The Unreal Me

I thought I better do a little post about a subject that all photographers should be very aware of but one I found quite a nightmare to find a nice solution to. The problem is what to tag your photos with. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Maybe it is for you but for me I would always tag a photo how I thought, and then later want to find it again and realise I hadn’t quite done it right and couldn’t find the photo. Other times I would labour over it so much I’d give up or just put one keyword like “House” and be done with it.

I did however stumble upon a post on the world wide web about a year ago that solved all my problems (I can’t find it any more, so thanks to whoever was the original author). It’s a simple solution but hasn’t failed me yet. Let’s start with an example.

On the surface I might keyword this with Bath, Cody, Deidre (The name of my wife). Now this might work for the obvious, but if I was later trying to find pictures of my son in the sink I may miss it. Also, if I was looking back for photos that we had in this house I’d miss it too. What about black and white photos? Or photos with mirrors? Or night photos?

So to cover my bases I use the tip. It suggests you just simply remember these six words – WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW? Now they might not all apply to every photograph but they should cover all your bases should you need them. Let’s look at the picture and see what I’d end up with.

WHO

Who is in the pictures; the actual people’s names or titles. Well it has my son Cody and wife Deidre, so Cody, Deidre are the starting two. I may if I’m feeling anal, add Wife, Woman and Son, Boy.

WHAT

This category means both the physical objects and actions in the photograph. Here the obvious would be Bath, but look deeper. If I keep telling myself “What is here?” and “What is happening?” I might then add Sink, Mirror, Reflection, Holding, Yawn, Clasped, Washing, Naked, Water, Baby, Toes

WHERE

Where was the photo taken. Expand this from the immediate vicinity to wider areas in case later you need to find all photos in that area. In this case it could be Inside, Sink, Bathroom, Home, Street Name and even City if you wish. Sink here doubles up but that’s fine, only use it once. At least you haven’t missed it which is the main thing.

WHEN

This is for time related key-wording. In this example I would use 3 Months and Night. Of course the obvious ones would be for special occasion photos like Easter, or Mum’s Birthday.

WHY

This one relates to the event itself and why you’re taking the photo. Here it’s obvious – Bath Time, but other photographs might be Graduation, Birthday, Family Portrait. These ones often sound like “What’s” but I use “What” to be the actual things IN the photograph. Of course, feel free to do what you want.

HOW

Probably often left out a lot but this one can help describe something about how you took the photo. Maybe something like Aerial, Helicopter, Underwater, Tilt/Shift or in this case if I really had to (I probably wouldn’t) I would say Black and White, Handheld

So in the end if I could keyword this photograph with:

Cody, Deidre, 
Bath, Sink, Mirror, Reflection, Holding, Yawn, Clasped, Washing, Naked, Water, Baby, Toes,
Inside, Sink, Bathroom, Home, Street Name,
3 Months, Night,
Bath Time,
Black and White, Handheld.

Remember it’s up to you what you consider important for your photos, but I find it an invaluable guide for my keywording.

May you never lose another photo again!

Uncategorized Photography

I had a great opportunity the other day to shoot two excellent subjects, Peter and Gesa. They are expecting their first child in around 8 weeks time and wanted me to take some photos of their pregnancy as well as some fun couple shots. We did this shoot entirely inside their home with a mix of environmental and “studio” style shots against a plain black background.

The variety of shots taken on the day was great for them to have a nice selection to chose from, but equally great for me to shoot a number of different styles. Here’s a selection of my favourites from the day.

This is one of a number of shots we did with Peter and Gesa mucking around on the bed. I think this capture’s Gesa’s sneakiness very well! Gesa is great to photograph because she’s not shy about having some fun, and Peter then joins in and they can just play and I can concentrate on capturing the moments.

Belly measuring was one photo they wanted to capture and I decided to shoot this with a wrap around light to focus on the tummy and let everything else drop into shadow. Yes, that 92 is in centimeters and while Gesa is 32 weeks pregnant, she still quite tiny – what luck!

The photograph above ended up being the couple’s favourite of the day. I love her smile and the colours and tones of the couch against the wood. Thankfully the couch didn’t catch fire being up against the fireplace like that!

This was one of the more intimate moments shared during the shoot and as a photographer it’s great to have subjects that are just so comfortable being in front of the camera. You can take time to explore a large number of poses and emotions.

