Colour Level 1: Week 5

This week we started by reviewing the first assignment (the views over the city with ambient and artificial light). Everyone's projects were similar, the changes in colour of the sky through the series was interesting to see repeated in everyone's images. One enthusiastic student had photographed 4 separate views (on 4 nights) which was an impressive effort. I thought Steve did a good job of praising everyone's photographs, and giving suggestions to how we could all improve.

We next started with the hands on use of our speedlight flashes. We again discussed the formula used to select the correct distance your flash needs to be from your subject assuming it is either off the camera or in Manual mode.

D = GN/F

The importance of knowing your _real_ guide number of your flash is important here. I have a 580EX so have attemped a guide number test but came out with something around 44 or so, but did find the whole exercise pretty subjective, so am looking online. Supposedly Canon say the guide no. is 58 but this is unlikely to be true. From this site, it seems like the guide no. at ISO 100, 50mm is 43, which is very close to the 44 that my guide no. test came out with. We are discussing this more next week at class.

We then discussed what white balance to use when using flash. When sources of light are mixed, we need to use the 'dominant' light source. In a room of fluro lights, it seemed that we should use fluro as our setting, but this gives a very strong blue cast to the photos, so we need to use flash (or manual K=6000) as our white balance to give a more accurate colour. We could even use K=6200 to slightly warm the image.

We tried taking some photos, and found that with ETTL in the small room the flash was too strong. We needed to go down to -2 or -3 stops Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) in order to produce a photo which didn't look obviously 'flashed'.

Then we briefly went downstairs to the studio to take some more photos, some of which I include below as test shots. The first is using the flash pointing straight at the subject, with FEC = 0. A reasonable image, but flash is obviously used.



The second is with the flash still pointing at the subject, with FEC = -1. Here the flash is less obvious, and it is a better photograph.



The third image I'm showing here is a pseudo window lit portrait, created by flashing the subject via the wall - with the flash head pointing at an angle to the wall to throw the light on the subject on the side. This adds some nice shadows on his face, and though is a little obvious in this image, is an improved and more interesting photo than the previous ones.



It was great to get into the flash and immediately I feel more confident about using flash more in my photography.