Small body, flash too big?

Guy Parsons wrote:

Paulmorgan wrote:

HSS has become a bit of a silly buzz word Guy, its not quite the same as high speed flash.

Another misused term, we get so many. Bokeh is the common one.

From way back last century I understood that any variation of name to do with high speed flash was meant to mean the camera in high speed focal plane shutter settings and the flash able to do that stream of pulses to cover the slit transit time. Or use an in-lens leaf shutter and avoid that nonsense. Various names like HSS, FP all meant the same to me.

I have all the bits at hand and an oscilloscope USB plugin so one day will get around to seeing how many pulses are used by various Olympus flashes to get FP flash. Previously I have looked at RC control signals but never bothered to analyse what the coding is all about.

An aside to all this is for people who use RC mode and have problems with the master trigger flash interfering in the image. Set the flash to HSS/FP mode for RC and use 1/125 and faster (with Olympus) and then FP mode is enabled and the master trigger flash pulse happens before the shutter opens so no interference in the image.

Lower the flash output and you get a gain in flash speed (quicker duration), higher shutter speed is not quite so important, lots of birders use flash extender so they don`t need to set the flash at full power for increased range as well.

Yes, up close the flash could only last for say 1/50,000 sec with some flashes, check any flash specs to see that. My little FL300R specs say it ranges from 1/500 sec to 1/20,000 sec, also my old FL-50 specs ranges also from 1/500 to 1/20,000 sec.

Lots of info here, for those interested, but I guess your a bit like me Guy and already know all this stuff.

http://www.digitalbirdphotography.com/7.7.html

That's a good page and would be of help to the OP.

Sort of grew up with flash but it sure was a pain with film and manual flashes as it took maybe 2 weeks to find out your settings were messed up. Way way easier with digital as instant feedback of errors lessens embarrassment, TTL is easy but so is manual flash with digital after a few test shots.

Regards...... Guy

Its all so easy now, back then no auto zoom functions built into head, much slower recycle times and dodgy pc connectors and leads that would keep falling out or fail in some way lol.