The Guild in Action! (Greg and Lee, Sr Shoot)

Guild members (and guests), I wanted to highlight one of the tremendous benefits of our guild--working together. Lee and I went up to Fox Run park on Wednesday at 5:30 to shoot my first paying Sr set. The above shots are super quick edits with no attention to much, so you can see we got some good ones that should pop whith some editing attentions. The lighting was a little mixed, but overall we had some really even (cloud-covered) shooting conditions.

Take home points:
1. When shooting outdoors with a long lense (not bright), make sure you ISO support a high enough shutter speed so your shots are crisp. (ex. I shot with 100, and some of my shutter speeds were below 1/100 of a sec, so it approached the troubled zone for hand-held shooting.

Recommendation: use 400 ISO with a long lense (75-300 4-5.6) to ensure your shutter speeds are quick enough to prevent problematic motion.

2. When shooting with a Speedlight capable of high-speed sync, employ that with your AV mode. The Canon Speedlight limits the shutter speed to 1/200th of a second when shooting in the normal flash mode. This means if you want to open up your lense to create a nice blur and still use your fill, the camera may need to set a higher shutter speed (like 1/1000) to have a correct exposure. I ran into this a few times yesterday. I opened up the aperature to blur, thus bringing in more light for the background exposure. In AV, the camera needed to set a TV of 1/1000, but had to stop at 1/200, which ultimately blew out the whole shot.

Recommendation: use 400 ISO in AV, set the speed light to High Speed Sync and open up the aperature for a nice blur. The camera will set a high TV, but will still be able to give a nice fill.

3. When shooting with Lee Miller, be prepared to have fun!

Time to upgrade some equipment--the only problem is funds. In His time!

Greg