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charlie_merrifi
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 13:57
Im going to be doing some outdoor portraits and wondering how to go about it. i purchased a sigma ef-500 super dg flash unit and I have no idea where to start with it. How should i set it up to use as a fill. I want sky and everything exposed correctly.
egordon99
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 14:02
Quick and dirty outdoor fill flash tutorial -
Basically, if your subject is in shade and the background is bright (ie under a tree) or majorly backlit, fill flash is your friend. Think of those times when you got a properly exposed background, but the subject was almost pitch black.

Put camera into Av mode, metering will set the shutter speed to expose the overall shot (which in the situations that call for fill-flash will generally be the background) based on your selected aperture/ISO.
Make sure flash is set to HSS (in case your shutter speed go faster than 1/200s) and E-TTL. Fire away! The shutter speed/f-stop/ISO will expose the background, and the flash should output enough power to light up the foreground.

Now to control the background exposure, you use exposure compensation on the camera body (which would adjust the shutter speed), to adjust how much fill for the flash exposure, you use Flash exposure compensation. The trick is balancing the two (as it is with indoor work), and that comes with experience/experimentation.
charlie_merrifi
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 15:35
Ok thanks alot. My camera wont allow the flash to use hss. Hopefully it will all work out. Should i do it in tv or manual mode instead?
egordon99
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 15:37
http://www.sigmaphoto.com/flashes/flashes_flashes_details.asp?id=3257

Your flash DOES support HSS, Sigma just calls it FP (or something like that...)

You could use M mode on the camera, but I find Av mode quicker. I never use Tv mode.
charlie_merrifi
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 16:33
I know the flash does but it does not work with my canon xs. It dosent show the symbol in the view finder. My camera is what they call a type b and type a uses the hss
egordon99
12th of June 2009 (Fri), 22:04
You sure your Xs doesn't support HSS?

http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/#aandb

I've done some googling and NOTHING pops up saying that the Xs has ANY limitations in regard to its support for any E-TTL features.

Put your Sigma flash in FP mode, Xs in manual mode, and try to set the shutter to something faster than 1/200s (ie 1/4000s). What happens? It should let you take the picture....