Lessons

Lesson Info

Flash Button

We're gonna go back to the back side of the camera. There's a little tiny light down there when you take a picture of the light comes on tells you that the camera is writing information to the memory card. Most important thing to know at this point is don't take the memory card out of the camera while that light is on it's kind of like the old dark room light there in their working don't disturb him so that's, why it's there there's an infrared receiver? So if you want to get the little m l l three, which cost about fifteen to twenty bucks, you can fire the camera from the backside without touching the camera so landscape photographers or people working on tripods. This would be a good tool for not vibrating or touching the camera. Well, speaker back there, if you are playing a movie back, you can hear not really loudly, but you can hear a little bit of what you have just recorded the info button we've seen before. Any time you want to get some more information, if you just hit that bu...

tton at any time, let me go ahead and hit it on this camera here right now, they've put a new screen on the back of this camera and it's actually very nice display, they've changed the fonts and it's all very easy to read it's, a different type of technology that they're using, but if you're working on a tripod and you can't see the top of the camera because it's up too high, this is a real easy way to see the exact change is that you're making on the camera and we throw it in a manual mode here, turn it up info, and you can see your appetizers, your shutter speed, including your light meter, porky let's, even that light meter out there, as well as many of the other features on your camera and so well will be using that from time to time with other things as we go forward. Okay, if you are a very observant person, you've probably noticed that there's a couple of green dots on your camera if you press the plus minus exposure, compensation and the s o button simultaneously for two seconds, and then again, you'll reset all the camera settings back to the factory default setting, so you probably don't want to do this, but if somebody's been messing with your camera that's a fastest, easy way to get it back, and if you press the meat oring button and the garbage can button for two seconds, wait a seconds and then press him again for two seconds it reform that's, the memory card and you want to know about that because that will delete all your pictures s oh, it's a quick way of deleting and formatting your cards it's something that nikon has been doing since the first of their digital cameras. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a thing and I'm telling you about it, so be advised, okay, next up were over on the left hand side of the camera. The top button up here is a triple mode button does three different things number one, it pops the flash up and turns it on number two it changes the flash mode and number three does something called exposure compensation. We'll talk about all of these okay, first off flash has a limited distance. If you don't know much about the technicalities of flash, let me just say it falls off pretty darn quickly it's going to illuminate subjects in front of you and things that are really far away, it doesn't have any noticeable impact on in general think about ten feet three meters in front of you is how good it isthe much beyond that, it has difficulty reaching the best use of the built in flash, in my opinion is for a little bit of what's called phil flash, which means just filling in the shadows for people that are nearby and so you can see just a little bit more light is getting into those eye sockets in up in those shadowy areas of the face, out in bright sunlight may not seem like the obvious time to use flash, but that's when you have really harsh shadows and the flash can really fill in those shadows and so it's not the greatest line in the world, but it is the light that is right on the camera it's easily available, and all you need to do is just press the button and pop the flash up works very, very simply in that regard. Now there is a number of different flash modes that you can put the camera in, and you're going to see all these different symbols here and words illustrating what mowed the cameras it and they're pretty obvious for the most part, if you see the lightning bolt, the flash is gonna fire where the flash is not going to fire. If it's got no flash symbol on it, slow indicates that you're going to use a slow shutter speed, which can be both good and bad. It will allow in ambient light from maybe behind your subject s o if you're subject to standing in front of a, say, a cityscape at night. You'll have a slower shutter speed so that you can see the lights of the buildings on the flash will illuminate the subject in front, which could be very good for maybe party indoor scenes or outdoor portrait red eye reduction reduces red eye, and while I do not like red eye, trust me, I don't like red eye. I dislike red eye reduction even more than I hate red eye, and the problem with red eye reduction is that the camera has a light on the front of it that illuminates for about one and a half seconds. And if you ever shoot pictures of kids who have lots of red eye, when you shine a bright light at a kid for one and a half seconds, they get bored and they turn away, and so, by the time you take a picture, they're turning someplace else, and I don't like that delay. I would rather have red eye and fix it later, which is very easy to fix later, and so I like turning off red eye reduction. Rear curtain sink is kind of a little technical thing where the flash matches up not with the front curtain, but with the rear curtain in its synchronization and there's some special effects modes that we don't have time to go into in this class but could