This photography is an anomaly, because it wasn’t part of the regular shoot. Peter was sitting on the couch as I was setting up the lighting for the next set of photographs and I was using him for some tests. I liked the resulting shot with the contrasty lighting and the intense stare so I thought I’d add it to their collection.

This was one of the first shots with Peter without his shirt, and Gesa was making fun of him. You can’t quite tell here, but Peter was trying very hard not to laugh.

To finish off the photos for today I’ll post another fun one we shot just for a laugh. It was a great session and I thoroughly enjoyed myself – congratulations guys, with parents like you, your little girl is going to be awesome!

Uncategorized Photography, Shoots

I recently finished a newborn shoot with a lovely new Mum, Nichola and her gorgeous new son, Tyler. Tyler was about 10 days old when we did the first part of the shoot and we finished it off a few days later on day 14.

Day one he was a little grizzly but with lots of feeding and coaxing things came along. On day two however he was a star! He slept like a, well, baby and if he got a little fidgety, we could pop him into the white fur basket and he’d either promptly fall alseep, or decide he wanted to eat it. The former made for some nice peaceful photos.

Most of the shoot was inside, using various backdrops and props. While I’m not a huge fan of black backdrops, I did capture a lovely relaxed shot of Tyler resting on his Mum’s arm.

Even though baby shoots are about the baby, I think it’s also extremely important to photograph special moments between Mum/Dad and baby and to work with the parent to get them to relax and be at one with their child in front of the camera.

The photo above I gave a slightly old style look to it in order to match his cute little corduroy overalls and hat. I also wanted to keep this one coloured to add to the look, as opposed to making it black and white like so many baby shots are (Often for good reason, they have very ruddy skin at that early age).

The final shot from the shoot that I’d like to share is a more casual shot that I felt worked best with an extreme black and white development.

For some reason I feel compelled to explain this photograph. Probably because I often don’t use such extreme black and white. I originally had an idea that I might use the earth tones of the curtains and couch to produce a nice look, but once I got to the post production stage, a harsh black and white look just felt better. Thinking about it, the overexposed look pulls the focus to Mum’s face and her joyous smile and the colourless image and darker tones of the background, couch and hair frame the body and face.

Tyler was a joy to shoot, and so very cute. I hope I get to photograph him again when he’s older.

Uncategorized Photography, Shoots

I’ve had my 50d for about 5-6 weeks now, but for the last 2 1/2 weeks, it’s been at the Canon service centre. I was browsing some images in Aperture and noticed a bright green spot on one. I zoomed into the image and yup, it was a hot pixel. I then scanned the rest of the image and found 2 more. OK, could be a one off, so I scanned a number of other pictures and they all had them. So I narrowed down the parameters that could be affecting it, by looking at my images with different apertures, ISO, shutter speed (This is usually the culprit) and voila! Exposures from about 1/2 a second or greater exhibited these pixels.

“Hmm” I thought, “This is a bit of a bummer”. While screen size viewing often hid the issue due to scaling and 100% view was required to see it most of the time, it was still visible at normal viewing occasionally and nonetheless the camera was only 3 weeks old so I felt that it should still be in primo condition. So, I popped it into the Canon service centre after ringing the retailer and like any good software engineer entering a defect, I gave them all the tests and parameters on how to reproduce the problem. What ISO, shooting format, shutter speed and I even gave them pixel locations of the hot pixels. No way were they not going to find the issue – a week or so later and I’d have a nice sexy clean camera!

So, skip ahead about 13 days and I ring them to see what’s up. “Camera has been checked and no problems found. But we cleaned the sensor.” was the reply. Followed by “High ISO will result in noiser images.” – I had to chuckle.

“You sure they tested it right, you need to do this and this and this?” I remarked.

“I’m sure they did, the camera will come down to pickup in a couple of days. We’ll ring you when it’s ready.” – I hang up, very very confused as to why they couldn’t see some blatantly bright green pixels  at the locations I specified.

Now where is that green pixel?

“Wait a minute! I wonder if they shot JPG!” which essentially nukes the image so bad you can’t see the problem. Another phone call and this time he said he’d ask the technician….couple of hours later.

“I have talked to the technician and he shot ISO 3200, RAW, 8 second exposure, Auto WB blah blah”. All OK it seemed but how could he not see the problem?

“He did clean the sensor” the support guy said “so maybe wait and see if that’s helped.”

“Well, that doesn’t produce hotpixels as far as I know, but OK” – hang up again.

