Ken's method will work but it's pretty complicated because he's still
clinging to automation and having to watch out for the situations where
the automation gets out of hand. Take complete control from the
beginning by shutting off all automation and move camera and flash to
manual. Your first settings will be a guess if you don't have a meter
but your digital gives you instant feedback in the way of chimping the
shot and the histogram. Two or three test shots will zero in on the
correct exposure... then just leave it there unless you move to a much
larger or smaller room.
Your choice of a Sunpak 433 is a good one (because it has lots of manual
power settings) but I would not trust the auto mode of any flash over
more than about 10-15 feet. It's really designed for shooting in your
living room with reflective walls and ceiling. Sounds like you were in
a large venue and a pretty fair distance away if you were shooting with
an 80-300 equivalent lens and with a zoom adapter on the flash. Turn
off the auto and go to manual.
Since you're shooting far away from the subject set the ISO to 400 or
however high you think you can go without significant noise. Set the
camera's shutter speed to somewhere between 1/15 and 1/60 in order the
capture some ambient light. Since you're using a long lens which will
amplify the camera shake you'll want to tend toward the higher end on
the shutter speed and and even higher ISO. Even 1/60 second at 300mm
equivalent may give you some apparent motion. Use higher ISOs to
compensate.
Start off (and stay at f/5.6 or higher). Since your 40-150 is not a
constant aperture zoom it will change aperture on you unexpectedly if
you choose f/4 at the short end and then start zooming in. Probably
best to just stay at f/5.6 so you don't get surprised.
Set the flash at half power and try a test shot. What does chimping and
the histogram say? Too bright? Cut the flash power. Too dark? Up the
flash power. Still too dark... oops... already at f/5.6 and can't go
bigger without zooming out. Already at full flash power. The only
alternative is more ISO or move closer. But if you start moving around
any significant distance you will affect the flash exposure distance.
Stay still and zoom instead if you can.
Since you are shooting from far away the angle between the lens,
subject's eyes and the flash head is very small. You're still subject
to red eye if you can't get that flash well off the camera. A good
solution is to get the flash completely off the camera and on to a light
stand somewhere. Trigger it with a cheap Chinese radio slave. Then,
once the light is stationary relative to the climbers, you can move
around without affecting the exposure. Then add a second flash on
another stand to fill the shadows from the first one.
Dr. Flash
Steve & Alicia Goss wrote:
> Hi, Y'all-
> The E-510 has a built in flash, but it's tiny, and I'm getting less than
> stellar results on indoor shots.
>
> Wen using the attached flash I'm getting red eye on a lot of images now.
> I didn't get red eye very often with my OM's, because I used a T32 on a
> bounce grip. Plus, the OM's would control the flash...
>
> At an outing to a rock climbing gym I tried using a Sunpak 433 with a
> zoom adaptor on an E-510 with the 40-150 lens, but the results generally
> went from bad to awful. I didn't get red eye, but it was obvious that
> the camera had no idea that a flash was involved. On some shots people
> have transparent arms because they were moving and the shutter was open
> way too long, and other shots are totally over exposed. One of the
> problems is that the distances to the subjects kept varying; the flash
> was set up in auto mode but was not cutting back enough on its own.
>
> Do I have to go to manual flash calculations (after years of letting OTF
> do it for me), do I need to just crank up the ISO to the maximum and
> forget the flash, do I have to get a flash dedicated to the E series, or
> something else?
>
> Thanks, Steve Goss, Dallas Tx usa
>
>
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