Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Manual or TTL flash for macro?
Having switched from a manual to a TTL flash for my bug macro work, I do really appreciate the consistency it gives me between shots. I very rarely have to seriously adjust the exposure in post -- or if I do, it's the same adjustment across a series.
Having 2nd curtain sync is great, too. I've definitely gotten shots with visible motion blur that are usable, even pretty good, but where I can tell that I would have junked it using 1st curtain sync. The difference is in 1st curtain sync, the flash makes the exposure and then any motion gets exposed while the shutter is still open, so the blur is actually leading the motion; in 2nd curtain sync, the motion is exposed before the flash fires, so any blur is trailing the motion, like our brains expect. The image with this post is a good example: I've gotten many photos of sweat bees with leading blur that would have looked fine with trailing blur.
TTL flashes can be used as manual flashes, are generally built better, and generally have a better manufacturer's warranty if you get them new. The only real downside is the major price difference, which can be really significant when you're comparing a $40 Yongnuo with a $280 Canon. So the benefits are real and noticeable, but whether they're worth paying $240 for is definitely going to be an individual call.
But my real point here is that there are two things I've noticed lately that may not be obvious to someone considering what kind of flash to buy for shooting insects.
The first is that TTLs fire a pre-flash, which they use to gauge how much light to put out, and then the camera opens the shutter and fires the actual flash pulse. This happens nearly instantly. But some insects, like smaller flies, are actually so fast that they can be startled by the pre-flash and fly away before the actual flash fires -- especially if you're shooting with 2nd curtain sync, where there's an extra 1/250th of a second to react in. Manual flash doesn't have this problem.
The other gotcha is that you can't always tell if your flash is positioned efficiently. On a manual flash, it's obvious if the flash gets out of position, because you start underexposing; if you don't change the setting, it's not going to change itself just because the sensor wants more light. But that's exactly what a TTL flash does.
You might be thinking, "and that's why I want one", but it's not. You want TTL to automatically deal with changes in scene: changes in focal distance as you back away just a bit, changes in the leaves around the subject as they blow in and out of frame, changes in composition as you follow an ant across a white flower, etc. But you want to know the flash is shooting roughly where you want it, somewhere around 1/32nd to 1/8th power, to take advantage of the fastest flash pulse you can. When you start shooting at 1/4, 1/2, full power because you're only catching the subject with the dimmer edge of the flash beam, the exposure is basically slowing down and you start recording a lot more movement. Motion blur becomes very noticeable. On top of that, the flash takes longer to recycle, and it obviously drains the batteries faster.
I get around this by checking every now and then by switching over to manual to see what power level I'm basically firing at. If you've been shooting with a TTL speedlight and you've found some of your bug shots are inexplicably blurry from time to time, this might be the problem.
Neither of those two things are deal breakers for me. In fact, I doubt they'd have affected my decision to get a TTL flash at all if I'd known, since I didn't get it just for insects. They do affect how I use the 430EX II though, so if you're thinking about what flash to get for this kind of photography, consider this an FYI.
Having 2nd curtain sync is great, too. I've definitely gotten shots with visible motion blur that are usable, even pretty good, but where I can tell that I would have junked it using 1st curtain sync. The difference is in 1st curtain sync, the flash makes the exposure and then any motion gets exposed while the shutter is still open, so the blur is actually leading the motion; in 2nd curtain sync, the motion is exposed before the flash fires, so any blur is trailing the motion, like our brains expect. The image with this post is a good example: I've gotten many photos of sweat bees with leading blur that would have looked fine with trailing blur.
TTL flashes can be used as manual flashes, are generally built better, and generally have a better manufacturer's warranty if you get them new. The only real downside is the major price difference, which can be really significant when you're comparing a $40 Yongnuo with a $280 Canon. So the benefits are real and noticeable, but whether they're worth paying $240 for is definitely going to be an individual call.
But my real point here is that there are two things I've noticed lately that may not be obvious to someone considering what kind of flash to buy for shooting insects.
The first is that TTLs fire a pre-flash, which they use to gauge how much light to put out, and then the camera opens the shutter and fires the actual flash pulse. This happens nearly instantly. But some insects, like smaller flies, are actually so fast that they can be startled by the pre-flash and fly away before the actual flash fires -- especially if you're shooting with 2nd curtain sync, where there's an extra 1/250th of a second to react in. Manual flash doesn't have this problem.
The other gotcha is that you can't always tell if your flash is positioned efficiently. On a manual flash, it's obvious if the flash gets out of position, because you start underexposing; if you don't change the setting, it's not going to change itself just because the sensor wants more light. But that's exactly what a TTL flash does.
You might be thinking, "and that's why I want one", but it's not. You want TTL to automatically deal with changes in scene: changes in focal distance as you back away just a bit, changes in the leaves around the subject as they blow in and out of frame, changes in composition as you follow an ant across a white flower, etc. But you want to know the flash is shooting roughly where you want it, somewhere around 1/32nd to 1/8th power, to take advantage of the fastest flash pulse you can. When you start shooting at 1/4, 1/2, full power because you're only catching the subject with the dimmer edge of the flash beam, the exposure is basically slowing down and you start recording a lot more movement. Motion blur becomes very noticeable. On top of that, the flash takes longer to recycle, and it obviously drains the batteries faster.