“Ah ha I then think again! I can provide them the crops which display the problem plain as day!”, so I call them and suggest it.

“No need, just wait.”

“OOOOOOK, I said but I have no faith it’s fixed and all I want to do is avoid having to come back.”

So today I get another call, they go over the results yet again, I pick up the camera, walk downstairs, fire off a few shots at 4s exposures, load into Aperture, go to the pixel locations and blow me down, there are green pixels there – who’d have ever thought that!!

Of course the next step if I’m not satisfied is to go back and try and get them to see what I see and agree that it’s a problem, which is possibly harder than you might think for a number of reasons.

Hot pixels are a very debated topic. Manufacturers try and tell you it’s part of owning a digital camera, but of course not everyone has them and if you do, it sucks. When I bought my first dSlR, a used 300d it had no hot pixels for sometimes before they appeared. Essentially lasting about 5-6 years before showing a problem.

Some software tries to mask it, often successfully. Sometimes some pixels don’t appear on my images because Aperture has found and squished them. This isn’t infallible however and I still need to check all my images.

Turning on Long Exposure Noise Reduction in the camera can often remove it. Downside is that it takes twice as long to take the shot (30s for a 15s exposure) because the camera takes another black exposure of the same length to use as it’s base for subtraction.

And as I said before, printing at a small enough size or viewing at monitor size often doesn’t show it up at all.

So I’ll go in tomorrow and see where I get. I don’t want another camera or major repairs and I’d be more than happy to have them just mask the pixels out. My main concern is not having to post process all my images that might have a slightly long exposure of a second or two and end up missing one and handing over someone a print with a bright green dot on someone’s forehead.

If I forget to Photoshop out one of Uncle Billybob’s extra fingers, then that’s my fault, but if my camera is adding rubbish to my images that shouldn’t be there, I’m not happy.

Uncategorized Photography

Another cool thing happened last night. I had submitted the photo below to the Auckland Festival of Photography website about a week ago and when I checked their page again today my photo had been selected as photo of the month! Not sure if I win anything (I may get some Gravity coffee or something like that) but it was cool to see it up there on the front page. Strange thing is noone contacted me to tell me about this.

Summer fun

Personally I really like this photo. Out of everything I’ve shot, this is the only one I’ve been tempted to print. If I can get over the shock of the cost (About $65 for an A3) I might just do that.

UPDATE: I just received their email newsletter and this was the blurb they gave my photograph.

“We loved the sublime, cinematic quality of this shot, with the tiny figure and the kite perfectly placed amongst the vivid green fields and blue colour and acutely placed hint of brown fence to the left hand side. The radiant blue sky with white pillow clouds is the main character of the scene; its apparent descent to meet the figure with the kite adds to the feeling of freedom and joy in this beautiful summer photo.”

Uncategorized Photography

After 8 months with my first ever digital SLR, the trusty Canon 300d I have finally done an upgrade. I’m now a proud owner of a new Canon 50d and wow, is it a step up from what I was using.

Canon 50D

My 300d was starting to feel slow and painful to use. Writing to a memory card took about 5 seconds (I use fast cards too), so if you took a shot and wanted to review it, you’d be waiting upwards of 10 whole seconds before you saw it. My 50d on the other hand is almost instantaneous. Among some other improvements we also have:

• 15MP vs 6.3
• 3″ screen at VGA res, vs 1.8″
• ISO up to 12800 vs 3200
• Shoots in smaller RAW modes like sRaw1 and sRAW2
• Buffer up to 16 RAW images for burst shooting vs 4.
• Super fast Digic IV processor vs “who knows what” on the 300d which makes the shoot-write-shoot cycle so fast now.
• Auto sensor cleaning. The sensor vibrates for a short perioud on startup or shutdown to remove dirt. Not a full clean but it can help.
• Micro AF adjust so you can account for back and forward focussing lenses
• Standard weather sealing, vs “point me at some water and I stop working

and those are just a few. Overall the whole package is just much easier to use.

The purchase wasn’t without it’s problems though. Originally I had wanted the 40d because I knew that would serve me well and be about $600 cheaper but the two stores I went into didn’t have them and my impatience made me get the 50d. I did regret it to be honest, as I would have preferred to save the money.

15MP is insane! For what I do presently I don’t need a 15MP camera (the 40d is 10MP) and the added file size does cause Aperture to crawl a bit now when loading images (Lightroom doesn’t have this issue so I’m thinking of switching). However, if I get a few really nice photos that I want to print the added MP will allow me to print larger and retain detail.

