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High Speed Sync

Lesson 6 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

High Speed Sync

Lesson 6 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

6. High Speed Sync

Next Lesson: High Speed Sync Q&A

Lesson Info

High Speed Sync

So ice we think allows us to go past our sink speed barriers that two hundred of a second there's a lot of times we need to go faster than that and so we can and so let's see how it works. There's another animation and this is, uh, remember our first curtain and our second curtain and normally you have that barrier where you have to let the shutter fully open there's a way to get around that called high speed sync. And here it is when your shutter is moving faster than your cameras sing speed it never fully opens to compensate for this. The flash doesn't just fire once it fires hundreds of small, evenly timeto 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. Yeah, perfect exposure every time that's not true up. So why wouldn't you always leave your camera on high speed? Think that's the...

thing like if if you can just shoot it, whatever speed why, when you just leave it on it? Well, a couple things, so when the flashes just firing, firing, firing, what happens is it takes your battery's down rapidly so it does that your flash will overheat rapidly because it's flashing, flashing, flashing, flashing and the amount of power that you can get from your flash decreases rapidly and so if you want to shoot somebody from let's, say six or eight feet away or if you're trying to shoot groups where you have a lot of light that you need from your flash as soon as you turn on high speed sync the amount of light that's able to come out of your flash just dives and so your batteries are going to die faster you're going to overheat your flash and you're not going to get his much punch it is if you do some other things so that's why you don't want to put that on high speed sync all of the time but outside in the sun it's something that's really, really amazing there's something else though that you can use in low light so really really bright light high speed think is the way to go in low light there's something else that we're going to show you not today but when we turn off all the lights tomorrow and hopefully if we can do it we're going to shoot attn night we're going to show you this other thing and it's called were curtain sink in rare curtain sink is amazing so remember when you have the first curtain as soon as the first curtain is fully open that's when a flash fire so first current fully opened boom the flash fires if you have your shutter and it opens and it has to stay open for like let's say half a second or so so this will open we're waiting for half a second a second right before the second curtain begins to close than the flash fires so you can tell your flash to fire when the first curtain opens or you can say wait and and fire at the very end why would you do that let me show you have some pictures of cars that will help you help so this was taking taken at night outside um you shouldn't do this because you can blind people driving but I did it anyway so let's let's look at this this blur here and what's happening so this was I don't know about a half second exposure something like that this is first currents of the first curtain open through the flash fired bam when it fired it froze this car it froze the car okay then the flash turned off because it just went on off but the car keeps moving the car has lights so as the car is moving we get this a blur of light hey so it looks as it should look so that's normally how first curtain sink looks you can even see the wheel is blurred so there's time that's passing rear currents sink does the opposite so what happens in rear curtain sink is the curtain opens and this car is driving and it's causing all these little light smudges toe happen and right before the, uh, the curtain or the shutter closes powell this flash fires, and it freezes the car over here, and so if we did this picture with first curtains, think what we would have is a car with a bunch of tail lights going through it, so what we can do is we can control how the blur is and how light falls either at the beginning or the end of the exposure, and when we turn on the lights off when we shoot at night, I hope it doesn't rain to show you this. You can just some really, really awesome things, especially if you're like a wedding shooter and you want to do pictures of the bride and the bridegroom dancing and people dancing you can actually show, blur and then freeze everything on top of that blur is really, really interesting. So to answer the questions now that we know high speed sync, rear curtain sink let's now dig into exposure compensation and talk about that stuff, and we'll do that like going through each of our cameras modes, so let me explain how these modes work, um, and so let's start by talking about aperture priority mode so on a canon camera it's the a v on a nikon sony and everything else is a I like to call this ambient light priority mode I'll explain why when we get into that we'll also go to shut her priority mode just tv or s this is actually the best one for low light, which is totally contrary to what most people think you think not very much light I should put it in aperture priority mode so I can bring in lots of light but we're going to find is this causes big problems this causes big problems ambient uh yeah petra party mood causes big problems at night on dh then we're going to dio manual mode for control freaks like me because I think that's the way you should do it here so we're going to step through each of these things so let's start with this aperture priority mud so the very, very first thing nikon owners change your settings ok, so we're going to a live view and I've got a nikon over here I told you you're going to use night cons I told you ok, so if you're a nikon owner, if you go into your menu, we're gonna get a little live you think here it's a work? Yes quips about that excellent ok let's say we get a live view here hopefully I'll be ah, yes so these are your settings on an icon. Maikon has this thing. If you go to e bracketing flash, flash, shutter speed this right here, so by default what this is set on is one thirtieth of a second are one sixteenth of a second. This right here, that's, my default what your flash is set to s so if you're a nikon owner, you should go into this and I recommend that either you change it or at least know that it's there and change it to thirty seconds. Let me tell you what this does, cannon guys, we don't have this so on a nikon. If you put your camera and aperture priority mode and it's low light, it will allow the shutter to go all the way down to thirtieth of a second. Okay, that's, what it will do, so it'll allow it to go all the way down to thirtieth of a second. So