{"id":851,"date":"2007-04-23T04:36:35","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T04:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=851"},"modified":"2015-08-09T08:26:17","modified_gmt":"2015-08-09T08:26:17","slug":"flash-for-the-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=851","title":{"rendered":"Flash For The Win"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I went for a Sony Flash Workshop, with thanks to George of Sony, Ted Adnan<\/a>, one heck of a cool photographer, the two models Joell and Joshua, and thanks to Muzium Telekomunikasi Negara. We learnt how to use the Sony HVL-F56AM strobe flashgun, with techniques to balance ambient light, bounce light, and wireless flash.<\/p>\n

I did not have a HVL-F56AM myself, but I’ve borrowed it from smashpOp<\/a> before for test runs (whose results I have yet to publish, but rest assured I like it very much) and gigs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anyway, one bonus was that at the end of the day, each participant would submit two of their best pictures, and the top 3 would win a prize!<\/p>\n

They showed the pictures on screen, without identifying who did what, and gave some comments.<\/p>\n

Their critique on pictures opened up my eyes quite a bit. Sure, I knew a lot of photographic effects. However, did I apply the effects to the subjects accordingly? I might’ve shot some nice shots, but did I understand why, so I could replicate them?<\/p>\n

Anyway, I had a tough time picking between these four shots (only resized, nothing else done in Photoshop):<\/p>\n


\n18mm F3.5 1\/60 ISO400 with one HVL-F56AM held with my left hand above and slightly to my right (1 O’ clock position) at 17mm with wide diffuser, and one HVL-F56AM pointing at the wall behind, held by smashpOp. Thanks smashpOp!<\/p>\n


\n18mm F14 1\/60 Zone-matching Low-key ISO80 with one HVL-F56AM bounced into an umbrella. Vignetting and light falloff due to Pro Tama 0.7x wide angle converter (giving effectively 18mm without the APS-C crop factor.)<\/p>\n


\nSame exposure data but at F3.5 1\/40s instead. Also used the wide-angle converter and the umbrella. I was hesitant to pick this because other than her hand propping up the circle Warner Brothers style, this shot didn’t pop.<\/p>\n


\n90mm F4 1\/125 Zone-matching Low-key ISO80 with the umbrella. The only lens I have that does 90mm at F4 is the wonderful Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan lens. Okay, so it was more of a bokeh appreciation shot than anything else. I was twiddling about with white balance here so it’s a sickly green; the beercan otherwise gives great color.<\/p>\n

I used Zone-matching Low-key ISO80 because it makes the Sony A100 use ISO80 for least noise, and Low-key mode retains the shadows so I can see more shadow details on my nVidia-driver-calibrated CRT monitor.<\/p>\n

Hi200, or Zone-matching Hi-key ISO200, does the opposite, and prevents highlights from blowing out when the camera processes the curves. Studio shots with a lot of white will benefit from this.<\/p>\n

I picked the first and second shot.<\/p>\n

The second shot won! Frames within frames, Ted said. If the flare was positioned anywhere else it probably wouldn’t be picked.<\/p>\n

I almost picked the beercan ad shot over that one. There’s something off about my shot but I haven’t figured it out… maybe it’s the guy’s face being lit from underneath by a stray HVL-F56AM (we were all using the same channel and were told to turn it off so not to interfere with the umbrella-ed flash.) I’d prefer to make natural-looking flash shots anyway.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And so, I won myself a Sony HDPS-M10 HDD Photo Storage device!<\/p>\n

It’s a 40 Gigabyte portable hard disk for photographers taking long trips or vacations, but don’t want to carry a huge laptop to transfer pictures to each time they fill up their memory cards.<\/p>\n

What’s good about it?<\/p>\n