Hating On-Camera Flash

It's been well over 6-12 months since I used on-camera flash on the SLR. Tried tonight and remember why I hate it so much... This is the typical deer-in-headlights-all-washed-out-short-shadow-in-the-hair-and-under-the-chin-look you get when your flash is mounted on your camera and pointing straight ahead. Cute kid, bad light. Hate it.



By the way, while I have you here, pretend someone suddenly had access to a 21 megapixel camera, like a Canon 1Ds Mark III. They'd be able to zoom in this much without any pixel loss. And they'd be able to tell that the focus is on her brow and not her eyeball. And they'd be able to see a bit of chromatic aberration in the flash reflected in her eye. And on-camera flash would still suck on such a camera. Hypothetically of course, if one had access to such a camera.



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Aperture and effect on oof lights

Just a quick and dirty little study on effect of aperture size on stuff that is out of focus. Using Canon 5d and 100mm Canon Macro lens, focused on the blue light and varied aperture size from it's most open (f/2.8) all the way to it's most closed -- f/32. I adjusted the shutter speed to maintain a constant exposure in each shot.


[not sure if you email subscribers will see it, but there is a YouTube video here]

Couple of things to note is that the out of focus lights take the shape (and apparently the relative size to some extent!) of the aperture: near round at its most open, and then you can begin to see the edges of the blades as the aperture closes. On my better lenses, a fully open aperture gives a circle instead of an octagon. If you have a lensbaby, you can actually change the shape of the aperture into shapes like slits, stars, and hearts. See the linked examples from earlier this year.

You can't see it too clearly in the video, but I also learned that the sweet spot on this lens is f/11 +/- a stop, the smaller apertures above f/20 yielded really soft photos. Also, though hard to see, there is some weird lens flare with this lens above f/11 -- the full resolution photos show little pinpricks of red light.

Not much to this exercise, but if you have some spare time, is always worthwhile to see how your lenses check out at different apertures....

I was doing some other little tests with this setup this morning, just killing some time. Was also measuring the color temp of the lights -- the Christmas lights in the background are 2200 degree Kelvin, and the blue light in the front is 7500 degrees Kelvin. I set the white balance in the camera to 2800 Kelvin -- the lowest it would go. The lights in the back are still a little reddish -- not a complete white like they would have been at 2200K. Also, not shown, I was playing around with amber gels on the blue light to make it match the background lights.

Another test here is converting .jpgs to a movie file -- these are 22 shots made into a movie -- I have the ability to do some time lapse shots and am starting to try out different movie-making tools. This was done with the Windows Movie Maker that came installed with my Vista machine. Too cumbersome to use, will look for something else down the road... Suggestions welcome.

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Picking up the camera again

I set the camera down the last few weeks to handle some all important money issues. Forced myself to get back into the studio tonight with some paint, Christmas tree lights, and a Kewpie doll.

I think my favorite instructor, Dave Nitsche, is back to pick up these first few classes of 2009. Looking forward to some studio conceptual stuff again...

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Whole Year with a Camera to my Eye

My Eye: Photomosaic of this blog and my photos as I tried to learn this photography thing the past year. 2000x2000 photo that you should be able to zoom in on by clicking on the photo....

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