Help with hotshoe mounted flash!

Dman

Dman

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I took a few shots at my sons 3rd birthday at the weekend. I usually do studio stuff where I've pretty much mastered the lighting, but this was my first real use of my SB400 as I don't do much else these days.

I started using a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 as it was in a hall and had to bump the ISO up to 800 to get some decent shots without flash, but the D60 isn't great at anything above 400 for my liking so I decided to go for the flash. I didn't realise how hard it would be to get some decent pics that weren't either well over exposed or under exposed. As it was a kids party I had to shoot on the move so the use of a light meter wasn't an option and I really struggled. Changing power on the flash didn't really help, but I just about got away with a few with the flash exposure helping me out. I tried different apertures but it made me realise how hard it is to do a kids party when they're all running around, I needed a fairly quick shutter speed just to get a decent shot.

So where do I start when it comes to mastering a hotshoe mounted flash in those sort of conditions? With these sort of things the subjects are constantly at different distances and requiring varying shutter speeds, so how do people manage it?
 
its a tricky one, I'm not at all familiar with Nikon camera/flash so I can only give you an example of what I do...

As a general kind of rule, a fairly well lit indoor room is around f/4 1/60 at 400 ISO ofc you can tweek that depending on what you need to do blah blah, but I wouldn't go dropping the aperture down to much more when using flash because you wont really need to in my experience.
If your flash works with ttl - just set it to auto and let it expose for the scene to save you messing about all the time, it might not get it right 100%, but you will get a lot more keepers than if your trying to do it all manually :)

try all the different techniques of bouncing off the roof/walls if they are white to avoid nasty direct flash :)

Hopefully this may be in same way helpful to you :)
 
Check out the flash EV+/- level. I find that if it is set at 0 then everything is over exposed! I usually set mine to -0.7 or -1. Give that a try, nothing to lose.
 
cowasaki said:
Check out the flash EV+/- level. I find that if it is set at 0 then everything is over exposed! I usually set mine to -0.7 or -1. Give that a try, nothing to lose.
Click to expand...

:plusone: Yea completely forgot to mention that, I usually have to set my 580ex to -1 EV or it blows highlights
 
Dman, were your using the flash on manual? You have TTL auto flash with that camera and flash don't you? It is by far the best way to get good results in that situation. It will automatically sort out distance problems far more quickly and accurately than you can manually.

Maybe you should also take a look at Flash Exposure Lock which sorts out inherant difficulties with off-centre subjects. And use the flash exposure compensation facility if your results are consistently too light or dark.

You should not be changing the shutter speed to freeze action. The flash is effectively your shutter speed. Unless you are attempting fill-flash by balancing the flash and ambient exposures, the shutter speed should be set on max x-sync (1/200sec on a D60).
 
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