be kind of fun to play with. Now the way you change these flash modes is pretty simple first, press the button down to just turn the flash on and then hold the button down and turn the dial in the back of the camera and so you can get to all your different flash modes by doing that now the slightly more complicated third feature of this is flash exposure compensation and in this mode you press down on the button and you turn the front dial and it changes the power of the flash now normally when the flash fires what happens is that the camera the brain the computer figures out how much flash is necessary and there's a technical setting that it goes teo and it does a good job technically aesthetically it seems to overpower people shots in many cases so here's an example of tl flash it stands for through the lens automated flash this is what the camera thinks looks good and from a technical standpoint you can't argue with it. Okay, but from an aesthetic standpoint I would say it's a little too much flash a lot of people want to back off the flash a little bit in power it's bitter toe under do the flash undercook it then overcook okay and so in this case I prefer tt l minus one I don't see a lot of difference with tt l minus two it becomes even more noticeable in other situations in this case, she's wearing a dark sweater and there's, a dark background and the cameras trying to compensate by over bright ning her face, which is clearly too bright here. And as we go down two through tt l minus one, two and three skin tones to me seemed most appropriate around t t l minus two. And so if you do a lot of people photography, you're going to want to tone down that flash a little bit. I would say if you left it at tt l minus one, that might be a good starting point. It depends on the situation, and it depends on your style. It depends on the skin tones of the people that you're shooting it's goingto have a lot of variables, but this is one if you do a lot of people photography and you want to use the built in flash, which I don't recommend for many things, but it's there and it could be quite handy play around with the exposure compensation and you don't want to go to the plus side you want to stay on the minus side. I don't know that I've ever set my camera to tt l plus anything it's just very, very rare, some other just general information about flash, the top shutter speed is one to fiftieth of a second don't be concerned you're not going to make a mistake here you cannot set anything faster when the flash is popped up or if you even have an additional flash at all uh added onto the hot shoe on the camera but that is the limitation of what you can use with flash and remind be reminded once again you're good to about three meters or ten feet yes you khun technically get much beyond this if you set your camera to ah hi s o and perhaps if you have a very fast lens you might be able to get it out to forty or fifty feet but in general it's not going to be very effective much beyond ten twelve feet or so stephen from ballard asked can you briefly talk about the c l s commander mode is the range for the onboard flash similar to those of speed light units like sb nine ten slash sb nine hundred et cetera okay itself everyone else he's jumping ahead and he's getting very excited about the nikon creative lighting system and what it is is it's where papa flashier this flash will trigger other nikon flashes to fire and it does so the way old navy ships communicated by flashing lights at each other and so it has to see this light in order to understand when and how much to fire and so if you had an umbrella stand and an umbrella between it it may or may not see it depending on other walls it's bouncing off and so the distance really varies according to the obstacles and the darkness of the environment it's possible that if you were out on a uh football field in the middle of the night it will be one hundred yards in the air remote flash will see it firing you could have it right next to it and it wouldn't see it it depends on a number of variables and so it's a fun little system I'm going to talk more about this when we get into the menu settings because you have to set this camera up in the menu to be a master slave and its triggering other slaves and in general it's kind of a cool mode to play around with for those who have gotten pretty serious about their flash photography, most people are not satisfied with it because its line of sight and umbrellas soft boxes and things like that can block it and so most people tend not to want to do that and they'll use a radio trigger. The other problem with having this flash in some cases is that it will reflect on your subject or this will be part of the illumination of your subject which they don't want and so it's for some people not for everyone we will talk more about it uh we'll just jump real quickly and just talk about built in flash is versus ad on flashes, so the built in flash you'll hear a lot of serious photographers complain and wine that's a terrible flash it's not so good what's wrong with it. Well, if you had to pick the worst spot in the world to put a flash, it wouldn't be far from where this is. Right now, it might be on the bottom version of the camera, but having it really close to the land's, having it really small in size is a terrible place to have a flash because you end up with these very distinct shadows that you can see here in this example. By adding on a flash, you can get the flash higher up to knock those shadows into a different direction that you may not see shooting a vertical image like this. Then, as the last question just was about off camera flash, here is an example of using the built in flash to fire an off camera flash where you can get much more interesting, softer, better directional lighty. And so if you do want to get better lighting that