Technical Notes: With more time on my hands, wanted to work out some stuff in harsher lighting conditions, should I be faced with them on a gig again or just some time crucial shoot. Purposely didn’t use the Nikon CLS system, just wanted to drive manual this time. Photo is deceiving because the sun was out in full force, with some extreme backlighting. 24-105mm f/4 on the Canon and PW’ed bare SB800. “Simulated” ISO 50 on the 5D mk II is the only ISO setting I’ve found without the garish pattern color noise. It’s in there even at native ISO 100 in a RAW, especially if NR isn’t enabled. A shame really, as it shows up in dark hair and shadow areas. But I’ll take it over the color noise in the underexposed SD14 strobist shots any day (which are so bad, I don’t even want to post them).
If you shoot natural light in this tough situation you can rarely have it both ways, that is, both subject and background exposed. The Nikons have mostly always metered conservatively in Matrix and (P)rogram mode, meaning you’ll most often times get silhouetted figures in situations like this. This image is what I got out of messing with the RAW file.
I’ve noticed f/4 on FF digital has a subject and background separation similar to f/2.8 on crop cameras. Which can be good or bad depending on which side you’re looking from. For those that like pin sharp photos and large depth of field/focus, sometimes there’s no need to “upgrade” from crop sensor cameras if you combine them with the the right lenses.
85mm f/1.4 just shooting through some daisies. I mostly shoot the lens at f/2, which even Nikon thinks is the optimum aperture in non nighttime scenes.
These shots are from my normal Nikon wireless iTTL CLS setup.
Strobist info: cute girls acting as voice activated light stands. 🙂 My favorite image of the day. Very much like film, in terms of color and the carefree people in the background.
