I'm just editing a wedding at the moment, and I've got a shot of a photographer using a flash in broad daylight.
Is this common practice with photographers, as I wouldn't dream of using a camera light when there is so much natural light. I can't even imagine there being much shadow on his subjects faces, as he had already took care to compose them.
Am I missing something?
Is he just being extra careful or baffling people with science?
A modern dedicated flash gun gives the same output every time it fires, but the amount of light is controlled by the flash duration. It can give very short flashes indeed, something in the order of 1/10000th sec, and at these exposure times the amount of light given out is very small.
To the casual onlooker, a 1/800th sec flash looks very like 1/100000th sec, yet the short duration flash can fill in shadows and control the contrast most effectively and invisibly. When I shoot stills at a wedding I use flash for very nearly every shot, as the gun can be set to 'under-expose' so that it adds less fill light than is technically correct.
The high contrast of sunlit scenes is way beyond even the finest of Fovian chips and colour neg's capture ability, so using flash evens up the tonal range and ensures that printing paper is more able to handle the range of contrast. As a side effect it tells the bride when your shutter's fired, and if either of them don't see the flash, you know you've caught a blink and need to fire off another frame in that pose.
tom.
TVC it's very common, they face the couple/group into the sun to get back light then use the flash to fill in. Sometimes they will use those white reflectors to achieve the same thing only with softer light. That’s why they go right up to the couple to get the light reading.
We would have up our iris up two notches to (AKA Back light) to illuminate the subjects, thus bleeding the background, but at least you can see the people. Normally this can happen during the speeches, when the top table is in front of a large window, I will use a light then to fill in the front and stop excessive bleeding of the background.
Thanks guys.
I know it was something I didn't really need to know as I don't take photographs, but it was one of those things that got me thinking.
I think they call it 'Fill-in Flash'.