HiroBoroi: I have converted a webcam and a Fujifilm Digital Q1 successfully. A Nikon Coolpix 2200 couldn't turn on after that.


Sony A100 at 50mm F4 1s ISO1600 using Hoya R72 and two polarizers.


Sony A700, 17mm F2.8 0.8s ISO6400 handheld using China-made RM90-equivalent filter.


Sony A700, 50mm F1.4 1/6s ISO6400 handheld using China-made RM90-equivalent filter.


Fujifilm Digital Q1 with Seagull 50mm F1.8 lens. Totally silent as it's an electronic shutter with CMOS sensor.


Same as above setup.


Note the CMOS rolling shutter!


Again, since there was no mechanical shutter...


Fujifilm Digital Q1 with 8mm F3.5 lens from manual-focusing webcam.

SpOOkY: SSS uses less power than in-lens stabilization.

IS/VR/OIS = on before exposure, stabilizing your view. On during exposure also.

SSS/AS = off before exposure, on during exposure only.

Seng_Kiat: There is a Alpha studio at Sony Style, The Curve.

You can only change camera channel on flash when it is mounted on a body.

Yuenzhi: You can go F8-F11 for maximum sharpness on a landscape.

Set your F58 to CTRL or CTRL2 and it's already ready to be triggered. The body should be set to WL Flash.

nabelon: Turn off DRO and make sure your subject is correctly exposed (more often than not, people don't know their pictures are underexposed.)

gizmo_pony: You can do tethered shooting with the A700 and A900. You can also plug the A330/A380 via HDMI to a TV while shooting.



hanafinoor: Tethered shooting is available out of the box - check your manual yo! (I haven't done it myself.)

achew: Nice shots!

lildaredevil906: Hey it's Jerome Kugan! You need a slower shutter speed to let in the background light.

MemorableStudios: 2 slaps only? Congratulations man!

Seng_Kiat:

White lamps, if you mean flourescent, are not white. Flourescent is green.

Tungsten lights are orangy. So when you blend ambient light with flash you will get orange background, white subject.

You will notice this more with the A700 because you can go higher ISOs. Try using a bright lens and pointing at a flourescent light at ISO1600 and fire a few shots - you'll notice that the flourescent light flickers between green and orange (ambient room light without flourescent.)

For flourescent you get slightly warm green background and white subject.

The CZ16-80mm is fussy about filters - best to get a low-profile filter.

This post has been edited by albnok: Aug 18 2009, 12:17 AM

Seng_Kiat: I would go for the Zeiss or B+W filters. Not sure which Hoyas are slim.

Show us a picture with EXIF? No you don't need to change anything. However, there is a difference in how Canon and Sony do flash;

In dimmer lighting, Sony defaults to 1/60s and pumps up the ISO to as high as possible to bring in enough ambient light. Often this means ISO1600 if your Auto ISO is set to 200-1600.

Canon picks a slower shutter speed; however I am not sure what Auto ISO will do. Though, by that I think the Canon would let in a lot of ambient light too. My guess is that Canon's rendition of flourescent is different with AWB.

MemorableStudios: My favorite Creative Style settings are:

Vivid 0 +1 +3 -2 -1

Congratulations on the A900 by the way, enjoy your 24-70mm!

Kul | Mo0: Ah, I remember the technicality - you said no more new lenses right? So a body upgrade, or an old lens, is fine LOL.

Seng_Kiat: Hmmm, that is rather blue. You're on AWB with wireless flash, correct? Your flash is direct, and not bouncing off anything right? Also, what filter are you using on the CZ? Does it have a tint when you put the filter by itself on a white piece of paper?

I am a bit confused as to where the flash is, because it looks like you have one bouncing off the floor (could be bluish marble?) and one from the popup (shadow from the glasses and nose.)

Seng_Kiat: Whoa, that IS weird. I'll try later at home with the exact same settings. I've never gotten that blue, though.

Seng_Kiat: I don't have my F58 with me now, but there are TWO serial numbers - the one under the head is for the flash head. You should turn the flash sideways and look for the serial number on a white sticker with a barcode.

MemorableStudios: I would prefer the B+W because it is scratch proof.

raist86: No, the A700 does not have AF adjustment.

yuenzhi: You must've changed to Spot Metering which meters only everything in the center circle and makes it middle-toned (the black dogs become gray). Change back to Multi-Segment Metering.

