JimH. Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Eyvind Ness wrote:
Thanks for commenting, Jim. I still cannot see any "big problems" anywhere, though
Well, there aren't. It's just that this shot doesn't disprove what I was saying.
Eyvind Ness wrote:
And thanks for the experiment idea. I won't be able to conduct any experiment in the nearest future, though. In a few hours I'm off to the Norwegian mountains, bicycling and taking pictures with my totally inferior, long lens macro rig
Now that sounds like fun! Don't feel that I'm down on your long-lens rig. I do a similar thing with my 70-300 IS and a 250D. And it's pretty handy at times! But I don't expect to get good diffusion or to be able to hand-hold it well without the IS turned on. My comments and original point were just that:
I constantly see people go on and on about how beneficial a long working distance is for macros. But my experience has been that longer working distances impose some very real drawbacks, especially when it comes to applying flash to the shots and hand-holding them. That's all.
Eyvind Ness wrote:
Just a short note: You seem to think that putting the flash in manual ensures shorter flash durations than E-TTL. I believe Fred V has just proven otherwise, ref. the posting at DPR, linked above.
Where did I say that putting the flash into manual ensures shorter flash durations? This is baffling to me. I never stated anything even remotely like that!
I fear that people are being overly confused by my posts, it seems, but I don't see why.
Obviously, for any given set-up, to achieve the same exposure, the exact same flash durations will be required regardless of whether we're in ETTL or Manual.
The point is that *we cannot know* what the power levels were when we shoot in ETTL mode because the camera does not record the power level information for us.
And for some reason, people are seeing the first shot in my series, taken at 1/64th power, and then assuming that all of their real-world shots will be taken at 1/64th power. That's unreasonable, and I never expected people to make that assumption.
What I'm saying is that I *can* achieve very short flash pulses when I manually set the power to 1/64th. But by the same token, I can achieve very long flash pulses if I set the power to (for example) 1/2 or 1/1.
So the question is: What power levels are we actually using when we shoot using various set-ups? The only way to draw any conclusions (from my tests) about the pulse widths we're getting is to know what power levels our shots are using. And I have no way to test this for everyone. We'll all need to do it for ourselves, using the method I outlined above. It's actually very fast to perform this test, and since it's digital, we can just delete the test shots when we're done.
'Eyvind Ness wrote:
Have a nice week-end, John and Jim - I hope you'll able to sneak in some shooting into your scheedules, too
Oh, I'm sure I will.
Thanks, and have a great trip. It should be beautiful!
Edited on Sep 11, 2008 at 01:30 PM
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