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brainiac
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Yohan Pamudji wrote:
Do you leave the hoods off your lenses...
Yes, because incidental flare is seldom a problem when you are shooting with on-camera flash. You are a photographer. You should know that.
> and never shoot at wider angles?
Canon makes a wide variety of wideangle lenses which work fine with a built-in flash. There are the 20mm, 24mm f2.8, 28mm f2.8, 28mm f1.8, 35mm f2. Other lens makers like Sigma also make a wide variety of compact wideangles. Built-in flash also works fine with most Canon standard and long lenses. Canon's macro flash unit does not work with a wide range of Canon lenses. Canon's macro lenses do not work well at close range with the 580 flash. When shooting with a 500 f4, Canon's 580 flashes aren't powerful enough to illuminate distant subjects. Clearly they should scrap all those products.
> Because no camera I've ever used with a pop-up flash has been able to clear the wider angles (casts a curved shadow toward the bottom of the pic), especially with a lens hood on. I HAVE TO use a flash with more vertical clearance to fix that.
No - you could use a more compact lens, since you don't need a wide aperture when using flash.
> And as far as shadows caused by a flash that is some distance away from the lens, that's actually much more attractive and interesting than flash straight-on from the lens axis that wash out all depth. Shadows aren't your enemies--they're your friends. You just have to know how to control them. Shadows too harsh? Use a flash modifier to soften them.
Again - this comes down to your personal preference. None of the light modifiers I have used make any difference, apart from the micro-apollo, but even that has little effect at 10 feet. When you go back stage at the fashion shows you notice many beauty photographers have constructed their own weird cardboard light-spreading devices which are huge, fragile, and cumbersome, because none of the commercially available diffusers makes the slightest difference. Bounce is unreliable, and therefore unprofessional. Modifiers like omni-bounce massively drain batteries, increase recycle times, and do practically nothing to ensure that incident light subtends a significatly larger angle at the incident surface (face), so they fail, completely, to modify the light quality in a beneficial way. The flash unit remains, to all intents and purposes, a point source of light. As regards shadow widths, when a woman is wearing a black dress, and you need to shoot portrait orientation, the shadows from a 580 EX add two stone of weight, whereas a pop-up flash only adds a stone. In portrait orientation if your flash is on the left while the subject is facing slightly to the right, a thick black shadow is cast by the nose, which consequently looks bigger, and more 3D. Depending on your subject, that can be unflattering. Again, this effect is halved when using a pop-up flash. If there are multiple people in the picture, all facing in slightly different directions, which is common, then at least some of them will have ugly black shadows across their faces. Bulb to lens-axis distance is the crucial factor in attenuating this ugly effect. Many fashion and beauty photographers use a variety of ring flash arrangements, cumbersome though they are, to get around this problem.
> I won't go so far as to say that everybody would be better off without the pop-up flash, but I don't find much utility in it
...so nobody else should be allowed it?
> ...(and also admittedly look rather skeptically at pros who do, especially for work. Personal stuff is up to you, but paid work should look better than what a pop-up flash can deliver.)
That depends what the paid work is. If you shoot social for magazines, or weddings, then you don't have time to set up studio lights for every shot. You have to move around, and shoot with no delays. Be as skeptical as you like, but many pros have to shoot this kind of stuff often. Sure, we're not artists like you, but we have to pay the bills and will use whatever equipment does the best job. Right now the D700 has a crucial advantage in close range social stuff: slighter shadows.
>...and would prefer Canon put the cost of the flash toward something more useful to me like weather sealing and/or 100% viewfinder. That's the downside--Canon are very, very price-conscious in deciding which features to put in, so if removing a pop-up flash makes room for weather sealing gaskets I'm all for it.
Canon's prices have nothing to do with the cost of supplying a weather-proof pop-up flash. The 1000D, D700 and D300 illustrate that. The fact that the cost of a 5D in Europe is about twice its US cost should tell you that what you are saying about Canon pricing is tosh. Canon, like every other manufacturer, sets its prices to what the market will bear. Manufacture of the goods themselves costs a small fraction of the retail price. The $670 1000D illustrates that the cost of pop-up flash, contrary to what you say about Canon's feature/price sensitivity, is negligible. Canon could include a weather sealed pop-up flash and a 100% viewfinder at little or no increase of the retail price, but probably won't because a significant number of the photographers who buy this camera are more concerned about posing as professionals than getting the most out of useful features.
Nikon's D700 and D300 render this argument obsolete. Serious weather-sealed affordable cameras can have built-in flash, and there's absolutely no reason why they shouldn't except for a strange kind of snobbery amongst a certain class of photographer, who is worried about not looking professional, because she wrongly fears that somebody will notice and care that her camera has a feature that she does not use.
Edited on Sep 06, 2008 at 07:27 AM
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| Sep 06, 2008 at 06:57 AM |
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