Seng_Kiat: I've attempted to replicate your shot:


A900, Minolta 24-105mm F3.5-4.5(D) with Hoya Pro1 Digital MC filter, sRGB, 28mm (have to lah handheld what), F4.5, 1/160s, ISO100, Multi-segment Metering, Manual Mode, EV 0.

Then I tried using my Zeiss in case it's a Zeiss thing:

A900, Carl Zeiss 135mm F1.8 with B+W 007 filter, sRGB, 135mm, F4.5, 1/160s, ISO100, Multi-segment Metering, Manual Exposure, EV 0.

EXIF is also inside for all to see. I can't quite figure out what it is. Does the F58 on the A700 give the same problem in AWB?

hanafinoor: Perhaps you could call them to tell them how much you bought it for? Also, was it under warranty? They have not gotten back to me on registering my F20 either.

Pang: The second picture has an overexposed flash because the flash is 30 cm away from the object and it cannot go low-power enough to light a subject at F4.5 and ISO100 correctly at such close distances. Trying the same shot at F5.6 however nothing gets overexposed.

As for the first shot being warmer - the higher the flash output*, the warmer the flash is. When you plug the F58/F42/F20 on an A200-A900 body, it will tell the body what is the flash temperature based on flash output. Because the flash was off-camera however, it did not pass the WB information.

In the first picture the flash was further away and the camera was at ISO100 thus it needed to output more. Thus it was warmer.

That said, there's nothing wrong with a warmer flash - observe your point-and-shoots and you'll see that the flash unit has a warm color.

Of course, the point of this exercise is not to use manual WB but to use AWB to copy Seng_Kiat's scenario. Read the context!

*output because the term "flash power" is misleading; flashes always fire at full power, just that the duration changes. Unless you have a very expensive professional studio light which is engineered to change power and not just duration so it maintains a very consistent 5500K no matter what output setting.

When the flash is used on an Alpha, AWB automatically goes to Flash WB, which is 5500K unless the flash on top tells the body otherwise.

On an Alpha, AWB does not go down to 3200K when the camera detects tungsten light and flash is used in AWB mode, unlike what you have assumed.

When you set a Canon/Nikon/Sony flash to 1/1, its duration is longer, the temperature is warmer (warmer than 5500K), but the power is the same.

When it is set to 1/32, the duration is shorter, the temperature is cooler (nearer to 5500K), but the power is the same.

This is the same for cheap studio flashes also.

My wall is beige-colored. (And uh, my shirt is not pure white, either.) The monitor in the second picture is beige also, in case you assume that all of these are neutral white. This makes the flash appear even warmer.

My mistake for putting the warmness of the first picture to higher power flash - it is also and primarily attributable to the scene being beige!

Nikon and Canon flashes also have this WB function:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0806/08061001canon430iiex.asp


http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardw...SB600/index.htm


http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores...552921665462455


And more reading:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/disc...57612503115874/



http://www.rpphoto.com/howto/hummer/humguide1.asp



http://photo.net/photography-lighting-equi...es-forum/00S50d


http://www.lowel.com/glossary.html


This post has been edited by albnok: Aug 19 2009, 04:03 AM

The variance between full power and low power flash certainly is not very drastic. You can try it yourself between 1/1 power F22 ISO100 and 1/32 power F4.0 ISO100. I would say it is in 100 Kelvins variance, but this is a good experiment to do with RAW and a custom WB color picker.

I have used off-camera flash in tungsten and flourescent light on the A700. In both cases, the AWB certainly did not go down to tungsten (giving me blue-ish flash) or flourescent (giving me magenta-ish flash). It stayed at Flash WB or 5500K.

Could something be wrong with Seng_Kiat's A700? Maybe.

Flash sync speed depends on the camera shutter. It is determined by how fast the shutter blades can move. Shutter blades travel at a fixed speed.

Flash duration depends on the flash head. You're the audio guy, you know your capacitors lah.

Even though the flash duration for a SB-600 is 1/900s at 1/1 output, your shutter curtains are not fast enough to run from one end of the frame to the other. If you were to hook a SB-600 to a camera via PC Sync or a camera without a Nikon TTL hotshoe, and you shot at 1/900s, you would see a stripe of light! It would be fixed in position relative to the frame.

At shutter speeds slower than the flash sync speed, the first curtain goes up, and the entire frame is exposed, before the second curtain goes up. Thus, one pulse from the flash is enough to light the whole frame.

At shutter speeds faster than the flash sync speed, the first curtain goes up... and the second curtain follows behind it without ever exposing the entire frame. The delay/distance between the first and second curtain is smaller for faster shutter speeds so there is a smaller 'stripe' of the exposed frame at any time.