the person sending the question has the right idea. Get the flash off of the camera if you want to get really good lighting the built in flash it's an emergency it's like the spare tire in your car you know those small spare tires that you get now in cards you don't want to use that as your sole source of getting around and so if you do a lot of flash photography, you want to bump up and get something better so let me address the nikon optional flashes the s p four hundred is their small flash and it's not going to be much different than what you have built into your camera, so I can't say that I highly recommend it the s b r two hundred triggers remote flashes, but your camera will already do it so I can't recommend this flash either they're both gonna work fine it's just I don't think they're worth the money the sb seven hundred is probably the go to flash on this camera it's their intermediate level flash it's going offer ah lot more power than the built in flash it's got the bounce capability so you can bounce it off of low white ceilings as well as walls and it's got some other nice little features to it that make it a good worthwhile flash now the sb seven hundred is going to sell for a little over three hundred bucks, but as I said before the beginning of class I think the night cons are worth a little bit extra money compared to some no name, third market brand flash, I would highly recommend this flash if you are very serious about your flash work. If you need more power if you need special effects, the sb nine ten is their top of the line flash and that one's going to cell for close to five fifty maybe even as much as six hundred dollars, and both the seven hundred and nine ten used for double a batteries. The nine ten is going to be I don't know the exact numbers, but maybe forty percent fifty percent more powerful on it's going to give you a number of special effects modes multi stroke, for instance, not get into that right now, but it's quite helpful. If you were to do professional wedding photography or event photography, the nine ten would be the way to go. For most family type situations, the sb seven hundred would be the way to go with either one of those. What I would highly recommend is thie twenty eight tl remark remote court this enables you to get the flash off the camera, still be one hundred percent automatic ah lot of professionals will add a flash bracket so that they can keep the flash above the lens when they shoot vertical but if you don't want to go to that extreme that's fine, you can just use it as a hand held court, and the court is just long enough that it's about as long as the normal human can stretch their arms from there to there, out to their arms and so it's a very handy cord for getting in unusual angles and works very well from macro photography as well as portrait photography. I don't know if we have any follow up questions on flashes, but I'll just delay for a moment if there's anything, any final things that we need to take care regarding flash because we're just about done totally. We have a few questions coming in about the high speed sync setting I want to buy, one says can he discuss hides high speed sync flash and how do you set the camera to take a advantage of this? May go seven ass on the menu. Customs setting menu bracketing flash settings has a choice for setting the sink speed. Teo one three twenty f p and one to fifty f p doesn't that mean sink speed at one three? Twenty? Okay, so when I told you earlier that the top flashing speed was one to fiftieth of a second, I was lying you okay? I was trying to keep things simple, I was going to tell you later on, but I'll tell you now, the camera technically can trigger at shutter speeds faster than to fiftieth, but you need the correct flash. These nikon flashes seven hundred nine ten will work, and you need to kind of put the camera in a special mode, and the camera fires a slightly different type of flash and it's, not tt l it za manual flash it's not automated. You have to manually start adjusting the power of the flash and setting shutter speeds and apertures mohr critically, because things are going to be different it's a little bit more complicated than we have time to get into if we had a class specifically on the flashes, that is something that we would spend a great deal of time on, but it is something that you will generally do on the flash itself. And so you couldn't set a shutter speed of three twentieth, for instance, but it's not of any real advantage for thos e who not super familiar with flashes when a flash fires it happens super, super, quickly, usually a thousandth of a second, or maybe even a ten thousandth of a second and so let's say, you're shooting a model. In a studio or maybe outside doesn't really matter, and you have your flash at two fiftieth of a second, and you're worried about movement because to fifty if it's fast but it's not that fast. The flash is going to be stopping most of the action, and so most people in studio situations, they're shooting at around one hundred twenty fifth of a second because that's, where their their lights sync up really well and the flash is going to stop the action. And so for general photography with flash one twenty fifth two to fifty if there's going to be fine, it's on ly special effects that you're going to need those special manual faster settings excellent. And then uh oh p photo as well. The sb eight hundred workers well with high speed sync, sb eight hundred, which was the predecessor maybe two generations to the s p nine ten I believe it will, but I haven't tested it and confirmed, I think I used to own and it s p eight hundred, and so I'm just trying to go off of my memory, which is a few years going back now in time, and I'm pretty sure it will because it was the top of the line that's been a feature they've had for quite a while.