Exposed For The Shadows

And, I have to take some of it back. Some of what I said about the new TTL exposure flashes, specifically, my new Nikon SB-600. I shot the wedding this afternoon. I shot the pre-ceremony and post-ceremony group shots with one of my old Vivitar 283s using this setup which allows me to rotate the camera from horizontal to vertical while keeping the flash at the top. The flash is connected to the camera with an SC-17 hot shoe cable. The camera was set on manual and I could control the shutter speed to provide a proper exposure for the stained glass windows in the background while the flash gave perfect exposures to the bridal party in the foreground. Here’s a sample. I didn’t even need to adjust levels in photoshop for this…it’s right out of the camera except for some minor cropping:

Then I went to the reception and switched to the SB-600 directly on the camera’s hot shoe. I used a Sto-Fen diffuser on the flash for all the photos at the reception, sometimes direct and sometimes tilted up for bounce. The value of the TTL flash setup in that situation, which involved moving from a dark indoor hall to a sunlit outdoor deck to an enclosed tent, was immediately obvious. I could just leave the whole setup on Program TTL flash and the exposures were pretty accurate. I did have to use exposure compensation ranging from -.3 to -1 in order to keep the white wedding gown and men’s white shirts from blowing out, but that was easy to do. This would have been a much bigger problem with the 283 and would have required a lot of adjustment as I moved from one situation to another…with some test shots to establish a correct exposure for each scene…it would have taken a lot of time and thought…not things that go well with doing a good job of taking photos of a wedding reception. So I’m pretty happy with the capabilities of that new SB-600 and TTL exposure.