Sunday, September 9, 2012

A new toy …

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane …

Lame, I know. Anyway, here is my new toy …


d7000 + tamron 28-75 2.8 @75mm  640iso  f/10  1/250

I have a door that I salvaged from my walk-in closet and put on the main bathroom after cutting new hinge slots to make it open right hand instead of left hand. Yes, I’m very handy :-)

But this door has been sticking form day 1, despite my sanding it over and over on the edges. I finally realized that what I really need is to properly plane it where it touches and went out today to buy a small and inexpensive plane. It’s really quite a lovely piece of kit, all metal and such. Razor sharp blade with fine adjustments using knurled screws etc.

Anyway … regarding the image, which is shot using settings similar to those I used yesterday. I used f/2.8 for the X-S1 after using higher apertures for the previous images. What I ended up with was some strangely hard edges to some shadows which I decided this morning came from the commander flash on the camera … it is not that bright, but it is bright enough to affect an image at f/2.8 from close range. Duh.

So back to f/10, which forces the flashes to work harder, but blocks out ambient light and the commander flash. Leaving a much better image.

Just so you know … in flash photography, you control ambient first. Then you set flash exposure. Ambient is affected by ISO, shutter, and aperture … flash is affected by ISO and aperture. So shutter is your best guarantee to block out excess ambient light.

For really good discussions on these many issues, look at the strobist site …