Re: Z8 extremely unreliable/inconsistent AF in mildly low light
jlafferty wrote:
“Dark” or black? I’m starting to get confused as I thought we were talking “mildly” low light in this thread. Are you also underexposing?
SCoombs wrote: jlafferty wrote:
I’m going to stand by what I said and your post reveals a misunderstanding. If you walk around taking pictures of people with just ambient, at speeds 1/200th or slower, you cannot rule out motion blur. That’s just a fact. With 40+ editorials under my belt covering movement/dance, I know it’s 1/500th or faster or the images aren’t sharp. You’ll never get an image in focus while you or the subject are moving, or I should say when you get a shape image it’s mostly chance. And when you’re shooting slower than 1/500 (maybe 1/1000) even when the camera confirms focus for you, the time it takes the camera to acquire the subject, and the time the shutter fires, blur can happen.
Now, given all of that, if you’re shooting a low powered flash “for flash duration”, you forfeit any of that benefit if the ambient exposure matches or even closely approaches the strobe’s output. You cannot hope to get sharp images using flash duration, if you’re below 1/500th shutter *and* the strobe is not sufficiently dominating the ambient exposure. Just facts. This is true of any camera and lighting system.
I don't know how to be more clear: for most of the examples I am talking about, when I turn off the flash the image is dark- that is to say, there IS NO ambient light.
For the shots where ambient lighting might be a factor I consider the possibility of blur, but blur from low shutter speed looks very different from blur due to a missed focus.
When using proper settings for flash you're always underexposing - often badly - for the subject under ambient light only. So if my camera is set to get a proper exposure with flash, and I turn the flash off but don't adjust the settings, I get an underexposed image which reveals how much ambient light there will be in the image once flash is turned on.
The evf is set to adjust for ease of viewing, so exposure doesn't matter as regards to focus.
May 01, 2024 at 02:28 PM
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