Mine has developed bad pixels. Yup, within 3 weeks I already have at least 3 hot pixels that I can see in exposures as short as .5s. They manifest as bright green dots on the image – this sucks. I’m sending the camera into Canon soon for servicing under warranty but I’ll be without it for about 10 days. What I imagine they will do is simply map them out so that they’re some sort of average of the adjacent pixels. While this seems dirty, I would challenge anyone to even tell. The old 300d will be resurrected while the new guy is in hospital.

Now, my 50d has made my images sharper even on my old lenses but to get some more benefit from the resolution I will need to step up to something better. I’m just using the old kit lens (18-55) and the old 75-300 III zoom at present and while they work, they are the low of the low with terrible image quality relative to almost anything else.  The problem though is deciding on what glass to get. Canon have done an amazing job of making a selection of lenses which don’t cover all your bases. One might miss Image Stabilisation, one might be a little slower (f4 vs f2.8). One might have USM focussing and one might not etc etc. The choices are full of compromises unless you spend 3k on something like the 70-200 f2.8 IS USM.

Now I can’t spend 3k on a lens, so the choice is now between mid quality zoom and high quality prime lens. That’s a decision I’m finding hard to make because I don’t know what I will shoot and I don’t have much experience with both. I did do a shoot yesterday though that helped a bit and I’ll post about that soon.

Uncategorized Photography

OK here are my next two entries for the year.

January 3rd 2009

I was at the beach with my niece and wife and in the distance I saw this kite. I then saw another kite further down the beach so pulled out my camera with ye olde 75-300mm f4-5.6 MK III non USM, non IS lens and took some photos. When I got it back home and was previewing them, I saw something in it that I wanted to try. So a little cropping and some tweaking and I had this.

Dogfighting Kites

There were a couple of things working against me in this one. First, I was miles away so had to zoom in (No IS = shakey shakey). Second, I didn’t zoom enough so had to crop quite a bit and lose res. The main problem with zooming though was the focus. I have no image stabilisation and a SUPER SLOW DC motor zoom on that lens, so trying to nail a kite that’s zipping around was almost impossible. I was damned happy that I got it as close as I did.

January 4th 2009

I dub this photo “Copout #1″. My niece was visiting and we had planned a pretty busy day and I find that busyness tends to cramp my photography as I don’t want to be stopping all the time and holding everyone up while I walk around all over the place trying to get a photo. That and when I’m busy my brain can’t think. So while we enjoyed an awesome vegan icecream from “The Castle” I shot the brick wall as a safety shot for the day and then at night I went out and shot some sunsets. Unfortunately none of them were too exciting and seeing as I’d already done a sunrise the other day I threw the idea out and put up my bricks.

Bricks

I think the tweaking I did to this could have been a little more obvious to sell the effect. There is a B&W copy on the bottom layer and the top layer is actually only the three diagonal bricks that are in a column in the middle. Then there’s a middle layer of the whole picture, with it’s opacity set to about 70%. The idea was to try and make those three middle bricks pop a little more but not too much.

One plus from this photo is that I discovered the scissors select tool in The Gimp which I used to select around the concrete between the 3 bricks. It’s an awesome tool.

Uncategorized 365in2009, Photography

Happy New year everyone! I hope you all had some great celebrations with people you care about and are looking forward to an awesome 2009. I spent Christmas eve and Christmas day with family and it was all good!

Now that the new year is here resolutions are the order of the day and while I have a rather large list I’ll mention just a few of mine.

First is to run another 1/2 marathon and beat my current time of 1hour 53 minutes. Until yesterday I hadn’t been running for 4 weeks but as they say “Start out as you mean to continue” so I got up and did a small run along Tamaki Drive in the middle of the day – damn it was hot. I don’t want to do that resolution any more…

Second. I am going to spend a lot less time on my computer. Yup, surprise surprise I spend vast quantities of time on it. Some productive, creative and interesting, but most of it not. I’m going a bit cold turkey to start off in that apart from work and a quick email check, several days a week I am not going to go near it at all. We’ll see how that pans out but I started it yesterday and while it was tough it was very rewarding. I actually got some writing (Not on a computer) done.

