. If you were shooting in sunny-16 conditions, with these settings, you'd be overexposed by four stops even without the flash. Throw the flash in, and you're overexposed ...
8
I think an updated answer is called for. :)
When integrating studio strobes with speedlights, there are two things to consider. Whether you want more control than manual-only triggers give you for either the strobes and/or the speedlights, and how robust you want the triggers to be.
Are there OEM/3rd party triggers to command the studio strobe?
Some ...
8
That's the nature of HSS. Instead of one full-power firing of the flash at a point when the entire sensor is exposed, it has to fire a series of very fast flashes at different points while different sections of the sensor are exposed between the slit caused by the first and second shutter blades. Otherwise, you'd get one band of well lit exposure through ...
7
Optical slaves are considerably quicker - easily measured with a 'scope. Radio slaves offer longer range and more varied working conditions - unaffected by bright light and so on.
Good radio slaves introduce a delay of around 600 microseconds (0.6 milliseconds), some are slower - I measured mine at 1.2ms, which surprised me (it was longer than I expected). ...
7
You cannot trigger it by flash. The SB-600 does not have an optical slave mode. You can buy an inexpensive optical slave trigger though and trigger it with the built-in flash on your camera.
You may be able to mount it in the hotshoe of a non-Nikon body, but it may not fire. In fact, it's possible it could damage the camera. Nikon flashes use 12V trigger ...
7
The first flash is probably for light metering (Canon call their version e-TTL, Nikon iTTL if you want to read about how it works), but the external flash doesn't know that of course.
You should be able to get an external optical trigger that can handle this (a hotshoe with a tripod thread on the bottom). Optical triggers are cheap so this would be a ...
7
The same is true when the flash is on the camera, facing away from the subject into empty space with nothing to reflect it back to the subject.
The point of TTL is to adjust flash power automatically under the assumption that it has an influence on the scene.
If the flash is on camera or not is not too relevant. In event photography or photojournalism for ...
7
Yes, there are several systems that work in the way you describe, where the off-camera lights can switch between different TTL systems, and the only thing you need is an on-camera transmitter unit that matches the camera system (i.e., "speaks" the correct electronic flash protocol, and has a physical foot pin configuration that matches the contact ...
7
Just to get the full understanding: Only to freeze fast moving subjects which need shorter shutter speeds than the flash's burning speed HSS is really required?
Sort of. That is a common reason to use HSS, but there are also other use cases where HSS may be preferable to using ND filters.
When you also want to use narrower apertures interspersed with wide ...
6
Not necessarily.
The sensor on the flash must be able to "see" the triggering flash, but it does not have to be direct light. The 430EX and 580EX both are sensitive enough that bounced flash works equally as well. You simply need to orient the flash sensor so that it can see 'out' from the umbrella, even if that means a convenient wall or other reflector. ...
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