leighgion

The old system (TTL) also worked great in shade (or dappled light). I shot an outdoor carnival that was set up in a tree lined area of otherwise bright sunlight with my N90s and SB-28 and every image was perfectly exposed. I was gobsmacked! I'm struggling to remember the specifics now but I believe I switched from my favorite metering mode (center weighted averaging) and used Matrix mode.

I don't know what metering mode you use but maybe switching to matrix mode will help. The only other thing I can think of that might help is to be aware of the bright spots in your viewfinder and try to minimize them as much as possible. Or maybe this is one of those times when high speed sync is the solution.

--Ron

Basically always in matrix metering mode. I think this is probably just a case of the light meter being a light meter and not a human being with understanding of aesthetics.


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I would consider seriously culling the amount of gear you're planning to bring for several reason.

 

1. Pure weight and volume. Even if you plan to mostly be moving from plane to car, to house, every extra ounce is a burden when you're traveling internationally and if it's ounces of valuable hardware, the burden is increased even more. 

 

2. Options can be negative. Full disclosure, I've done what you've done and carried the majority of my camera gear with me when visiting my sister in Germany. The burden didn't end at my sister's door. Because I'd brought so many options, I didn't really want to leave them at home, so I was going out with a heavily loaded sling bag. Did I get some good pics? Yes, but I don't know that it was worth all the extra sweating and time that I burnt thinking about choices of hardware. Walking around Heidelberg would've been a lot more pleasant if I'd only had a point & shoot instead of hauling my D300 plus 17-55mm f/2.8, and more options with it.

 

3. Airport security. In recent years, I've had to take every lens out of my camera bag and put in the tubs to pass security AND tended to get flagged for extra checks. Royal PITA and a high risk with all that gear just sitting out.

 

My suggestion to you would be to leave the K-3 at home, take the D750, 24-120mm f4 for general use, if you really feel you must, take the 70-200mm f/2.8 and take the 50mm f/1.8. One of your flashes might be worth bringing depending on if you plan to do much human photography. 

I don't shoot much daylight fill these days. However, in my old film days, when I first discovered TTL and used it for daylight fill I thought that I had died and gone straight to the pearly gates. In fact, Nikon's original TTL was a lifesaver both indoors and out.

--Ron

If my subject is under direct sunlight then it works great, even with the pop up flash. The problem is when the subject is mostly in the shade, but there’s sections of the frame that are sunlit that I want to balance.



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I’ve been almost exclusively a fast lens available light man for years, but of late I’ve committed to learning how to use speedlights better. A lot of good things, but also hiccups I didn’t expect.

1. White ceilings and walls are great for bouncing, but if everything is white, your shots end up looking dull as dishwater.

2. Daylight fill flash can be a surprising difficult and inconsistent experience.

Under full sunlight, things work more or less as expected but in mixed sun and shade, things get weird with iTTL. I get much better results going full manual on everything, camera and flash power, but that’s a rough way to shoot moving subjects in changing light.

Ever tried to shoot a kid’s birthday party outdoors in Spanish sun with a speedlight on your cam adjusting everything manually while minding your own 3-year-old? I have now. It’s a roller coaster.

3. There’s never enough flash power when bouncing. I’m not getting studio strobes, but I look back at the one time I shot with them and I appreciate them more now.

4. The vast majority of tutorials and discussions of advanced lighting techniques assume a cooperative subject, time and ability to setup lights or both. Most often I have neither.


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You have the wrong idea about how to use an external flash.

 

If you put an external flash on your camera, then the popup flash isn't meant to work at the same time. The fact it won't fully open is normal. No adapter is needed in this case.

 

You should also be aware that the reason that speedlight is so inexpensive is that it's manual. The only communication with the camera is to make it fire. You'll need to set the power on the flash itself and get the right exposure through trial and error.

You described the situation very thoroughly, so it's immediately apparent what the problem was. 

 

You wanted something along these lines, right?

 

Back to the Falling Water by Leigh, on Flickr

 

The Underfall by Leigh, on Flickr

 

You knew the type of shot you wanted of the waterfall, but you didn't understand the nature of the technique to get it. In order to get that smooth look to the water, it's necessary to use a slow shutter speed to capture the motion of the flowing water. However, by definition, this means the camera is also capturing any other motion like branches waving in the breeze, things moving through the frame or... the hands holding the camera.

 

For this type of shot, you need a tripod so the camera stays steady. Your lens, ISO, filters, etc, are irrelevant to this problem. It's a pure matter of stability. 

 

The general rule of thumb for shutter speeds is that if all possible, not to try to handhold a shutter speed slower than the reciprocal of your focal length i.e. 1/50th of a sec for 50mm. This isn't a hard and fast rule, as skill and situation can allow you hold steady at slower speeds, but there's a human limit. In order to get the smooth water effect, you're looking at least going to 1/4th of a sec and quite probably several seconds. 

 

So, next time you want to do the smooth water effect, bring a tripod and also, check your shots to make sure nothing is going badly sideways. There was no need to shoot blind the whole day only to be disappointed by everything at the end of the day. 

