A Scenic World

Or, rather, I figured out how to make the flash fire wirelessly. Whoo-hoo!

First you have to make sure EVERYTHING is right. This means:

• The flash setting on the camera is set to “wireless.” Under the Fn menu, press the down arrow, then press the right arrow twice to get to “W.”
• The flash and camera are set to the same channel. Once you put the camera in wireless mode, the channel will show in the top LCD for a moment. To set the channel on the flash, slide the menu selector thingy on the right side of the flash body to the bottom menu (the white block will now be on the bottom). Press the button that says “Zoom” on the top and “CH.” on the bottom until you get the channel that matches the one on the camera.
• The flash is set to wireless. It’s the setting between “Off” and “On.”
• The flash is set to slave. The button below the “Off/Wireless/On” button toggles between “Master,” “Control,” and “Slave.” More on those settings in a later post.
• The flash is set to SL1. Move the menu selector thingy on the right so that the white box is now on the top. Press and hold the “Light” button. The menu will change to show either SL1 or SL2. To change it, press the “S” inside the dial.
• On-board flash is up:)

The first thing I wanted to do is to make sure that the flash was indeed firing. It was hard to tell with the onboard flash firing at the same time (I had the on-board set to master at this point). Despite Jens’ stern warning, I looked directly into the flash to make sure it worked. It did.

Guess what you can do when you’re holding the flash? You can move it around and cast weird shadows across your face!

One thing I noticed while I was bouncing the flash off different surfaces in my room is that I had to be really careful with how I was lighting my eyes. I’m not sure if it’s because my eyes are pretty light in color, but it’s painfully obvious if they’re not illuminated equally.

So all this time, I’d had the camera set to Av. I went ahead and bumped up the EV to +2 (hey, I’m pale!). The camera chose a shutter speed, and I have to admit, I was happy with what I was getting in my nearly dark room:

But I wanted to see what a photo taken at different shutter speeds (with all else kept equal) would look like. The processing values are the same for all photos (except where noted):

1/180th:

1/13th:

1/5th:

1 second:

Whoa! Let’s tone that exposure down in post-processing, shall we?

Much better! Now, with a 1 second shutter speed, I can finally take the shot I’ve always wanted to take. You know, the one that proves how much I value photography as an art form; the one that will prove how much I’ve grown as a photographer; the one that will indicate my maturity to the world:

And that concludes today’s lesson.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Photography Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.