Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Daily Post (Josh) 2010-02-25

Not too much going on today, as it happens. I did finally get around to playing with my flashes and Jen's giraffe a bit, for my still life assignment in photography. Professor Becerra loved the results, and to be honest, I'm fairly pleased with what I got, but frustrated at the same time too.
Art 207 - Assignment 7.1 - Still Life - Sinister Giraffe 1Art 207 - Assignment 7.2 - Still Life - Sinister Giraffe 2Art 207 - Assignment 7.3 - Still Life - Sinister Giraffe 3
The primary reason I was frustrated is due to the nature of the two flashes I have, mostly. They're Vivitar thyristor flashes that I got super cheap. They're powerful, but lack a good bit of control. The thyristor bit means that the amount of light they put out is controlled by a sensor on the front of the flash that increases resistance based on the amount of light it senses until it reaches a specific value, which then cuts off the flash. Functionally, this means that the light output of the flash is dependant almost entirely on the surfaces bouncing light back towards the flash, rather than being a specific amount of light (IE 1/4 maximum power, etc). Add to this the fact that both flashes only have 3 settings for these thyristors and you can see it requires a bit of a brute force approach to get anything resembling the light setup you're imagining. Secondary to this is the fact that the light measurement is based on light coming back to the flash, not relative to the camera... not the ideal situation.

This is of course addressed to some extent by modern Canon flashes, which have a much greater granularity, and communicate with the camera to see how much light the camera is actually seeing (thus being described as TTL, or "through the lens" flashes). Unfortunately, getting in on that game would drain at least $150 from my account per flash. Not happening soon.

Ah well; adversity strengthens, yes?

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