Yeah, being able to shoot all the way down to f/1.4 and still use fill was great. Also great though, not the flexibility in balancing against ambient. It was bright Spanish sun but with subjects mostly in patches of shade. Really helped keep the sun spots from blowing out.


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Do NOT put it in remote mode. That's for using Nikon's wireless flash system, which isn't what you're doing. 

Layers are great. But even with layers, I find masking out an irregular background when you have human beings in the foreground to be a time consuming PITA with no guarantee of a good result. Makes me wish to go whole hog, shoot again against chroma green and just completely fake the background or destroy all the lenses in the world that stop down farther than f/2.


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I just broke back into the cheap wireless flash trigger world with the purchase of a kit identical but under a different brand to this four pack. I've had a few days to try them out, and the experience has been illuminating in regard to the relative advantages of Nikon AWS compared to really cheap radio for me.

 

The primary reason I decided to buy the triggers was to more economically expand beyond two wireless flashes and for that purpose, you can't argue with 23€ for a four pack. I already own non-wireless capable flashes, and it's gratifying to get them back in action. I was in minutes shooting with three flashes and the full manual experience, while fraught with trial and error, didn't take as long to adapt to as I thought. However, a couple sessions made it clear that a shortcoming of a totally dumb flash trigger is that the flash goes into sleep mode and the next time you take a shot, the flash wakes up but doesn't fire. 

 

Upon loading them into the computer, more problems emerged.

 

Long story short, cheapie radio triggers can have a slight firing delay. In many circumstances this isn't an issue, unless you're trying to shoot at max flash sync speed like I was, at which point you can get a bit of shutter blackout at the edge of the frame. I found I got the problem at 1/250th but it mostly disappeared at 1/200th. Was not totally consistent even at the same shutter speed. A little googling turned up the suggestion of changing channels, which I did and I found one channel that seemed to nearly eliminate the blackout at 1/250th. 

 

All that said, for 23€ I'm happy with what I got despite losing a number of shots to the learning process. I now have the option to field four wireless flashes for a very minimal investment, but I think I shall be switching between radio and Nikon AWS.

 

My experience with Nikon AWS was mostly pretty good, save for some failures to trigger (mostly my SB600) and a lot of exposure inconsistency and just plain underexposure when I bounced the flashes. The later was really the bigger problem, but I realized (slightly late) that there's nothing to stop me from shutting off iTTL and just manually adjusting flash power from the camera. I did that for the first time today, and found that since I was free of the sleeping flash problem, it was a much more suitable setup for chasing my kids around. 

 

In conclusion, cheap radio triggers are a very good budget option for the budding photographer who wants to primarily do studio-type work, but it has serious shortcomings for candid photography. I don't know if higher end radio triggers are free of these issues.

An option, yes. I'm just taking issue with the "easy" part. It's easy to apply the gaussian blur, yes, but not at all easy to mask with sufficient precision so your picture doesn't end up looking like a dumpster fire. 

I'm going to disagree a bit with Ron on how easy to it is to add background blur in post. This depends completely on the nature of your background and your subject, particularly how their hair is. Unless you can get a very, very clean selection around your subject, the artificial blur is going to look like just that: extremely artificial.

I know the Strobist blog well. I've read it at least three times. Probably will read it a fourth now that I'm finally coming around the author's way of doing things (all manual flash).

 

My only real problems with Nikon AWS has been some failures to fire and inconsistency in metering. The real motivation to go to radio triggers is budget, as I've got older flashes I can get into the action if I'm willing to go manual, which I totally am now. Just a couple months has changed my mind on the relative need of having iTTL metering for my off-camera flashes. I'm finding my bigger problem is just getting enough light and since I don't have the money, space or right lifestyle for studio strobes, the next best thing is just ganging more flashes together. 

 

The 4-trigger radio kit arrived today. I already have an old SB-15 I can get into the mix and a funny little single-AA Osram that my wife had from her film days I can mess around with. Asking my sister to bring a couple Vivitar 285hv's from my mom's which combined with the SB-15, SB600 and YN568 will bring up to five 4AA-cell lights. Should be more than enough light for anything indoors. 

OK, money where my mouth is. I pulled the trigger on a four pack of "Andoer" wireless triggers for 23€. All I need is for them to work, so fingers crossed.

 

I got a great shot of my daughter dancing this afternoon with two flashes places on the ground and pointed upward. Very motivated to push on with the creative lighting and a set of triggers will let me bring more flashes into play than I'd otherwise be able to afford if I had to stick completely with Nikon AWS.

Thanks for the rec, but I’m living in Spain so haven’t got affordable access to the US market.

This whole question is proving much more of a quandary than I expected. I think I might just buy the cheapest thing Amazon.es has and accept the risks. Really can’t shell out much but the more I try to use off camera flash, the more I’m becoming convinced I could use more lights and the most economical way is to hook up cheap radio triggers to existing flashes.


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