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Dragging the Shutter and High Speed Sync

Lesson 14 from: FAST CLASS: Understanding Light

Mark Wallace

Dragging the Shutter and High Speed Sync

Lesson 14 from: FAST CLASS: Understanding Light

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

14. Dragging the Shutter and High Speed Sync

Next Lesson: Light Metering

Lesson Info

Dragging the Shutter and High Speed Sync

using a slow shutter speed. You can do this to balance ambient light or for special effects. And there's something else I want to talk to you about. And it's called rear curtain Sink. And so the wait to see this is very, very easy. So I've got a couple of pictures here, and I did this outside, um, in Phoenix one night. So when you're when your, um, curtains open in your shutter, normally the first curtain opens. And as soon as it's open, that's when the flash fires, right? So boom, it fires. That's my default. You can also set your flash to fire just before the second curtain closes. So the curtain opens its open for a while and then bone right before the second curtain closes the flash fires. And then it closes. And what this will do when you're dragging the shutter, it will change the way that your light looks, but first curtain sink. Let's say you have a car with bright headlights, and the shutter speed here is slow enough. That we're seeing the car move from here were all the way t...

o here. Okay, so that's the ambient light that we're seeing there, So the curtain opens the flash fires. Pau. In the flash fires, it freezes this car. That car is frozen, but the shutter is still open and the car continues to move. And so we get these streaks of light from the headlight, all right? And it looks fine when you have headlights on because it looks like the light is shining out from the headlights. The second thing that you could do rear curtain, sink or second curtain sink. What happens is the shutter opens and the car is moving or and it's creating these blurry lights. And then right before the second curtain closes, how the flash fires and it freezes the car over here. And so we have lights that are trailing. So if we had this at first curtain sink, what would happen is we would have a car here, and all these lights would be on the car itself. So you can control basically when that frees happens of a person or a car or a sports person or whatever, and so it's sort of fun. So one of the things that I've seen wedding photographers do is they'll use this technique to capture the, um the dance with the father or dancers at a reception, that kind of stuff. And so it's in a low light situation and they will have a slow shutter speed. And let's say father and daughter are dancing and so they're gonna be blurred when they're dancing and hope you don't dance like this, but they dance and eso they're gonna have this blur but right at the last second boom the flash fires. So there's a frozen image of them on top of a blurred background. So on the flash itself, we'll see if I can show everybody here. There's a button that says Sink. When I push that the first thing that shows up his little H that's for high speed sink. The second thing that shows up is a little bunch of little triangles, and that's saying, Rear curtain, think. And so to see this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to slow my shutter down to 1/2 a second and just watch what happens. So you I'll do it a second, so you'll see to flashes. You'll see the first flash that's the pre flash and then in one second will go by and right before the curtain closes, you'll see a second flash. So we're not taking a picture of anything. Just watch what happens and listen. So here it goes. So you see how that happened? If I did First curtain sink, watch what happens. So we're changing. Win the flash fires. It's all we're doing. Okay, so I'm gonna put this on rear curtains sink, and then what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to see what I need to do. So we're gonna do this at 1/5 of a second. And so, Lex, what I want you to do is to stand in front of these lamps and come out just a bit. There we go. Something like that. I'll see if I can focus in the dark. I am. And here we go. I'm gonna do something sort of wacky. All right, so I zoom the lens really fast as I shot this. See, this comes up and here we have all the stuff in the background is being blurred from the zoom of the lens, but lex is still in front of those things. Okay? We need to talk about something else and that is called high speed sink because speed lights or cheaters. So what high speed sink does is it allows you if you're using a speed light to shoot faster than 2/100 of a second? So how does that work? Well, good news. We have a cool video, so let's see if this video will play here. 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 to bursts. When the first curtain opens, the flash begins to fire, and as the curtains moved 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.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Understanding Light Day 1 Presentation
Understanding Light Day 2 Presentation
Understanding Light Day 3 Presentation
Gear List
Zone Lighting Basic Setup

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