 Using a flash doesn’t just help light up a dim or dark scene. Using a flash to balance or overpower (yes! overpower) the sun allows the creation of effects all the way from the subtle to the extreme.
You will find some fairly extensive discussions of this technique on sites like David Hobby’s blog. He gives a very good coverage on the topic of balancing flash and sunlight. My first guess at setting the intensity of the speedlites (1/2 and 1/4 respectively) was totally off. Fortunately I didn’t delete the file before I downloaded it. Even thought it was over-exposed by about 4 stops, the effect was actually quite interesting. The sun was bright enough to need an exposure of 1/500s to 1/1000s at f/8 in order to avoid over-exposing the background. An exposure that short is well beyond the sync speed of any DSLR currently on the market – most can only manage maximum flash sync speed of 1/200s or 1/500s. Flash sync at exposures that short are no problem for the Canon Powershot G11, which is what I used for all of these shots. |
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| I am not suggesting that medium format cameras are becoming irrelevant. If you don’t need the phenomenal resolution of a digital medium format camera, or can’t afford one, there are ways, however, to pull off some of the tricks that were the sole domain of the medium format club.
All of the photos shown here were taken using a Powershot G11, Speedlite 580EXII (key) and Speedlite 430EX (fill), using wireless triggers. |
