I agree with Mickey's suspicions about WalMart's printer process. One-hour
labs don't always do the best at printing photographs with unusual exposure
conditions.
Also:
Take care when photographing groupings of people when using on-camera
flash. You don't want too much depth in the grouping relative to your
distance from the closest person. Light from a point source falls off at
the square of the distance. If the closest person is 6 feet away and the
farthest one is 8.5 feet away (about 1.4X the distance), the farthest one
receives only half as much light (by one whole stop) than the closest one
does. Move the farthest to 12 feet away, and they receive 1/4th the light
(two stops less).
Solution(s)?
Flatten out the grouping and/or move back with a longer lens. This also
helps with depth of field so everyone is in sharp focus. This works by
reducing grouping depth relative to your working distance.
Possible problems doing this?
Moving back farther with a longer lens can leave you with too little flash
power. I try to select a film speed that will let me keep a reasonable
aperture for DOF while nudging the shutter speed indication in the
viewfinder just below 1/60th which will force the flash to fire. In open
shade (beside a building with full sky above) ISO 160 or ISO 200 can
work. In deeper shade (under trees) this can require ISO 400. The T-20
can easily run out of gas with insufficient flash power outdoors at longer
distances. The T-32 has about twice the steam and makes it easier for
doing this sort of thing (GN of 104 versus 66 @ ISO 100 in feet). Having
done this a few times, I've even contemplated getting a Metz with a higher
GN (about 131 @ ISO 100 in feet).
-- John
At 03:25 9/2/01, Mickey wrote:
Don-
My guess is that the bright background fooled the Walmart printer process.
It looks at the negative much like an averaging meter looks at the scene.
The printer probably adjusted for the bright spot, so the foreground came
out dark. You can have them reprint them, paying attention to the proper
exposure. I've seen it a lot. You take the time and effort to expose the
negative correctly, only to have the printer defeat your work. I've also
found that my exposures are on target a lot more than the machine prints
show, as proven by the film scanner.
-Mickey
----- Original Message -----
From: "Don" <dong357@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2001 11:18 PM
Subject: [OM] Another question
[snip]
Now I have another question. I took a some pictures in the shade on a
bright sunny day. I used the OM2S in manual mode with the spot meter on
the faces of the subjects such that it indicated a correct exposure.
There was bright background. When I got the prints back from the processor
(Wal-Mart) the subjects were greatly underexposed. The people in the
background were correctly exposed.
[snip]
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