Posted by COCCO on October 05, 2007 at 07:45:42:
In Reply to: Chicago WNBR and night photography posted by Rvierslug on October 04, 2007 at 14:22:55:
: All my pics were blurry from shooting without a flash. Tarzan, if you are there - can you tell me exactly how you took your pics (camera type, settings, flash, etc). ...
Yes you need a flash. Even a basic flash stuck on the hot-shoe will be good and modern cameras are pretty good at calculating how much of a burst of light is needed.
Continuous shooting can be done. If you are close to a subject and a weak flash exposure is used, the flash will recharge quickly and you can probably do a burst of a few shots before you have to pause for the flash to recharge.
If you get a pro flash with a big battery you can shoot all you want.
If you step back and shoot large wide areas the flash needs to produce a maximum burst of light. Only professional flash units will give any kind of continuous shooting. The flash does have to recharge between exposures and the good ones do it fast.
You should know your flash. You should know:
1) with the flash shooting at max
2) at a given exposure index (ASA)
3) at a given aperture setting (f stop)
at what distance is a subject perfectly exposed.
And you should know things like, the way the brightness of light drops off or increases with distance. A person standing half way to the good exposure point will have 4 times the light needed, or 2 stops over-exposed. A person double the distance away from the good exposure point will be 2 stops under-exposed. (I hope I'm getting this right, it's been ages since I use this information on a daily basis) So a true pro photographer who knows what he/she is doing will have everything on manual on the camera and play with the aperature/subject distance and flash brightness settings while moving around getting shots. How many people, even "pros" can really do this when modern cameras have become so fully automatic? Why let your camera decide things for you? Do you want cameras to take over the world? ;)
Oh there's one more factor and that is shutter speed. Not as critical, because if you have it around 1/100 as it normally would be the light of the flash overpowers everything else. But as so go for a longer exposure, like 1/25 or even 1/4 of a second, the natural light of the dark scene will start to add to the image and probably streak and blur a bit because it is a slow exposure. You can get some interesting effects. Like someone in motion... you can see the blur of the movement but superimposed on that is the perfectly still image exposed by the flash.
Get to know your flash before you go out and shoot something important. Make the process part of you. Understand the numbers. You just need to put in the time and apply yourself. It's very satisfying once you get it.