if you have a flash on and allowed to go thirtieth of a second, and if you want it to go slower than that, it won't. It'll just stop there so if you're shooting outside and you really want to soak in a lot of light and you think I've got my flash and I wanted to go to two seconds or three seconds to do some of this stuff will show you it won't do it unless you change this ok there's a reason this is there but you have to know that it's there okay is very, very important. Okay, so back to our little keynote here um nikon people some of this won't work okay? Some of this is not gonna work stop gloating cannon people not nice. Ok, so some of this is not going to work so what we're gonna do is we're going to show you this both of the cannon and then if we can show results on a nighttime will do that as well. So sarah's gonna come back out? We've already shown you this. Okay? So oh, by the way nightgown people the d four fixes this so if you have a d for, uh stuff that I'm going to show you it will work the same exact way and so they finally allowed the the shutter exposure priority that on lee do ambient light in the flash exposure on lee to do flash so I think what will happen if I know nikon his future in icons will incorporate that and so the d whatever when it comes out will be this way ok, so we're going to do here is walk through what's happening with our camera in this mode ok, so the first thing we do in aperture priety motives were going to set the aperture okay, we're going to set the aperture on our camera then so for example on my camera here I don't know if I need to show you this, but I'll set my aperture to I'm going to say thirteen it doesn't really matter it could be whatever someone said it to thirteen then the camera is going to set the shutter speed to expose for ambient light that's what's going to happen so we said theis so the aperture and then the camera tries to figure out the shutter speed so let's have you stand right there that's good so with no flash at all I'm going to go here I'm gonna meet her on sarah now metering on sarah and that tells me a tenth of a second is what we need which is pretty slow okay actually needs more than that. I have my exposure compensation I forgot to reset it so it's telling me we need one full are a quarter of a second very slow okay, so we get a blurry picture so we set the aperture the camera sets the shudder the next thing that happens when we have a flash is the ninja thing okay? Ninja comes out so I will push this halfway with my flash on when I push this halfway when I push my shutter release this pre flashes going to come out here he's going to come through the lens and it's going to figure out what the proper phil is it's right here did you hear that was still a very very slow shutter speed because it's trying to fill not only you but the background as well all right, so we have that so that we'll show this pops up here in a second so there's the picture that we had there now that's going to work differently afford a distance which I think we've shown all right, so the other thing is in this this is not good in low light and the reason it's not good in low light is you can hear this it slows the shutter down so much that we get these blurs in fact I'm going to do this I'm gonna put this on a really large aperture are small aperture sixteen shake this around and when we show you this we're going to see that we have camera shake issues right? We have a camera shake issue because the shutter is going all the way down to a quarter of a second I'm going to flip over to a night gone we want to try the same thing with the flash because if you can throw a live, you want again, guys, that would be great. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put this bracketing flash thing back to where it was sixty eighth of a second. So why does that exist exists for the same reason that we just saw someone put this on aperture priority moon when I put it on the same thing, I think we read about an aperture of about thirteen and this is sticking a sixteenth of a second with sugar is falling is saying, hey, what does it need to be got my lens cap on its awesome love that so when I focus this it's saying, oh, gosh, there's not enough light, but it's not letting the shutter go down any lower than sixty eighth of a second, and the reason for that is watch this I'm going to jiggle the camera a second before and look it, we're over exposed because I don't have my one of the things you should do is when you rehearse stuff the night before is put it back onto the normal setting, ok, sorry, so now we'll do that with the flash in man on auto mode, there we go so that's the can, the nikon version so I can take this I'm going to radically shake the camera came radically shaking no blur okay nikon people go ahead gloat I set you up for that go gloat all you want so what's happening is that that say there's a safety net in icons that say you can sit where the flash shutter speed is in aperture priority mode and so we know that if we let the aperture drop is low is it needs to go for capturing ambient light in something like this with his really low light we're going to get blur sometimes we want that and so on a nikon you khun set where that is happening on a cannon or other cameras you have to just shoot in manual mode. So like on people you've got great cameras, you know? You do they're all good they're looking out for you, okay, so go ahead and gloat. I put that in there go ahead and blow tonight come people. Okay, so the quick adjustments are we've gone over these over and over exposure, compensation changes the ambient light it doesn't work with an icon in fact let's try it. I've got a nikon right now we're gonna have you facing this way so we can show it. So come on over here you're going to face me this way, so on a nikon here, what I'm going to do is take a picture with no exposure compensations sixty eighth of a second and see what we get to show this up here due to do so are live view is gonna pop in hopefully in a second, I love live see what pops it. Okay, so we have this. I'm going to take my exposure compensation and I'm going to take that down and see if I get rid of those windows. Okay, so I'm doing that. I'm taking my exposure compensation down by a couple of stops here and it's. Just really not doing much. Here we go. So on this camera to I've got so you can go back and forth here. Yeah, actually, I went the opposite way. Sorry, I took it up. Another thing I love about my conscience if you go left it's more if you go right it's lesson on a can and if you go right it's more on your left, it's less. I went the wrong way. But what we have here is we got mohr light on her and more of the ambient light. And before we had less light on syria and less ambient light. So with the nikon camera, everything moves together. So that's, what exposure compensation doesn't a nikon nikon can in different

