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09/23/2003 05:33:31 PM · #1 |
OK. Color me ignorant!
<== Ignorant
People tell me that I need more fill light on a goodly percentage of my portraits (link). I have a Quantaray QAF 6600 Zoom Bounce flash. I can tilt the head 90 degrees from directly perpendicular to the plane of media to straight up along the vertical line of the media (the head of the flash tilts up and down). The flash also has 3 settings for the hood on it so that it extends for what seems to be 35mm, 50mm and 85mm (at least those setting correspond to the numbers on the back of the flash). I've tried different settings and different angles of tilt but still lose some definition of my subjects in shadows or the shutter speed might be so slow as to miss out on 4 or 5 good poses before I catch one just right. I also have some reflective presentation board (foam-core board with either bright white or gold reflective surfaces (about $2.00 per sheet at Wal-Mart of a craft store). I still haven't tried this with a model as I normally don't take an assistant along with me on the shoots and these FCB's are light and will blow away in a decent breeze.
I'm a little stymied and I'm up for some experimentation if anyone would care to point me in the direction of a decent tutorial on "bounce flash" or "fill flash" or "fill lighting". I tried PhotographyTips.com but didn't find it helpful (perhaps I'm imprevious to some instruction--I hope not). If you have any direct experience with this type of personal flaw in your photography, please share how you overcame these silly habits to create flawless portraits. I've been shooting portraits for about 2 months now and I usually shoot around 400-1000 at a sitting and out of that I might get 10-25 decent shots that I'm not totally ashamed to show you folks or the models but I'm starting to get more interest in models wanting to use me to get some headshots or promotional shots and I definitely would like to produce as close to professional quality work as I can. I'm very willing to put in the time to gain the experience but this whole fill in lighting thing is like cyrillic to me (I can actually read some Greek so that's kinda a useless metaphor).
Thanks for your reading, understanding and the witty way with which you share your wise diwection (OK so I wike awitewation, too).
Kev
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09/23/2003 07:37:31 PM · #2 |
Bump...
This isn't a direct answer, but I've got a book titled "the photoshop book for digital photographers" by Scott Kelby. It has one or two techniques for compensating for lack of fill flash in portrait shots. If you're interested, I can try and boil it down and send the steps to you. I haven't tried these particular tricks yet, but on the whole the stuff in this book is pretty good. (Though it's filled with a lot of fluff - coulda used half as many pages and gotten the same basic info in.) |
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09/23/2003 08:16:29 PM · #3 |
I'll try to help you as much as I can here. Most of my experience with small flash units like yours involves manually setting the flash power. I am not familiar with yours, but if it has an integral sensor, you can use the ASA setting to fool it's internal sensor and control power that way. If it is linked to the camera metering system, you will have to read your manual to see if you can control the flash exposure that way.
Try setting your camera on manual exposure and playing around with the various settings. Keep in mind that below the fastest sync shutter speed, the shutter speed should have no effect on the flash exposure, only the exposure from the ambient light. The flash power setting does not affect the ambient light exposure and the aperture setting affects both the ambient and the flash.
Try setting the flash power to be 2/3 to 1-1/3 stops less than the ambient setting. Experiment from there.
I found this article
//www.profotos.com/education/promag/articles/october2001/fill_flash/index.shtml
and these
//www.danheller.com/tech-fillflash.html
//www.ephotozine.com/techniques/viewtechnique.cfm?recid=301
Message edited by author 2003-09-23 20:18:22.
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09/24/2003 09:16:45 AM · #4 |
Thanks folks. I'll start into these tutorials and see how this turns out.
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