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My trip to Florida is now officially over and I thought that I would let everyone know my experience.

My father inlaw decided to fly his entire family (14 kids, 9 gran kids, 6 spouses) to Disney World. With this once in a lifetime chance to spend his time with his family they (his wife and himself) wanted photo documentation. I was nominated as the primary photographer which also meant family portraits and choosing a location somehow.

I lucked out on the portraits as the resort we had lunch at had beautiful scenery. However it was sunny and there were shady spots everywhere, luckily I bought an SB 800 so that took care of teh problem for the most part, I did find challenges in some of the highlights in the background though. I fought sunlight streaming through trees for 5 straight days (when it's sunny, everyone prefers to sit in the shade). I found fill flash didn't work really well as it kept blowing out face tones (or maybe it was just the bright screen?)As much as I hissed at it it didn't go away until the last day, more clouds finally and a nice diffused light enshrined everything. It all was very frustrating but I suppose it's better than getting rained on every day.

The other thing I fought was WB. Going from flash to shady to cloudy, I missed a lot of pictures by not changing the WB back over and Auto just doesn't really cut it IMHO. All in all I found it very rewarding. I took to the tune of 450 photos not including repeats. I liked watching Parents gasp as I showed them their pics of their kids playing with eachother.

I got home and last night tried to download them onto the computer. It took a while (my first full 512 mb to fill) and when the computer was done it showed me two of the more useless photos of the 270. They were nowhere to be found on Iphoto. I have no idea where they are. For somereason they just disappeared off of my card and the computer. I'm going to see if my bro can find them. Luckily I downloaded them all onto my bro in laws computer (at his insistance) in florida so they are all luckily not completely gone. Phew. I'll post a few as soon as I can.

dooda wrote:My father inlaw decided to fly his entire family (14 kids, 9 gran kids, 6 spouses) to Disney World.

You better clarify that Dooda... father in law with six spouses?!

Must be fun to get out of cold Canada for a while. I had wanted to visit FL on my trip to the US east coast in recent months past, but didn't make it due to three tornadoes sweeping that region. I look forward to seeing your pics.

I have a theory about the blown faces with flash use outdoors - you might have been bumping up against the 1/500th sync limit at your selected aperture. The top LCD will show shutter speed as "Hi" but will allow the shutter to trip at the max 1/500th, thereby rendering overexposure.

Onyx wrote:I have a theory about the blown faces with flash use outdoors - you might have been bumping up against the 1/500th sync limit at your selected aperture. The top LCD will show shutter speed as "Hi" but will allow the shutter to trip at the max 1/500th, thereby rendering overexposure.

Possible, but not likely. Shutter speed, when using flash, has very little input into the actual exposure encountered. You need to remember that even tough the shutter speed might be just 1/500 sec, the flash duration will still be far shorter than this - perhaps 1/20,000 sec. You only need to synchronise the full opening of the shutter (front to rear curtains) with the tripping of the flash in order to see correct synch.

But one needs to also properly compensate for the ambient light levels. Consider that the meter might say 1/500 f8 at ISO200. That's spot metered on the subject's face.

Let's add flash to this ... doesn't matter how much flash we're adding (not yet) but consider what's about to happen to the meter reading.

Care to speculate?

Hey Dooda,

Can't wait to see the family portraits...

By memory you have the family whick has a little bit of every nationality don't you

W00DY

Dooda - can’t wait to see the pic of the 6 spouses together

Plus all the others. I would imagine there is a major difference in weather between where you live and Florida this time of year

Chris

Onyx,

Ah, but read carefully Father in Law's entire family comprises 6 spouses, not specifically connected to himself, but within the family (mostly spouses of his daughters etc) not his own spouses, but spouses within his family therefore my statment stands...checkmate!
(edit: I suppose 7 spouses would make more sense as his own spouse would be included, then the 6 spouses to his children that are in his family nonetheless)
What killed me about the flash thing is that someone whipped out their Canon A 75 and took a flash photo of me and some others and it looked great. AAaargh! So I ramped the ISO up to 1600 and took some low light pics that way. Take that!

Gary and Onyx, in summary I have no idea about what you're trying to say to fix the problem. I think that Onyx was saying that the metering was reading one thing, then you throw the flash into a shutter speed that is set to be open for a certain amount of time. Gary, not exactly sure what you're saying, but I'd love to know what you guys suggest I do to rectify...several times I considered throwing it on A and just tapping the stupid little button.

Florida's weather was a real shock. I couldn't believe I'd be wearing sandals and shorts in January. In the sun it was too hot, I needed the shade. 80-85 farenheit or so. I got used to it really quick though, and now I'm back to the freezing cold.

Whilst Gary is correct in that shutter speed has little to do with flash exposure, it's true only when flash is primary light source. In the case of using flash outdoors as fill, the main ambient light exposure is still very much related to shutter speed, and it's this balancing act between ambient and flash exposures that determine how your final image looks.