Third, I am going to attempt a photo a day. Every day, rain or shine I will take a photo. I will then post it up at the end of the day or if time is tight I will save them up and post en masse at the end of the week (So you might see up to 7 in one go). The key thing about this challenge is that it keeps me photographing and thinking about photography. A side benefit I see from this also is that if I just start taking random snaps to fill my quota I’ll be unhappy with the results so I’ll actually try harder to shoot more interestingly and of higher quality.

I have also joined the Flickr group 365 in 2009 where I will also be posting the photo a day. I encourage anyone else to join this group too and if you do, let me know.

So now that’s out of the way, here is my first two photos covering January 1st and 2nd.

The first while not a cop out, wasn’t difficult to produce and is not very flash. I was trying to think what to shoot and then stopped to think about how my day was going. I was relaxing, enjoying thinking about photography and about to have some whiskey so I combined them into a photo.

Relaxing on New Years Day

You may have noticed the insignificant role that the whiskey plays in this photo. I would like to make it clear that this is no metaphor for reduction of my whiskey consumption this year – no no no…it’s just that if I had of kept it in the shot, there would have been this ugly umbrella pole sticking out the top of it thereby making the photo even worse.  Totally my fault for setting up an awful shot.

Now, day 2 is a much better attempt I feel and I personally like the result much better. I got up at 4am because I couldn’t sleep and thought “while I’m up why not get out there and get a sunrise” so I went to Shoal Bay under the Auckland Harbour Bridge and waited.

And waited, but nothing was happening. Everything looked dreary and boring so I decided to jump down under the bridge and take some shots of the supports. When I did – WHAM – The sun burst over the horizon and I got about 5-10 minutes where I shot the crap out of the sunrise. I learnt a lot – primarily how damned hard it is to manage exposure with super bright sunlight smashing you in the face.

Sunrise at Shoal Bay, Auckland

So there we have it. Two days down and 363 more to come. I should end this by saying that one last resolution I have is to become good enough at photography this year to actually get a job in the field. Anything – assisting, small business of my own, or toilet cleaner at the Photo Warehouse. Given my noob-ness in the world of photography it’s a tall order but I’ve set it as a goal for the year because only under pain of forclosure do I want to go back to fulltime software engineering and I need a lofty goal to get me moving – fast!

Have a great one!

Uncategorized 365in2009, Computers, Photography, Running

A habit I’ve found myself getting into as I drive around is keeping my eyes open for interesting things to shoot. A few days ago I was driving to the supermarket and I noticed this old tree trunk, almost branchless, with no top, sticking up among the other trees. It looked kinda spooky and so I decided to use it as the subject for learning something about using my flash. The task I set myself was to single out the tree with a flash and make everything else black.

When I arrived I took a reference shot of the tree so you can see what it looked like to me. Settings were ISO 3200, f6.3 @ 1/50. 

Reference shot of tree and surrounding area

I then fiddled around with some exposure settings to get the background darker, attempting to get it to go black and noticed a nice effect in the clouds. ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th.

Moody clouds (ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th)

 
I quite liked the effect, so I started shooting some frames at similar settings but using my flash to light the tree. The surrounding area was a little cluttered with other trees and junk so I decided to handhold my flash on my left hand as opposed to setting up a lightstand. This meant I could quickly try a few different angles on it too without having to stop and move the stand all the time. This first shot I think my flash was on 1/8th power, and as you can see from the shadow I’m holding it up and left, facing down and right. ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th.

First tree shot with flash (ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th)

I then pointed the flash up as opposed to down and this resulted. Notice how the shadows from the bush on the left now cast onto the trunk, making things look a little messier.

Flash facing up and right (ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th)

Next I bumped up the power of my flash to 1/2 and took this picture after moving to the side of the tree. Unfortunately with this framing, the branch of some spindly tree comes into frame, and the flash is so bright it lights the surrounding tree on the top left too. ISO 400, f6.3 @ 1/50th.

Left side of tree, 1/2 flash (ISO 400, f6.3 @ 1/50th.)

Next on the list, I decided to pop my white shoot-through umbrella in front of my flash and take a shot. See how the transitions between light and dark on the shadows is smoother than without the umbrella. The flash is also on the same power as the previous shot (1/2) but the image is exposed less due to the umbrella sucking up light.

Shoot-through umbrella (ISO 400, f6.3 @ 1/50th)

I then decided to go back to my black background tests and so adjusted my camera settings to ISO 200, f6.3 @ 1/200th, bringing everything down 3 stops. I then took another shot and got this.

