Please offer suggestions

Started Aug 24, 2009 | Discussions thread
Forum ProPosts: 19,216
What kind of events; read Mr. Davis
In reply to Lance K, Aug 25, 2009

Pay attention to Mr. Davis; he knows what he is talking about.

What kind of events?

As Baz says, the distance from subject to flash matters greatly, if you want the people exposed similarly.

Remember that with three flash guns (two portable, one built into your fanmcy camera) you can organize the photo so a fairly large number of people are evenly lit.

Your automatic flash features will allow quite even exposure, from three different flash units.

If the goal is four person groups, standing side by side holding glasses and looking at the caemra, poretty much filling the frame -- a typical cocktail party, it's easy enough to set your camera on P for program, set the flash for I-ttl, put some modifier light a Gary FongLightsp[here ontop, and shoot away.

Too bad you did not buy a D90, with night portrait mode.

Anyway, if your plan is to have people fill only part of the frame, with some of the location visible in the background, the brightness of this background matters.

Your choice is to have a dark background, so the people stand out in the foreground, and messy backgrounds are minimized, because they are dark.

Or, you can exposse the shot the background is quite bright and visible, showing the messes, other people, etc., and this may also be blurry, because the camera moves (we'll solve that in a minute) or the people move -- we can't solve that.

To get some half-decent exposure in the background, indoors,in dimish light, set the ISO at 800, set the exposure mode at manual, pick an aperture you like, and adjust the ambiant light exposure to give you a shutter speed you are happy with -- slow enough to allow flash synch.

Set flash on i-TTL.

Now, when the shutter goes off, the ambiant light will expose the whole frame, and during the time the shutter is open, the flash will go off, illuminating the people int he foreground, properly, because the i-TTL is on.

If the shutter speed chosen is too slow to handhold, you can use a monopod to help, or a tripos, or decide you don't care if the background is blurry.

But the flash will make the people sharp, unless the opverall room is pretty bright.

THIS IS THE SIMPLE VERSION... it can get a bit complicated if you try to blanace light color in the background with the color of the flash.

Photography is hard; that's why there are professional photographers.


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