Well, I’m now officially done school. Sort of. I’m done with my portfolio, it’s been handed in. I’m done with classes, they’ve been over for a while. I’m done with paying money, printing pictures, assignments, and all of the other things that I’ve been doing with my life for the past 10 months. What’s the first thing I did after I realized all of this? I took pictures.
I was out in East Sooke, house/dog sitting and I was sitting on the deck eating an apple and there were about 10 hummingbirds buzzing around me constantly. I couldn’t resist. I got out my tripod, flash, syncs, 70-200 and camera and set myself up on the deck.
At first, I couldn’t figure out my sync speed for the camera. I was trying to attempt a very high sync speed by setting the flash to 1/1 and just blasting with my shutter speed in order to stop the motion. This wasn’t working. I had to have a wide open aperture and I just couldn’t keep the little buggers sharp. I dropped the flash power down to around 1/32 or 1/64. Possibly in between those. I also slowed my shutter to the cameras 1/250 sync speed. I was hoping to use the flashes shorter flash duration to freeze the action. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fun to play with it. This way, I was also able to shoot at a smaller aperture so that focusing wasn’t such a pain on the 3″ birds.
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If your flash exposure is 2-3 stops over the ambient you can freeze action on anything. even if that shutter speed is 1/10th it so long as the flash exposure is 2-3 higher the motion will appear frozen.