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High Speed Sync

Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

High Speed Sync

Lesson 5 from: FAST CLASS: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

5. High Speed Sync

Lesson Info

High Speed Sync

so ice, we think, allows us to go past our sync speed barriers that to hundreds of a second. There's a lot of times we need to go faster than that. And so we can. And so let's see how it works. There's another animation, and this is Remember our first curtain and our second curtain. And normally you have that barrier where you have to let the shutter fully open. There's a way to get around that called high speed sinking. Here it is. When your shutter is moving faster than your cameras sync speed, it never fully opens to compensate for this. The flash doesn't just fire once it fires hundreds of small, evenly time. Two firsts. When the first curtain opens, the flash begins to fire, and as the curtains move over the sensor, the flash continues to fire bursts of light to the sensor. These multiple flashes appear is one long burst of light, and we get a perfect exposure. Yeah, perfect exposure every time. That's not true off. So why wouldn't you always leave your camera on high speed sink? ...

That's the thing. Like if If you could just shoot at whatever speed, why don't you just leave it on that well, a couple things. So when that flashes just firing, firing, firing, what happens is it takes your batteries down rapidly So it does that your flash will overheat rapidly because it's flashing, flashing, flashing, flashing and the amount of power that you can get from your flash decreases rapidly. And so if you want to shoot somebody from, let's say, six or eight feet away, or if you're trying to shoot groups where you have a lot of light that you need from your flash. As soon as you turn on high speed sink the amount of light that's able to come out of your flash. Just dives. And so your batteries are going to die faster. You're gonna overheat your flash and you're not gonna get as much. Punch is if you do some other things. So that's why you don't want to put that on high speed sink all the time. But outside in the sun, it's something that's really, really amazing in low light. There's something else that we're gonna show you, not today, but when we turn off all the lights tomorrow, and hopefully if we can do it we're gonna shoot Attn. Night. We're gonna show you this other thing and it's called rear curtain. Sink in. Rear curtain sink is amazing. So remember, when you have the first curtain, as soon as the first curtain is fully open, that's when a flash fire. So first curtain fully opened. Boom. The flash fires on rare curtains thing is different. What happens is if you have a horn honking if you have a, um, continuing dunk if you have your shutter and it opens and it has to stay open for like, let's say, half a second or so so this will open. We're waiting for half a second a second, right before the second curtain begins to close than the flash fires. So you can tell your flash to fire when the first curtain opens. Or you can say wait and and fire at the very end. Why would you do that? Let me show. You have some pictures of cars that will help you out. So this was taking taken at night outside. Um, you shouldn't do this because you can blind people driving, but I did it anyway. So let's let's look at this. This blur here and what's happening. So this was I don't know, about 1/2 2nd exposure, something like that. And this is first curtains to the first curtain. Open room. The flash fired bam. When it fired, it froze this car. It froze the car. Okay, then the flash turned off because it just went on off. But the car keeps moving and the car has lights. So as the car is moving, we get this blur of light. Okay, so it looks as it should look. So that's normally how first curtain sink looks. You can even see. The wheel is blurred, so there's time that's passing. Rear curtain sink does the opposite. So what happens in rear curtain sink is the curtain opens and this car is driving and it's causing all these little lights. Much is to happen. And right before the the curtain of the shutter closes. Pau, this flash fires and it freezes the car over here. And so if we did this picture with first curtain sink, what we would have is a car with a bunch of tail lights going through it. So what we can do is we can control how the blur is and how light falls, either at the beginning or the end of the exposure. So to answer the questions now that we know high speed sink, rear curtain sink, let's now dig into exposure compensation and talk about that stuff. And we'll do that by going through each of our cameras modes. So let me explain how these modes work. Um, and so let's start by talking about aperture priority mode. So on a canon camera, it's the A V on a Nikon Sony and everything else is a I like to call this ambient light priority mood. I'll explain why, when we get into that will also go to shutter priority mode. We're just TV or s. This is actually the best one for low light, which is totally contrary to what most people think you think Not very much light. I should put it in aperture priority mode so I can bring in lots of light. But we're gonna find is this causes big problems. This causes big problems. Ambient Uh, yeah, propriety. Mood causes big problems at night, and then we're gonna do manual mode for control freaks like me