How To Do Better Next Time

[Hill Country Hack]

Hey gang. I just spent the last hour or so reading Strobist lighting 101 and 102. Needless to say the head is spinning. I understand the apeture controls the ambient and shutter the flash.

Within the month I'll be getting a Canon Speedlite 430 EX II as I understand it has TTL and will fill my needs for now as I don't forsee myself using this off camera for quite a while if ever.

I want to use this for fill light or second light source when outdoors, but the primary use would be for indoor stills and action (when allowed).

I went to a local junior livestock show in an arena. I used my 70-200 f2.8 non IS lens and fought the lack of light the entire time. The below shot was taken at 70mm, f2.8, ISO 800 with shutter (the best I could get) of either 1/50 or 1/60. The shot is ok, but I feel I could have better results with more light. I am able to get at fence side so the subjects will be at between 5 ft and 30ft away.

I think I understand from Strobist I should/could expose for the ambient, set max sync speed (hopefully 1/250) and work backwards until 2 stops underexposed to ambient. Take a test shot and adjust from there? Am I on the right track? The goal is to at least get the shutter speed to a 1:1 ratio to focal length (to reduce camera shake), have a properly exposed subject with some background detail and as a bonus be able to stop the not so fast action.

Here is the shot using only ambient at the setting mentioned above.

[Doug Sundseth]

Setting to maximum sync speed is mostly a way to kill or reduce the ambient light contribution to an image. If you're lighting primarily by flash or shooting in very bright ambient light, it's usually the right thing to do.

For action photos, things get a bit more complex.

If you can use flash to put enough light onto the subject that it is well exposed, then this can still work. The background will go mostly to black, but you'll freeze the action in the foreground quite well. If you slow down your shutter enough for a major ambient contribution when the ambient is low, you're likely to get motion blur.

At 5', flash will probably work pretty well once you figure out how to do it, though I'd probably use a sync cord and hold the flash off to the side to get decent modeling. At 30', that's going to be more problematic, since you'll have 1/36 as much light (about 5 stops less light) from the flash at that distance as at 5'.

If you want to see the background while freezing the action, you need a fast shutter speed -- that means fast glass and high ISO usually. (Assuming the sort of poorly lit indoor arenas that I've seen at the rodeos I've been to.) If you don't care about the background, flash can work pretty well.

[Hill Country Hack]

Thanks Doug. I'm not too interested in the background. Maybe enough to let the veiwer know it is an arena. Maybe next time I'll take the 50mm f1.8 to get a couple more stops of light. I'm not that far from the action, so if I can get some crisp shots I can always crop. I'd really hate to max the ISO to 1600 as I can't handle the noise. Even with the good noise reduction in LR, the image just doesn't look good.

As I stated, If I can get the shutter to 1/100 then I can hopefully get a crisp shot.