Sunday, May 2, 2010

Flash + ambient, indoors (part 2)

After taking pictures of the car guard, I decided to try my hand at some more ambient + flash balancing, but this time I wanted to control the spill on my background a bit more, so I went with a cardboard grid on my flash, instead of an umbrella.

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It took a few tries until I got the direction and flash output “right” (since it’s basically a matter of taste). The whole process will be unveiled if you click on more…

The grid I used has a very narrow beam, so there was some trial and error in the setup. A couple of extra shots:

IMG_1819

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I found that final one “close enough”, so I started from there. Settings: ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/200, flash at 1/8 (up and to the right). Ambient only looked like this:

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Clearly, this time I’m having very little spill into the background. At least I got that one covered! Let’s start getting some more ambient into the pic. 1/100:

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1/50:

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1/25:

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Hey, it’s getting better! Let’s look at 1/13:

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And finally, 1/6th:

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Take your pick, I like the darkish 1/25th and the next one (1/13th). Since the flash had a grid, that last photo has some background areas much lighter than the foreground, something that doesn’t work for me in this pic.

Unfortunately, no setup pics this time, as it was close to lunch time and I had to hurry ;-)

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