December 2010

For the most part working outside during the day I can use natural light. I am not a fan of flash photography. But there comes a time and a place for flash. Flash can be a creative tool. Example of this are two pictures from above, both taken about 10 seconds apart. Dave S. joined me for a day of steelhead fishing, and if you steelhead fish you know early morning can be good. Well we started at 8am this past week, still a low light situation. As luck would have it on our second or third cast of the day, a playful 5-6 pound hen was twisting, turning, jumping, and running through the run we were fishing. Dave made quick work and the fish was in the net.

Now comes the fun part of photography. How to take a picture with little to no light, and not have a blurry photo. Blurry photo because my shutter speed has to be longer with limited light, and since I shoot freehand when guiding, not much time to set up a tripod. The bottom picture I had to get my ISO up to 1600 to get any-sort of picture, but quickly taking the pic and looking into the LCD I was not happy. My natural light limited and my ISO was really not high enough, but was max out on the camera. I just was not pulling out the chrome nature of the fish. While I only currently have a pop up flash on my Canon 40d, (currently saving my pennies for the Canon Speedlite 580ex II) I switched to ISO 400 and shot a quick pic with the pop flash. Much better.

While I still like using natural light as much as possible, I also want to get better at the art of flash photography. Hope to show more examples of this in future posts. I recently took a class in TC at the college, about using flash. Can’t wait to get the Speedlite, pretty amazing how the two (camera body and external flash) work together understanding ISO and shutter speed. Gotta love technology.