because I think that's the way you should do it. Okay, so we're gonna step through each of these things. So let's start with this aperture priority mode. So the very, very first thing Nikon owners change your settings. So these air your settings on an icon. Maikon has this thing. If you go to e bracketing flash flash, shutter speed this right here. So by default, what this is set on is 1/30 of a second are 1/60 of a second. This right here, that's by default. What? Your flash is set to eso. If you're a Nikon owner, you should go into this. And I recommend that either you change it or at least know that it's there and change it to 30 seconds. Let me tell you what this does, Canon Guys, we don't have this. So on a Nikon, if you put your camera and aperture priority mode and it's low light, it will allow the shutter to I'll go all the way down to 30th of a second. Okay, that's what it will do. So it will allow it to go all the way down to 30th of a second. So if you have a flash on it allowed to go 30th of a second, and if you want it to g o slower than that, it won't. Okay, so, um, back to our little keynote here. Um, Nikon people, some of this won't work. Okay, Some of this is not gonna work. Stop bloating, canon people. Not nice. Okay, so some of this is not going to work. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna show you this both of the cannon, and then if we can show results on a Nikon will do that as well. So Sarah's gonna come back out. The first thing we do in aperture priority mode is we're going to set the aperture. Okay, We're gonna set the aperture on our camera then. So, for example, on my camera here, I don't know if I need to show you this, but I'll set my aperture to I'm gonna say 13. It doesn't really matter. It could be whatever. I'm gonna set it to 13. Then the camera is going to set the shutter speed to expose for ambient light. That's what's gonna happen. So we set the I S o the aperture, and then the camera tries to figure out the shutter speed. So let's have you stand right there. That's good. So with no flash at all, I'm gonna go here. I'm gonna meet her on Sarah, not metering on Sarah. And that tells me 1/10 of a second is what we need, which is pretty slow. Okay? Actually, it needs more than that. I have my exposure compensation. I forgot to reset it. So it's telling me we need one full are 1/4 of a second. Very slow. Okay, so we get a blurry picture. So we set the aperture, the camera sets the shutter. The next thing that happens when we have a flash is the ninja thing. Okay, ninja comes out. So I will push this halfway with my flash on when I push this halfway. When I push my shutter release, this pre flash is gonna come out here, is gonna come through the lens, and it's gonna figure out with the proper Phil, it's right here. Did you hear that was still a very, very slow shutter speed because it's trying to fill not only you, but the background as well. Right? So we have that, so we'll show you. This pops up here in a second. So there's the picture that we had there. Now that's gonna work differently if we're at a distance, which I think we've shown. All right, so the other thing is in this this is not good in low light. And the reason it's not good in low light is you can hear this. It slows the shutter down so much that we get these blurs. In fact, I'm going to do this. I'm gonna put this on a really large aperture are small aperture 16. Shake this around. You know, when we show you this, we're going to see that we have camera shake issues, right? We have a camera shake issue because the shutter is going all the way down to 1/4 of a second. I'm gonna flip over to a nightgown. I want to try the same thing with a flash, because if you can throw live, you on again. Guys, this would be great. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put this bracketing flash thing back to where it waas 60th of a second. So why does that exist? Exists for the same reason that we just saw. So I'm gonna put this on aperture Priority Moon. When I put it on the same thing, I think we read about an aperture of about 13 and this is sticking as 60th of a second. So the shutter is falling is saying, Hey, what does it need to be? Got my lens cap on its awesome love that So when I focused this, it's saying, Oh, gosh, there's not enough light But it's not letting the shutter go down any lower than 60th of a second. And the reason for that is watch this. I'm gonna jiggle the cameras second before and look, it were overexposed because I don't have my one of the things you should do is when you rehearse stuff the night before is put it back onto the normal setting. Okay, sorry. So now we'll do that with the flash in man in auto mode. There we go. So that's the can the Nikon version so I can take this. I'm gonna radically shake the camera came radically shaking it. No blur. Okay, Nikon, people, go ahead, gloat. I set you up for that. Go gloat all you want. So what's happening is that that safe? There's a safety net and icons that say you can set where the flash shutter speed is in aperture priority mode. And so we know that if we let the aperture drop is low is it needs to g o for capturing ambient light in something like this. With his really low light, we're going to get blur. Sometimes we want that. And so on a Nikon you can set where that is happening on a cannon or other cameras, you have to just shoot in manual mode.

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