This is an interesting thought, but I get hung up on the fact that the OM2
will establish a flash to ambient light ratio that will exist to be exposed
by any other camera at the same instant. On the other camera, you can adjust
the overall exposure by aperture or film speed, but you still have the same
balance. You still don't get control of that balance at the other camera.
But you can control the balance at the taking camera by calculating the
exposure by filmspeed, guide number and distance. You can reposition the
flash without recalculating in order to intensify or diminish the amount of
light the flash contributes to the scene. But you do all this without TTL.
I don't see how going through the trouble to set up the OM2 as a TTL drone
is any easier/better than calculating exposures, using a flash meter, or
using a non TTL flash setting and counter-adjusting the aperture as needed.
I believe that any of the OM cameras will fire a flash on a PC cord at any
speed of 1/60 or less.
Frankly, the fact that the OM2 in TTL flash mode will keep the shutter open
until it's hunger for light is satisfied, is a negative in my book. I've
lost too many images because the flash was too short and the shutter too
long. For that reason, I've removed the shoe from the OM2 and only use it
for available light shooting, at which it excels, or with manual off camera
flash.
TTL flash is wonderful for portable on-site on-demand flash control built in
to the camera and flash. It's far more reliable that the on flash non TTL
auto modes. At its introduction the OM2 TTL flash was a breakthrough. But
the OM TTL flash system is not designed to support fill flash, so it's all
manual and semi-automated workarounds. But I deal with it as I need to. For
me, I put auto fill flash and its variants in the wonderbrick culture. I
don't need it, and it's not going to lure me away from the system I use.
I really like the thought process here. If someone gets this idea going, I
look forward to hearing about it.
-Mickey
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Bryhn" <thomas.bryhn@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "olympus" <olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 2:04 PM
Subject: [OM] Fill-flash (oh no, not again!)
> Don't worry, I'm not going to start the debate about the F280 again. A
> fellow list member asked me a few days ago about using T flashes with TTL
> at longer speeds than 1/60.
> While thinking about this problem it suddenly occured to me that the flash
> is controlled by the body, integrating light from the flash and the
ambient
> light, and that another body would of course pick up the light as well.
> It's then obvious that one camera can be used to control flash while the
> other makes the "real" exposure. The flash-body don't even have to use
> film, as long as the pressure plate is covered with something 18 0rey.
> This is a rather complicated way to achieve something the OM-2 has done
> perfectly well for decades, but manipulating the ISO-settings of the
> flash-camera would be a very simple way to dial in fill-in-ratios.
> This would of course only work for fairly long exposures where the
> flash-camera could be manually triggered during the exposure of the other
> camera, but I believe two motor drives could be added to ensure correct
> timing of the two cameras. During testing one would probably find that the
> two cameras/MDs have slightly different response time, and the slowest one
> would have to be used for flash control. In an ideal world world the two
> combinations would be exactly matched for speed, and the setup would work
> all the way down to 1/60 sec.
>
> I hope this triggers an interest among the zuikoholics that have a few
> spare bodies and MDs lying around ;-)
> At the moment I can't seem to come up with a situation to put this into
use
> and it's really frustrating to have a perfectly good solution and no
> matching problem. Thoughts and ideas, please?
>
> Thomas Bryhn
>
>
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