Ratings and Reviews

Gary Hook
 

Mark's wealth of knowledge combined with his engaging and 'fun', experimental approach to teaching is a winner. I learned a great deal but what truly reinforces the learning is that he actually shows what he is talking about. He gets a question and quickly sets up the practical demo for the answer. Brilliant. Given that this session took place some time ago ( but by no means diminishishes the tremendous learning value) the lessons and knowledge are based techniques that will stand the test of time; however, if I was advising Mark on his teaching techniques, the main are a of 'focus' would be to be more effective with his demonstrations. He holds the back of the camera up, makes his point quickly and then moves on, just as the video is locking on. Great idea to talk about what button you are pushing, but when your fingers are obscuring the 'learning point' it diminishes the effectiveness of the demo. Overall great course which I will watch parts again and highly recommend it. Thank you PS Give both Kelsey and John and huge hug as they are all-stars making things happen!

Alexander Svishchenkov
 

Great! I'm so thankful to you, CreativeLive, for providing this great opportunity to learn an important subject of photography - Speedlights - from the professional Mark Wallace. He is such a good teacher and explains everything in real-life situations and on slides. As he fires his flash, I instantly see the resulting photo on my screen, so this is theory combined with practice. I'm in fact watching you from Belarus, and it's midnight, so I'm fighting with sleep, but I can't get myself away from the screen. this is my 1st CL experience. I'm very grateful for running a rewatch of the previous Day the following morning, so I woke up and saw what I'd missed. And it's totally free! Thank you so much for a true first-class education!

Aussie David
 

Truly a fabulous class. Mark has such a gift for taking a complex subject and making it so understandable and fun at the same time. Mark is easily one of the best instructors out there. Highly highly highly recommend this class.

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