I'm told by various people involved in adult education (sorry, life long learning) that reflection is integral to the learning process. So I fully intend after each assignment to sit down and think about what I've learned. Whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen of course.I have been taking my flash(es) off camera for some time but I remember that it was a revelation when I first did it and compared the results to the sort of images I was getting when that flash was stuck to the top of the camera.
This time around I've been struck more by the fact that you can totally ignore the ambient light; ISO 100, set the shutter speed to close to the camera's max sync speed (1/200 for my 20D when I'm using cactus v2 radio triggers - the theoretical 1/250 doesn't work well) and a medium aperture (f10-11). It kills both my domestic ambient tungsten lighting and gloomy winter daylight stone cold dead. At those settings my flashes were working comfortably at around 1/16 - 1/32 power when they were unmodified, ungelled, and about 1-1.5m away from the subject. A good headshot or still life set up. Obviously I'd have to allow wider apertures for full body shots or environmental portraits when the flashes have to be further away, else their battery life would diminish rapidly. But the point is I have control over how much ambient light to start with. I know I'll come back to that subject in later assignments.
On a related theme I tried setting the camera's white balance to flash - with the ambient light not a feature the WB was well balanced on that setting. Its only the ambient light/flash light mix that you start to worry about colour balancing and using gels. I turned all the images here to black and white in Aperture software to concentrate on the directional lighting but the original colour images were ok - a nice white light on that WB setting.
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