Project 52: Week 48 “Fill Flash”

I learned a lot this week and am going to share six photos instead of just one. I did zero editing to these, other than a slight white balance adjust and lens correction to account for the distortion of my wide angle lens. It is clearly authentic because my kids are a mess, haha.

Photo Details (Flash Shot):
Exposure time 1/30 sec, Aperture f/3.2 ISO 400, Focal Length 32mm, Canon EF 16-35mm F/2.8L, Flash Fired

Why This Photo:
This is a good with/without shot that I took this last week as I experimented with my flash on my camera. I am still working on figuring out how to use it, where to bounce it, how to angle it, and what to adjust and this is a good reminder that it is totally worth it.

Challenges/Lessons Learned:
I found a great tutorial/explanation online about the different components of how to best use a TTL flash and within about five minutes my photographs dramatically improved (it is amazing what I can do when I take the time!). With this first set of photos I was trying to adjust my shutter speed to help bring out Gavin in the front of the photo, but still have some ambient light in the background so it wasn’t a big black hole. While this worked great, messing with your shutter speed on kids probably isn’t the best idea – they move quickly and things get blurry extremely fast (I have a lot of throw away shots where that happened). In this shot I was lucky because Gavin was engrossed with Bob the Ball on the tv, so he was relatively still.

Series #2

Photo Details:
Shot #1: Exposure time 1/200 sec, Aperture f/3.2 ISO 1000, Focal Length 21mm, Canon EF 16-35mm F/2.8L, Flash Fired
Shot #2: ISO 2500
Shot #3: ISO 5000
Shot #4: ISO 6400

Why These Photos:
This was a really fun experiment to see how the ISO impacts the photo while using the flash.

Challenges/Lessons Learned:
My biggest lesson was really a reminder about ISO – I always forget about that part of the exposure triangle and when photographing kids where you can’t really mess with Shutter Speed too much, ISO is the ace in the hole. At 1000, the background is a bit dim. At 2500 & 5000, the background is much brighter and Carter isn’t blown out at all. at 6400, Carter is now blown out. I think the exposure that I like the best is probably 5000 – the background has similar lighting to the foreground in it, plus, Carter doesn’t look as much like a goofball! If you are interested, write a comment with the one that you prefer.