If you put the SB-600 on a Nikon TTL hotshoe, the camera recognizes that there is a flash attached (and prevents the shutter speed from going faster than the camera's flash sync speed if the flash is in bounce mode) and the flash recognizes that it is attached to a camera. So when the flash is pointed straight, the camera allows HSS, and the flash goes into HSS mode.

The flash, in HSS mode, will fire a few pulses, to 'fill in' the stripes to illuminate a full frame. Because it fires a few pulses its power is reduced.

* HSS = High Speed Sync, same as Canon's FP Flash

If you hooked a SB-600 up to a point-and-shoot which doesn't use a mechanical shutter, shooting at 1/1800s would thus get 1/2 output even though the flash is 1/1 output.

Seng_Kiat: "Ambient&flash" means that when you change EV, your flash EV changes also. "Flash only" means that when you change EV, flash EV does not change.

SpOOkY: AWB will default to Flash WB when the camera knows that a flash was used so there is no need to change to Flash WB.

The SB-600 at 1/1 output, is ON for 1/900th of a second. So if you shot at 1/1800th of a second you would only get half the flash duration effectively making it 1/2 output. It's not like the flash is an instantaneous burst that happens at the end of the 1/900th of a second - it's continuously lit for that 1/900th of a second. SpOOkY has got it right.

This Youtube video might make it clear:



Ah, better diagrams!

http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2008/12/13/max-it-out/

And an animation:

http://www.mhohner.de/essays/myths.php#shutter

SpOOkY: The "exp.comp.set" function in the A100/A700/A900 can switch between "Ambient&flash" or "Flash only".

On the A200-A380 it is "Ambient&flash" by default behavior and there is no option in the menu. On Nikons it is "Flash only" and there is no option (on the D700).

Oops my bad, the SB-600 does allow HSS and bounce (though it is quite pointless because you lose so much power bouncing and using HSS.)

Flash WB is for when you want to fix the WB as 5500K even when there is no flash attached. This retains rich color for stage lighting, for example. With AWB and no flash, it can go down or up.

MemorableStudios: I see you've got the FA-EB1AM battery pack. Congratulations!

This post has been edited by albnok: Aug 19 2009, 12:27 PM

SpOOkY: If the stage has all kinds of colors, and you flash (or don't flash), it will turn out nice. You don't expect to correct red and green light into neutral white - that defeats the purpose of colored lighting, doesn't it?

ah ming: Try now?

ryzan76: Uh... the paper's a bit blueish. Somehow I am not drawn to wanting to buy the shoe... try to naikkan daya tarikan dia.

raist86: A new A700 can go close to RM2999. Try Studio Zaloon in Pudu Plaza.

Killerz622: For Nikkor AF-D lenses you need to set the aperture ring to F22 (or whatever aperture is marked in orange color) to allow the Nikon body to control aperture.

tanjq87: Or rather, the older bodies can have a different finish due to wear and tear. My A900 doesn't look as nice as hanafinoor's!

The grip sensor does lose its shine. Well mine did!

Killerz622: Ah! Well same lah. You don't have to call it a FSLR as SLR already is supposed to mean film SLR while dSLR means digital SLR.

Killerz622: Nonono you set it to the orange mark on a Nikon which can control aperture on-body. On a Nikon FM2 which doesn't have any aperture control on-body you set the aperture on the lens. If you mount it on an Alpha you can open it to F1.8.

hkhk: The A700 body is magnesium alloy; the grip sensor is nickel. I don't know if they have changed it, but it would've been great if they figured out a new metal by the time the A900 came out as I miss my grip sensor and eye-start AF!

Seng_Kiat: I really like how the strap is positioned, such that it travels OUT of the frame. It helps to frame the subject and define the borders which are otherwise invisible.

tanjq87: Yes, the A900 doesn't have a grip sensor (darn nickel-allergic Europeans!), and it does not have Eye Start AF either. There is an eye sensor though to turn off the screen when you are looking through the viewfinder.

MemorableStudios: You got it backwards LOL.

The A700 came first, with grip sensor and eye-sensor. Both these sensors make Eye-Start AF a lot more usable.

Because the grip sensor uses nickel, which is banned in the EU, Sony made the A900 without the grip sensor.

Because there was no grip sensor, Eye-Start AF becomes less usable, because it can be triggered when hanging around your neck like the A100-A380. So Sony just removed that feature from the A900 totally.