Studio Lighting - Shutter Speed

[SteveCliff]

Ok, this is probably a very obvious question to people who have done this before, but I've managed to have a play with a friends studio lighting set up (2 x Elinchrom 500 heads)

The guy also had a light meter which I used to give me some idea on how to expose the shot.

I was in a small room (ok, it was my lounge!) and had one head fitted with a softbox with the modelling light on full power and the flash on 1/4. The other head was firing in to a white brolly (no modelling light, 1/4 flash).

I set the light meter for 1/125 and it suggested an aperture of f11. This produced a lovely exposed shot. Great!

Then I got carried away - I decided to try and get a minimum depth of field shot and hit a problem on the shutter speed. As soon as the speed went anything faster than around 1/250, the preview of the shot on the LCD showed that only part of the scene was being captured. The faster the shutter speed, the less of the picture I saw :-(

Does this mean that I am limited to around 1/250 with this set up - or am I thinking completely wrong!
If I am restricted to this, how do other people take photos with faster shutter speeds ?

Please forgive my ignorance on this - I'm really enjoying playing around with everything, but I'm getting very confused too! ;-)

Hints anyone ?

(Sorry, forgot to say that all this was done on my D60 ...)

Cheers,
Steve.

[daveh]

Yes, the D60 has a 1/200th x-sync.

[SteveCliff]

Oh :-(

I was under the impression that you could change a custom function to allow flash sync at faster speeds than 1/200, but I can't find it anywhere!

I think I need a brain transplant - anybody got a spare brain (photographer or brain surgeon model) :-)

Thanks for the info!

[daveh]

By the way you don't adjust your DOF by changing the shutter speed when using a flash. You change the flash power/duration. If you try that flash meter again (assuming you're in a room without a huge amount of ambient light) you'll see that adjusting the shutter over a wide range has no effect at all on the suggested aperture. That's because most flashes fire at around 1/3000 of a second so setting your shutter to 1/500 or 1/5 lets the same amount of light in.

The only problem is that at 1/500th your 2nd shutter curtain is starting to close before the first is all the way open. That's why the flash gets clipped.

[SteveCliff]

Thanks again Dave - I want to try this all out again, but the guy now has the lights set up in his studio rather than my front room, so it's not as easy to play!

I'll speak to him tonight and see if I can pop over for a few hours I think.

Cheers!

[raymond_anthony]

stevecliff...we should talk. it sounds like you and i are at the same stage as far as setting up a studio.