News and Views from Dave Wilson

Some Days Are Better Than Others

by on Sep.21, 2009, under Photography

Grass Seed Heads

Grass Seed Heads, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Don’t you just hate it when you go out and think you’ve nailed a huge number of great shots only to discover some fundamental flaw that leaves most of them unusable? I’m happy to say that this is not something I’ve had much experience with. My biggest photographic disaster to date is still the occasion when I dropped my DSLR on the way to the Taj Mahal. Sunday, however, came a close, if somewhat more local, second.

I had met Bernard “BoldPuppy” Ortiz at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for an afternoon of macro photography. The recent rain had really helped things out and there was plenty to shoot including lots of interesting insects and spiders. I had had good success with flash on my last couple of trips so I slapped an SB-600 onto my hotshoe and shot happily for a couple of hours in aperture priority mode stopped down to f22. The pictures looked fine on the LCD but it was rather bright and difficult to see so I only noticed the problem when I got home.

Despite the D90 having a flash sync speed of 1/200, I had been shooting at 1/60 all day, which meant that my f22 exposure was only 2 stops below the ambient light exposure without the flash. As a result, most of my images showed serious ghosting and blur. In the past I had been using off camera flash and had been careful to set things up to use high speed sync so this wasn’t a problem. On camera, however, I had been too busy shooting to spend the time to check what settings the camera was using and, more importantly, what the ambient exposure would be to give me an idea of how much the flash would isolate the foreground.

As a result of all this, I got 5 images I am happy with out of the 100 or so that I took. I would normally expect a macro hit ratio of around 10% to 20%. Of these 5, most were taken with off camera flash (using CLS and triggering using the on-camera pop-up). This is my favourite of the bunch. It was shot with the Tamron 90mm Macro lens. I had an SB-600 on a Gorillapod underneath the plant firing upwards to provide the backlight and used the camera pop-up to provide a little fill. This was also shot at 1/60 but I expect the wind was kind to me as I pressed the shutter release since there isn’t any appreciable ghosting here.

Lessons for the day – pay attention to what the camera is doing and take a few minutes to do a sanity check before diving in.

2 Comments for this entry

  • AxMstrLP
    September 22nd, 2009 on Sep 22, 09 | 2:11 pm

    The blurring/trails could have been a cool effect. Were you using second curtain by any chance?

    Reply
  • Dave Wilson
    September 22nd, 2009 on Sep 22, 09 | 3:53 pm

    They could have been cool if intentional. I was rather hoping for some sharp pictures of insects. I wasn’t using rear curtain sync (after the first couple of shots when I realised that I had left that turned on too). The problem was the 1/60 second shutter speed and the windy conditions blowing my target around. If you look at Bernard’s shots, he was syncing at 1/250 and the results are a great deal better (than the photos I’ve not posted anywhere :-) ).

    Reply

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