Re: Confused about EX flash bashing...warning soapbox employed
Carl Cherry
wrote:
Lots of recent forum activity has been dedicated to Metz vs Canon.
Metz makes a fine product, but the Canon bashers confuse me.
Hi Cal:
I don't read all of these threads, so forgive me if I'm rehashing all this. First, a bit about me, flashwise. Many years ago I use a Nikkor 45GN lens for flash that adjusted the diaphram as you focused. You used a manual flash and got pretty much perfect photos every time. That was low tech perfection. I switched from Nikon to Canon sometime in the early 1990s. I had been using the fabulous Nikon matrix flash system which allowed all sorts of good things, including the option of using their Nikon branded flashes as one would a Vivitar 283, in the plain old AUTO mode, which sometimes is really the way to go. Don't need it your say? Why should that be Canon's choice and not mine as a photographer. The Canon flash systems never measured up to the results we were getting with Nikons. Ask any Nikon to Canon switcher and they'll all tell you about their sainted SB-24s.
Then there was the whole AFR thing. Canon came up with the crazy scheme that assumed you were never using your flash as a main light an employed their "Automatic Flash Reduction". It made using flash a turkey shoot, because you could never tell when the camera would decide to arbitrarily reduce the flash output. Thank God there was a custom function to turn that off.
Zoom ahead (pardon the pun) to the realm of ETTL. The whole preflash thing has always been a disaster for professional photographers. In the wedding business nothing is a bigger pain than blinks, and the whole preflash thing pretty much assures that you will have one set of closed eyes anytime you photograph a group of 5 or more. I don't care how briefly the preflash fires, or at what interval before the main flash, it's enough time for eyes to react and close.
Now, Canon has linked the preflash to a focus point, so that now you must separately preflash, and you need to do it with the focus point on something neutral in tone before you compose, hold the FEL button, recompose, and then shoot. Aside from the many steps, and the fairly unreliable results, after the preflash, while you recompose your subjects move, turn to chat with their friends or start talking so that when you actually do release the shutter their miouths are open as they form the first few words of "did you take the picture yet?"
The mystery is this. Canon has the best AF system in the world. Using the distance data that the camera already has they could get perfect flash pictures regardless of the reflectivity of the subject's clothing. Flash exposure is about distance, not reflection, and is really pretty simple. It don't get why Nikon made it work so well 15 years ago and Canon is still trying to get it right.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my Canon cameras, all 10 of them. I would put Canon L lenses and some of the plain old primes up against anything for image quality. Their flash system just sucks. It's overthought by engineers, and always limits you to their lastest implementation. You shouldn't need to buy a new set of flashes everytime Canon decides to change it's way of measuring flash. Plain old TTL as it was in the Canon A2 worked as well as anything Canon has tried since.
My solution: Metz.
Tom
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http://www.kachadurian.com