I get around this by checking every now and then by switching over to manual to see what power level I'm basically firing at. If you've been shooting with a TTL speedlight and you've found some of your bug shots are inexplicably blurry from time to time, this might be the problem.
Neither of those two things are deal breakers for me. In fact, I doubt they'd have affected my decision to get a TTL flash at all if I'd known, since I didn't get it just for insects. They do affect how I use the 430EX II though, so if you're thinking about what flash to get for this kind of photography, consider this an FYI.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Spyder 3 Express with laptop + external monitor
I'm using a Spyder 3 Express from Datacolor for my monitor calibration. I'll probably upgrade the software to Color Eyes when I have some more cash, but for right now the basic software that comes with the puck is good enough. I want accurate color, but I don't think anything I'm doing is that color critical, so "good enough" is good enough.
One problem I ran into was getting it to calibrate the right display. I have a Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (awesome display, by the way), attached to a Vostro 1500 laptop. It's not my ideal workstation computer, but it works pretty well, so like better calibration software, upgrading it isn't my highest priority right now. But the Spyder 3 Express, with the bundled software, only wants to measure the primary display, which it wrongly believes to be the laptop screen instead of the external. No amount of fiddling with display properties would convince it otherwise, but I did figure out how to do it.
Go into Power Options, and change the setting for when the laptop's lid is shut from "Sleep" or whatever it is to "Do Nothing". Then close the laptop, and open the Spyder 3 software -- you only have one display now, so it picks the monitor. Easy as that.
One problem I ran into was getting it to calibrate the right display. I have a Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (awesome display, by the way), attached to a Vostro 1500 laptop. It's not my ideal workstation computer, but it works pretty well, so like better calibration software, upgrading it isn't my highest priority right now. But the Spyder 3 Express, with the bundled software, only wants to measure the primary display, which it wrongly believes to be the laptop screen instead of the external. No amount of fiddling with display properties would convince it otherwise, but I did figure out how to do it.
Go into Power Options, and change the setting for when the laptop's lid is shut from "Sleep" or whatever it is to "Do Nothing". Then close the laptop, and open the Spyder 3 software -- you only have one display now, so it picks the monitor. Easy as that.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Disruption
Originally uploaded by mehampson
I was struck this week with a deep philosophical question. When bad luck occurs, but is canceled out by an equal yet opposite stroke of good luck, how do you rate things overall? Bad, because of the bad luck to begin with? Or good, because as unlikely as a catastrophe is, a catastrophe followed by a miracle is even less so?
I'm kind of inclined to go with the latter. I lucked out. A couple days ago, I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop -- a 320GB 7200 rpm Western Digital to replace an old 120GB 5400 rpm Seagate. It was kind of an impulse buy, since I was getting frustrated with Lightroom and Photoshop being sluggish about loading files and previews, and short of replacing the whole system, there's nothing else left to upgrade. Plus, I haven't really trusted the old drive for a while now -- it's an three-year-old laptop -- so a $60 upgrade seemed like a good idea.
The new drive shipped out on Friday, and by Sunday morning, the old one in the laptop was dead. Totally dead. Not even recognized by the BIOS. Making whhrr--sproing noises. So I'd say that was pretty good timing, and pretty good luck, since I only wound up with two days downtime.
But like everything else, 95% of good luck is good planning. It wouldn't have mattered that I had a replacement in the mail at the moment my drive died if I didn't have everything important backed up. I had stopped keeping anything important on my laptop a few months ago: RAW files were imported directly to my external drive, which had a second copy of nearly all my "data". I keep my OS and applications on one partition, and all my photos, mp3s, documents, etc. on a separate one, to make reinstalls easier -- my external drive has a copy of that second partition. My photos also live on another external drive that I keep at my girlfriend's apartment, in case mine gets struck by a meteorite or something.
The real luck here was having the foresight to prepare for this kind of problem. Whether you're a photographer or not, if you don't have at least one backup solution, get one right now. I've lost some stuff, but nothing I can't recreate or find new copies of. The only hassle really is reinstalling Windows and the big programs I use every day, and that just took an afternoon or so. I don't want to think about where I'd be if I'd lost all my photos from the past few years...
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At the same time as all this, I broke my macro rig. I tried mounting the bracket to a tripod collar to see how well it worked, but the socket on the bracket just rotated in place when I tried to unscrew it. Eventually the whole thing cracked in half when I tried pulling it out. I haven't done much bug stuff lately, except for some natural light work I haven't been thrilled with. (Got some GREAT shots of chive flowers this way, though.)
But I finally got the replacement bracket in the mail, along with a third-party lens hood for the 100mm macro that I'll trim down to work with the extension tubes, and went out and shot the blue solitary bee in the photo above. Still need to do some tweaking to the overall rig, but I'm happy to have found a new bee.