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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
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 ...
14
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 ...
13
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
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
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 ...
9
Here's a list of common things to check.
Are you using the wrong slave mode?
For your speedlight to be a radio slave, the antenna icon must be showing, and the backlight should be orange.
Godox's TT685 and V860II speedlights for Canon, Nikon, and Sony have five different syncing modes that the horizontal lightning bolt button cycles you through:
On-camera ...
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
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
Although freshly charged NiMH measure at 1.4 or so volts, they quickly drop to 1.2 under load. However, unlike alkalines, they stay around that 1.2 for a long time (this is called a "relatively flat discharge curve").
Alkalines by contrast have a much steeper discharge curve but do present a higher terminal voltage when new. (Hint: You can separate unused ...
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
It will still be quite noticeable. Even at very low power a flash is hard to miss. A flash set at 1/128 power is seven stops dimmer than the same flash at full power, yet it is hard for a person to tell the difference just by observing the flash fire. This is probably due to the fact that the irises of the eyes of people in a dark location are enlarged and ...
6
In addition to what Michael has already stated, depending on the configuration, you may want to create a composite. Long exposure for the scene only and then add the lights and couple to overlay on the scene you already took. This eliminates the need to hide the lights in the shot.
If the space is large, you aren't likely to get it all lit artificially, and ...
6
Fuji HSS
There's an easy way to tell if your Fuji camera does HSS.
Unlike all the other camera brands supported by the Godox X system, Fuji's HSS setting is controlled by the camera, not by the transmitters. If you have a camera menu selection to set AUTO FP(HSS) on an external shoe-mount flash's SYNC. setting, then you can do HSS. If you don't, you can't.
...
6
Yes, a so-called Strobist setup (a radio controlled off-camera hotshoe flash/speedlight) can be great for learning and experimenting with basic off-camera lighting, even while it won't deliver the same way a proper studio strobe setup would.
However, if you can find a studio setup with two lights and two softboxes for less than a TT350+X1T, the chances are ...
5
Flash (by far), then lens or body depending on the number of lenses you already have and how close you are to a meaningful increase in max usable ISO. Flash adds far more than twice the amount of light, so it is a far larger improvement than an f-stop faster lens.
Lenses that are one stop faster will double the amount of light you can take in, but will ...
5
There is no hard limit to how many YN-560III flashes you can set off remotely with the appropriate transmitter device, as long as the flashes can receive the radio signal. Four is well within its capabilities.
However, the YN-560III only has a built-in radio receiver. You still need a radio transmitter. The following Yongnuo models can all be used as a ...
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