Playing with flash fill

Cabled, wireless, studio - anything do with using flash
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Greg Beetham
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Playing with flash fill

Unread post by Greg Beetham »

I didn’t think the Poinciana shot was much as it turned out, I took a few shots of that bunch experimenting with the exposure balance, flash balance, to see what would work best, the light was difficult, late afternoon, so it was very difficult to use some small amount of flash fill and not make it look like a flash photo, it’s an interesting experiment for any of you if you want to try.

Even under-exposing and brightening up the shot a tad later in PP still brought out the ‘flash look’ so there didn’t seem to be any easy answer.
I know from previous recent experiments that to get rid of the flash look the best way is to set the main exposure to minus as this also seems to regulate the flash to minus as well (the default in the on camera menu is they are both connected, you can separate them ‘I think’ p.110 in the A700 User’s Guide but I haven’t tried that yet with the A700).

I have tried it with the A100 using the popup flash and the AEL button to maintain the same background exposure throughout and compare flash balance differences to the flash exposure in either ‘Ambient & flash’ and ‘Ambient only’ modes and there is a difference between the two modes in how the foreground flash is compensated, the ‘Ambient only’ with flash compensation set to -1 is slightly darker in the foreground (maybe 1/3rd stop) than the ‘Ambient & flash’ set to the same amount. Ambient range was set to 0 in both.

Thinking back now maybe because the ambient (background) was already getting dull-ish that should have been bumped to over expose slightly via the AEL button (hold) in combination with minus compensation on the flash (foreground).
I’ll have to file that away to try on a future occasion.

Here is one of the shots (camera jpeg) using minus ambient exposure (with flash fill) with all camera enhancements turned off.
And the following one is the same shot showing what Elements ‘Enhance’ does to it.
Greg
A700
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bfitzgerald
Subsuming Vortex of Brilliance
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Joined: Fri Sep 26, 2008 10:48 pm

Re: Playing with flash fill

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

Interesting.
I did note that some of the alpha bodies don't have the setting for Ambient only or Ambient and flash.
5d does though. A57 does not and it appears that using the exp comp influences both. I

Bit annoying a few ways around it, one being set manual flash power (if you have a flash that allows this) or move to M mode and set your ambient exposure based on that.
The other pet annoyance for me is the lack of Slow Sync off the AEL button as present also on the 5d. Evidently this is now "high end stuff" ala A77.
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