When your metered exposure is say 1/1250th at f/5.6, and you're in aperture priority mode, if you then turn on the flash the camera will fire at 1/500th at f/5.6, thus rendering 1.3 stops overexposed. In this case, you'd have to select a smaller aperture to keep shutter speed below 1/500th, use a neutral density filter (extra cost), or tape up the two rearmost contacts on the camera hotshoe for the ability to fire the SB800 at upto 1/8000th.

I've had this happen at my graduation - I told my mum to watch the shutter speed, keep it below 1/500th. She didn't bother. Consequence: my face was rendered more yellow than I already am, and crap pictures of a non-repeatable event. But what can you do... I'll never shake the "know it all teenager" perception for as long as I live.

If the plural of mouse is mice, should the plural of spouse be spice?

tHANKS Onyx that makes a little more sense.

Dooda,

This is the method that I use to get the results I want in similar situations - ie bright backgrounds. It involves using M Mode, spot metering of the brightest part of the background to avoid blown background highlights. Pure white is about 2.5 stops left of centre on the exposure meter, so with light coming through trees the meter should read about 2 stops left of centre, midtones at centre, black is about 2 stops to the right. Clear blue sky near the horizon is somewhere between 0 and 1 stops left of centre (sometimes more). With the EL button set to FV lock, set the flash value by pressing EL button while focused on the face (or whatever else) you wish to meter from. Focus, compose, shoot. Once background exposure is set it will not need to be altered unless the scene changes substantially, so it is good for many shots. SB-800 is set to TTL and -0.3 to -0.7 compensation. This technique sounds much more difficult than it really is.

Gary and Onyx covered the issue of sync speed. ND filter would be handy. The worst conditions that I have experienced was white cloud obscuring the sun in front of the lens - 1/500s f16 or thereabout.

I have found that I generally get fairly average results when using auto WB and presets. It may be time for me to get an Expodisk or two plus a grey card. Until such time as I can afford these items (Christmas has wiped me out), I will continue to use Auto -2, shoot RAW, and make corrections in NC.


Cheers

Matt

Hi matt,

So when you say 2 to the right and left, you mean exposure compensation + or - (I've got a sick feeling that I look like a real fool right now). So if I opened up 2.5 stops it would be pure white, and closing up 2 would make it mostly black? Hmmm, sorry I'm fairly new to this for some reason. What is center? I have a very vague idea of what you're talking about here, but it definitly isn't hitting home, sorry.

To use fill-flash in a situation like this, I would:

set my camera to manual (this also sets the SB800 at Standard TTL)
use the camera's meter to determine the exposure setting for the ambient light
set flash exposure compensation at around -1.3 to -1.7 (you'll have to experiment to get it right)

This way you are controlling everything the camera and flash can do.
If you use iTTL flash mode, the camera and flash make their own decsions, and then you won't know what has been successful and what has not.

Generally speaking, once you get a feel for this, you will have a repeatable method for fill flash in the future.

Also, remember the on-camera flash. It's actually quite good for fill-flash in sunny situations, because of its low GN.

Dooda,

Yes, left to right is +_0_- on the meter in the viewfinder. Pure white is at the + end, pure black is at the - end of the meter scale. Midtones (or 18%grey) in the middle. Sorry, I think in terms of left to right.

The d70 has a dynamic range of around 5 stops so anything to be rendered white needs to be placed at the + end of the meter. If you were to ever to try exposing 3 cards, white, grey and black using this method, you would find the final exposure values (shutter and aperature) would be the same although the meter itself is showing different values (approx +2.5, 0 and -2.5 respectively). Skin tones fall pretty close to zero. Opening up 2.5 stops (on the meter) on a white object will render pure white. Seeing as you dont want pure white in most cases, +2.5 is a little too far. Same applies at the other end (-) of the meter with black.


When you point that meter in the viewfinder at something in modes other than M, what you are doing is telling the camera that this is the tone that you want rendered as middle grey. To point it at white for instance would render the scene under exposed.

Ok, fairly crude sort of explanation of Zone System. I hope that it does not confuse. There was a link posted on this forum recently to an article/thread on dpreview which used teddy bears for the examples in the scene. I cannot find the link. Perhaps someone else here knows where it is. You could have a read about the zone system, but the values used in the zone system are not entirely appropriate for the d70 and may lead to further confusion.

Cheers

Matt

Cripes! I did a bad job of that last post.
Hereis the link that I referred to previously.

Matt

Hi Dooda!
When flash things get to complicated do what I do...stick the camera into Program mode and the flash onto TTL. Bloody thing works beautifully every shot! And if you want a particular f/stop just spin the command dial. Dang...best flashgun I ever used.