usher99@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Wondered what people do with bright light where there are harsh shadows with
> OM-2. Do neutral density filters work OK for this problem?? I usually only
> lug around the small T20 flash. With 400 film at max speed of 1/60 there is
> not much leeway. Thanks for any suggestions.
----------------------------------
No matter how you do it you've got to get the exposure to the point
where 1/60th is OK. If you're facing sunny 16 conditons in the
foreground (meaning the main subject) you don't have any choice but to
accept sunny 16.
The first thing to do is dump the ISO 400 stuff. Just use some
Kodachrome 25... oops! Guess they don't make that anymore :-) OK,
let's assume you've got some ISO 100/125 stuff. Even with that you're
already at f/22 in full sun. Even an ND8 only cuts this by 3 stops to
f/8. This is a bit more like it but would be even better if you had ISO
64 film and could open up to f/5.6.
Your next problem is to make your flash punch through this same ND8
filter at one to two stops less exposure. If you were shooting the
camera at f/8 you would want the flash to believe that the camera is at
f/4 or f/5.6. Since the T-20 has normal auto range settings at f/4 and
f/8 I'd choose f/4. This will give you a two stop lesser exposure by
itself and you could adjust the ISO setting on the flash downward to 64
to make only a one stop difference.
This assumes that you're shooting the camera in manual mode at 1/60th
and have the flash in "normal auto" mode vs TTL. John Lind has posted
instructions several times here on doing TTL fill flash but it's all too
complicated for me. I'd rather not give the camera a chance to make the
wrong decision.
In a related condition you may be shooting in the shade with a bright
sunlit background. Here you have to make an ambient light exposure for
the bright background and use flash power to bring the subject up toward
the background brightness. I don't think everyone would agree with me
but, in this case as long as the total sunlit area isn't too large, I
believe it's OK to let the sunlit background be a stop or so overexposed
if you really can't close the gap on brightness range. When looking
from shade into sun I think it's normal for us to expect the background
to be a bit overly bright.
I think I may forever hold onto my Minolta A1 since it can sync with
flash at 1/500th or possibly much faster. It's a great tool for
overcoming these bright sun situations. Some of the Nikon DSLR's go to
1/500th also but this great advantage gets negated by a minimum ISO
setting of 200.
Chuck Norcutt
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