Almost black (ISO 200, f6.3 @ 1/200th)

To finish off the night, I threw on a couple of filters, the first being a Lee Golden Amber gel which unsurprisingly produced a rather golden, amber photo. The second filter was a Lee Full CTO gel. In case you don’t know the Lee Full CTO is designed to take daylight and turn it into tungsten; something you’d do if you were using your flash inside under normal tungsten lights and needed to balance the flash to the lights. As an aside, the Lee gels were simple gels from a sample pack that I’ve had lying around for years. The samples are the PERFECT size to cover the bulb on my flash and with a little DIY to make a plastic flash holder, voila, I have free flash gels. I’ll post about this little adapter and the gels in another post soon.

With Lee Golden Amber filter

Anyway, overall I found the experience very interesting. It was great to get out and finally test my flash in a more realistic way, but I do have to say that the resulting photos were a little depressing. While the clutter was a bit of an issue, I can remedy that in post to some degree, but the two big things that I would have liked to have done better is to light more of the tree (I might need a bigger flash, or a high stand) and to get a better angle on it. I wanted the tree to be ominous looking against a black sky but it didn’t turn out that way. Maybe a wide angle lens, combined with situating myself lower and at the base of the tree would have worked but I just couldn’t get close enough.

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist

I had a bit of an “Ahhh” moment today when I was reading a Strobist article on balancing subject light with background light. The article was talking about controlling ambient light while using your flash to bring your subject into an acceptable exposure range. The article proposed some exercises to do and I was going through the steps in my head, imagining the output that I would get should I do them. Unfortunately I found myself confused when, after reading about taking some initial shots at f5.6 @ 1/60th, I read the following:

“But now, also shoot some frames at 1/125, to underexpose the background by a stop. And try a few at 1/250th to underexpose by two stops. You should see a very different feel in these photos, but they should all look okay…”

Underexpose the background? Won’t adjusting the shutter reduce exposure over the entire area? Surely they meant to say “increase the shutter speed and adjust the flash power up to compensate.”? After all, we’re taught in photography 101 that increased shutter means less light, means darker photos. I kept reading, hoping they’d correct it later on but the article kept suggesting that you change the shutter to change the background exposure only. I was getting truly frustrated and so had to stop reading and try to think about all the things I’ve learnt recently about flash photography that I must not be taking into account. That’s when it hit me.

FLASHES FIRE VERY, VERY FAST

Not only do flashes give you more light, but they do it so fast that they effectively render your shutter speed unimportant with regard to exposure of whatever the flash light is falling on. Imagine this scenario. You are in a perfectly black room aiming your camera at a subject. You set your camera’s shutter speed to 10 seconds. Because the room is completely black, no light will hit the sensor of the camera in that 10 seconds and you’ll have a black picture. Now add a flash that when fired will illuminate your subject for perfect exposure. When you hit the shutter button, the flash fires for a tiny fraction of a second (Maybe 1/1000th) and then for the remaining time the room is black again. Changing your shutter speed to 5 seconds, or to 20 seconds would have absolutely no effect on the resulting picture because for 1/1000th of a second there is light that the sensor can read, but for the remaining time it’s black.

Now, change the black room to one that has a little bit of light in it. Your 10 second exposure will now be doing something. It will be exposing the sensor on your camera with a little bit of light for 10 seconds. The flash will still fire at the start, exposing your subject perfectly, but the remainder of the time is spent exposing the picture with the little bit of light. Hence, your shutter speed allows you to control background exposure, while your flash does it’s own thing effectively independent of it.

Here are some samples pictures showing this in action. Each picture was taken at a very different shutter speed inside an almost pitch black cupboard. Notice how the exposure is almost identical? The flash dominates the exposure and you can see only a slight difference resulting from the longer exposure times (There was a gap under the door with some ambient light coming through). 

1/10th second exposure	1 second exposure
2 second exposure	5 second exposure

If I was shooting this without flash and just using shutter for the exposure (NOTE: I would have had to let in more light for you to actually see anything at these relatively short exposure times) you would have seen vastly different exposures; the 2s exposure would have been twice as bright as the 1s exposure.

So, now that I have finally become aware of this practical use for the speed of flash, the Strobist post becomes clear and it opens up even more control possibilities when doing flash photography. I plan to go out in the next week or so and do some flash tests. It will be the first real world stuff I’ve done with my flash so I’m looking forward to it.

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist