Ambient and Flash light

Keltic Ice Man

Keltic Ice Man

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Allan
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I've been reading that to get a shot which shows some ambient light behind a subject eg person in a bar, or bride at a reception :D I should use a slower shutter speed, and some examples have shown 1/20. Why is there no camera shake on these pics?

Is it because you raise the Aperture up to compensate on the light?

Thanks

Allan
 
I have also studied this a bit lately as I want to hone my skills here, the reason why you will not see camera shake is most likely because the flash freezes the foreground subject and one is generally less likely to notice movement in a sunset background...:shrug:

Let me know what you find and I will do the same:thumbs:
 
WOW!!

Thanks for that!

:thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs:
 
Keltic Ice Man said:
It was exactly that resource db247 that got me thinking about it

The bottom pic with the skyline behind is done at 1/20th - Why no blur?
Click to expand...

Tripod?:shrug: :thinking:
 
Keltic Ice Man said:
It was exactly that resource db247 that got me thinking about it

The bottom pic with the skyline behind is done at 1/20th - Why no blur?
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced the background is that sharp but it isn't noticeably blurred.. if that makes sense, he played around a bit to get it right and shooting in raw gave him that flexibility. If you get any more articles put em up mate.. cheers
 
That last shot is very nice but there's nothing remarkable about it. He's just metered for the background, and let the flash fire to light up the foreground figures.

At 1/20th second it's likely the camera was on a tripod, but it's also possible that with a wide angle lens of (say) 24mm, with a safe hand holding speed od 1/25th, it could have been hand held. Obviously if the lens was IS it would be even more possible.

The flash duration would have been much shorter than the shutter speed and would freeze the couple's movement. The biggest danger is secondary images from the ambient light after the flash has died, but it's quite usual to ask subjects to keep as still as possible for this type of shot.
 
I use this technique quite a lot to shoot interiors if I want the shot to be warm, i.e. I turn on all the tungsten lighting and meter for that and then hust use the flash for fill. Because I'm normally braced against a door or some such and using the sigma 10-20 at around f5.6 I can normally handhold down to about 1/15 and still keep it sharp enough.

In that shot mentioned above I'd like to see the full size version, best way to assess sharpness. It can be done though.
 
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