DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Macro flash advice needed

Started 8 months ago | Discussions thread
John K Veteran Member • Posts: 9,870
Re: Macro flash advice needed

c h u n k wrote:

Kev The Doc wrote:

John K wrote:

kli wrote:

PhasmatosOculus wrote:

An amazing Amazon offer came up; Yongnuo YN 560 III flashgun are half price on Amazon. Aware it’s not TTL but by all accounts it seems I’ll be shooting manual with this anyway.

Keep in mind, YN-560 III setup will also be non-HSS. That might be a bigger deal if you're shooting outdoors in sunlight or using a longer lens and need to keep your shutter speed over sync speed of the camera body. (On an R7, flash sync speed is 1/250s).

High Speed Sync (HSS) works by pulsing the flash while the shutter is open to eventually get enough light on the subject for a proper exposure. But each pulse is like a "time slice" and any movement will get recorded. HSS is NOT recommended if you are trying to use the flash to freeze motion, since it will kinda exaggerate it.

To freeze action when using HSS you are back to relying on the shutter speed being short enough to the freeze the action and not the flash itself as John alludes to above.

I dont see HSS used to deal with motion very often. Its typically to fight the sun while using fast apertures > causing a need for fast shutter speed to not blow out ambient. Obv not always the case. In any event, its all but pointless in macro applications because ambient light is almost always drown out by the settings and flash durations are fast enough. The times the sun is excessively hard, causing motion blur in specular highlights, a better solution is shading the subject.

Agreed. It's actually easier to drag the shutter and/or increase the ISO to expose for the background while casting a shadow over the subject so that the flash is the only significant light source on it. If the background is too dark then just putting something behind the subject to reflect the flash back into the camera will do the trick. Both are better options than letting the background go black due to flash fall off, IMHO.

Post (hide subjects) Posted by
kli
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow