Daytime flash question.

AnimalRights

If I had used a flash on this picture would it have highlighted the face better?
I remember a fair while back asking in a thread why did people use flashes during the daytime, maybe this is why?
I found it hard to meter with the bright sky and take pictures in the congested centre of the protest were this picture was taken.

Anouilh

When I take photos of flowers in deep shade, even in daytime, I use flash. This year I'm going to learn how to use it with a more subtle effect. In-camera flash is harsh, but the trick of putting a piece of white tissue over the front softens the effect, it seems.

Anouilh

If you had used flash in your photo, I think you would have lost some of the drama and the background would have paled into a blur?

AnimalRights

I'm not sure....
and regards harsh flash I used the 5DII which has no internal flash so I would have used an external flash.

DaireQuinlan

AnimalRights wrote: »

I'm not sure....
and regards harsh flash I used the 5DII which has no internal flash so I would have used an external flash.

this is exactly the situation that calls for fill flash. In this case it would have been a neccesity, other people use it for a particular look or aesthetic. There are a couple of different ways of doing it as well. you can balance the ambient and fill, or knock a stop or two off the ambient and rely on the fill to emphasis the subject. Start googling on "fill flash" for material, or just cut to the chase and just head over to the strobist and start reading :-)

Ricky91t

Its always good for events like this to have your flash on the camera.Some shots will be fine without it..but other will turn out like this as you can't ask them to move into sunlight..On sunny days a fill in flash is always a must have for a percentage of the shots!

AnimalRights

Yeah Ricky was just thinking that, I took some shots of the protest from across the road, obviously I didn't need fill in flash for that.

Borderfox

It would give a better balance to the shot.

challengemaster

Definatly a situation for fill flash. Just to hilight the face a bit more. (if you dont know what fill flash is, www.google.com)

Actually, a lot of people will use flash to light subjects if you shoot INTO the sun. Can work well if its done right. Creates a kinda dramatic back lighting for the subject.

Definatly take a look at strobist, and the flickr group. Well worth a good read. You'll see flash being used in any condition imaginable!

smelltheglove

I would have used flash with diffuser and dropped the flash, maybe -2 so still soft

melekalikimaka

if ya drop the power I'd prob leave off the diffuser

AnCatDubh

Ok. Lets accept that on O'Connell its ok for fill flash without being shot at (eh..... not normally anyhow) but how about a situation that you don't really want to draw more attention to yourself than is necessary? Lets say you are on the streets of Gaza and you didn't really want to be a *target* for a stray bullet.

Spot metering on the face maybe accepting that you will lose the highlights? Shoot raw with multi segment metering and selectively process the face /body for additional brightness?

AnimalRights

Not sure what you meant but I do shoot raw with spot.
I don't know how to do selective stuff at this time and moment.

AnCatDubh

AnimalRights wrote: »

Not sure what you meant but I do shoot raw with spot.
I don't know how to do selective stuff at this time and moment.

Well I guess RAW will just give a digital negative in lossless format and using post processing you could select an area and just brighten the selected area (perhaps the individual).

Spot metering on the face in theory should leave the face properly exposed at the detriment of everything else not of a brightness similar to the spot. If you were spot metering on the face in the example above i'd have thought the face would have been brighter with burnt areas of brightness and darkness.

smelltheglove

if you want to save this particular photo I recommend you dodge (I think that is the right word) the subject, or is it burn, whichever one lightens, so lighten just the subject and then in curves drop the lights a bit and raise the darks, it gives you a more even picture that doesnt look messed with, I did it to a picture today and worked brilliantly.

pete4130

Hope you don't mind, but this is a 2 min edit in photoshop form the Jpeg and there is enough of a dynamic range to balance it a bit better, so you should be able to do more with the RAW file.

AnimalRights

It's not an important picture to me, it's just knowledge for future shots, while I loved your PP on that landscape from earlier today I'm not mad on this, it looks like ya mans just being plonked into the scene! /edit (actually just checked the original pic and he also looks like he was plonked into the picture too!!)

Anyway I've moved on to wondering how to handle the Zoo bars tommorow and other tips!
Read a few pages and also I believe manual focusing can help too.