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[OM] Have Sekonic L-508 and T45, will assist

Subject: [OM] Have Sekonic L-508 and T45, will assist
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 20:29:39 -0500
Life is good. I functioned as a VALS tonight. That's a Voice Actuated
Light Stand. Went pretty good. Assisted a photographer friend as we
photographed individual and team photos of cheerleaders.

Being a Canon geek, he wasn't quite so versed on manual exposures and
stuff, so here is how it went.

5D with 70-200/2.8 zoom. Camera-to-subject distance was 10 yards.
Attached to the camera was the T45. I held a radio triggered 580 in an
umbrella from about four yards away and a bit to the side to provide
some nice off-axis fill.

Totally new for him was using a meter to set everything ahead of
time--and it worked!!!

Using the L-508, we metered the ambient, which gave us our background.
We established a desired aperture of F5.6 and for most of the first
series of photos the shutter speed was set to 1/125, later 1/60 as the
sun dropped down lower. (we were in the shade of the stands/pressbox.
The on-camera flash (T45) ended up being set to full-power to
establish full-exposure. To provide off-axis fill, the 580 was set to
1/4 power and I adjusted flash-subject distance per the meter.

It was a real pleasure to nail the exposure (although we were just a
bit hot on the flash, but that's OK as he'll pull the exposure down a
touch during conversion) for ambient (background) on-axis and off-axis
fill with just the meter ahead of time. Chimping was used more for
instruction than for exposure determination. The meter was correct.

In the olden days, the above was "normal", but in this day and age of
computerized ETTL functionality and wireless flashes, it's a lost
skill as it is easier to chimp adjust, chimp adjust, chimp adjust...
and still not quite understand why the nose is casting a shadow. These
results were good stuff.

BTW, glad I had the T45 battery fully charged. We did somewhere around
180 full-power shots and another 100 half-power shots. It slowed down
from 2.5 seconds to 3.0 seconds, so we were into the battery a ways.
Meanwhile we went through almost two full sets of batteries in the 580
at half power.

The beautiful part of all this (besides the photographic subject
matter, of course), was that we had established exposure prior to the
arrival of the first cheerleader. We had a three light-source
configuration all set and adjusted and positioned beforehand. Also, by
locking in everything into manual exposure mode, all images from the
entire set can be processed identically. As the sun went down lower
and lower (causing the background to dim), I would take an occasional
ambiant exposure with the L-508 and let him know to adjust the shutter
speed.

AG
-- 
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