I want to use wide angle lens settings a lot more, since I want to learn on how to get close, and to still compose a nice picture without getting in too much distortion.
And I also want to play around with flash and ambient. In theory, I know how to do this, but there’s nothing like practice, so this is what I wanted to do today.
Since we had nice and bright sunshine today, even in our flat, this was an ideal opportunity. The sunshine was lighting up our living room, and we had let down the shutters at the dining table already - an ideal place for putting the flash and finding some object which I could use as the foreground. After trying with my watch first, I decided to take one of Zuleikha’s newest toys - a little princess.
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| From selfmade |
I set the lens to 17mm (34mm on a “normal film”, or “full frame” camera), and the aperture to f=5.6. With these settings, I measured the background first, and the time the camera would have chosen for it was 1/15 of a second. So I set it manually to 1/60 of a second to get the background two stops down. That’s how it is done: you control the intensity of the flash on the flash itself, and with the aperture. The intensity of the background is controlled with the time settings.
Since my flash has a guide number of (roughly) around 30, and I bounced it over the ceiling - which means it was about 4m from flash to ceiling and back to the object, you can do a simple calculation like 30/4 to get the aperture you’d have to take with the flash on full power, and the camera on ISO 100. In this case, it would have been f=8. But I had the camera at f=5.6, so the flash could operate at half of its power. In fact for this one I even dialed it down to 1/4 of its maximum output, since the flash has a bit more than GN 30. I focused manually, and took the photo above.
That was the result. Pretty close and nice as a first try. But as soon as I had it in the computer, I saw two errors. First, the lighting still wasn’t perfect - the face was a bit dark, since the flash was at about 90 degrees to the princess’ left (or camera right), and so the face was partly in the shadow. This would work with a real human maybe, because we are much bigger, but for this tiny thing it wasn’t optimal.
But the really more severe error was in the composition - do you see it? There’s that nicely lit living room in the background, with a painting on the wall over the couch, a light hanging from the ceiling, the sun shining in in a nice diagonal, and - ouch! - a halogen light sticking out of the princess’ head. Uuuh. This is bad. So I had to do it again.
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| From selfmade |
I put the figure to the other side, so she was facing the flash to avoid the shadows in her face (the figure looks so human, it’s actually hard to say “it”). Plus I used the flash at 1/2 power now, which was the perfect exposure according to the camera. And now the background of the figure is a door and a plant, but she’s covering most of these, and nothing sticks out of her head. The head now makes a nice contrast to the darker background - a much better result. This was also focused manually, at the closest distance my 14-42mm kit lens allowed.
Again; the formula for this is easy: roughly calculate the needed aperture with dividing the guide number through the distance, and set the background one or two stops lower than what the camera would take without any flash at all. If you want the background brighter or darker, prolong or shorten the time. If you want your object brighter or darker, open or close the aperture, or change the settings of your flash up or down accordingly.
If you don’t want the flash to look like flash, take a lower setting like in the first example. You can even soften out both the highlights and the shadows if you put a translucent umbrella or some transparent paper in front of your flash, and still point it to the ceiling (over the umbrella, which would only soften the direct line between flash and object in this case). If you don’t want any highlights on the object at all, put a solid thing like a book in between flash and object. But then it gets rather flat; only you can decide if you’d like that or not. I don’t.
If you want to really learn this and much more, read strobist.blogspot.com - David Hobby is far better than me in all that.
Ok - on to a totally different topic.
On a Sunday almost two weeks ago, I took a walk alone. I need these little escapes sometimes. When coming back from a nice place, I ran into a game of soccer (we Germans call it football, since like John Cleese explains, it’s played with a foot and a ball - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sD_8prYOxo for his wonderful rant). Our local sports club “Rot-Weiss Walldorf” was just playing against a team from Frankfurt.
I went in to the officials and asked if I’m allowed to take pictures, and they said something like: “Sure, go on”. So I took my very first own soccer (football) photos ever. Like this one:
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| From Soccer |
These were all taken with the longer of my two kit zooms, which has a range of 40-150mm (equivalent to 80-300mm on an “old” film camera), and the complete album is at http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/Soccer?feat=directlink - feel free to watch them, use them, whatever you like.
This is also what I mailed our sports club two days later, and I asked them to forward the link to the Frankfurt team as well. Now I’ve got an official invitation to come back when and as often as I want, and to take as many photos as I like. Nice. Glad they liked them.
Ok; enough for today. I need a break. A 3 week break 
