Metz MZ3 - Auto vs ETTL

Goatee, What mode do you normally shoot in?

I'm lazy, just post your conclusions, that'll be fine for me

Ok Lazy Tim Here's my conclusion. ETTL works more consistant than Auto. Consistant in Color balance and white balance. When on Auto, beige things look white while in ETTL they're the right color.

Handy, ta

I either shoot M or Av, and shoot RAW, so I don't care about white balance.

You will when you have 1000 photos to process all with verying light sources.

I won't, because the colour light produced is consistent - it's just the way the camera sets WB - I batch process in RSP, so I'll set the WB in the first one, and then do the rest automatically. (though if I have thousands, I'll need a couple more computers to speed things up!)

Had a chance for a bit more of a play on the weekend with the 20D (still the M2 adaptor at this stage :cry. But shooting raw, the EXIF works fine on the 20D.

So you're assuming that the camera gives the same autoWB in daylight on, say, a soccerfield as in a nightclub under tungsten? If I were you, I'll test it before you need it ....

No I'm not, I'm saying I don't give two hoots what the camera sets Auto WB to, since I shoot RAW and set WB in RSP- if I take 1000 shots in a wedding hall, then once I've set the white balance for one, I can use it for the other shots. If I was shooting JPG, then yes, it would be a pain in the butt, but I'm not and RSP lets me fix that easily.

In fact I've had very few shots where the auto WB is the optimum colour temperature.

René Damkot wrote:
So you're assuming that the camera gives the same autoWB in daylight on, say, a soccerfield as in a nightclub under tungsten? If I were you, I'll test it before you need it ....

Sorry for the late reply, been out for a while...
I understand you can apply the same WB to all pics, but then lighting circumstances should be the same for all thos pics, wouldn't they. If a few were taken under tungsten, and others under Fluorescent and still others in daylight, they would need different WB, right?

That;s ok You're right, circumstances do change, but I'll go through, work out which ones should have the same WB, and apply WB to them all, and then make any other tweaks I want. I've found it to work pretty well - in RSE and RSP it lets you select which corrections you want to copy and paste to a rang e of images, so it's not a problem if you want to share some settings, and not others.

My M3 foot for my 54 MZ-4 finally arrived so I've had a chance for a bit of a play with E-TTL. With just a bit of mucking around in my room I noticed the E-TTL over exposure that people have been complaining about.

It was late afternoon, so there was just enough light for experimentation with fill flash, and that seemed to work ok, but I didn't have enough time before it got dark to suss it out properly.

But once it got dark, E-TTL was horribly overexposed by 1-2EV compared to auto. I then noticed that I had my mecabounce diffusor on, which is pretty much fixed permanently on the flash head. So I tried E-TTL with bare bulb. The exposure came straight back in line with what auto mode was giving me. I played with various bounce angles and they worked fine. But as soon as I put the mecabounce back on it started overexposing again.

I also tried with my lumiquest, flash mounted reflector, and got the overexposure again. This one confused me, as all this does is reflect the flash, exactly the same as bounce flash. So I started playing with bouncing the flash off a white peice of card. I found the closer I brought the card to the flash, the more the E-TTL overexposed the shot.

I current feeling is that under different conditions where the flash is hitting the subject indirectly, the weaker pre-flash behaves differently to the strong main flash. I would guess that Canon engineers did intensive testing of direct flash and regular bounce flash and adjusted their algorithms to handle this. But I think that as canon don't make diffusors or on flash reflectors for their flashes, these are all aftermarket, they didn't test these and didn't adjust the E-TTL algorithm to compensate.

I think that my tests with fill flash behaved better as the main flash is a lot weaker on a well lit subject, and behaves more like the weak pre-flash.

But this is all just guesswork on my part, and would need a Canon engineer to come out of the woodwork to see if I was even close.

I will play around with it a bit more over the coming days. But my current thoughts are:
- At night time, use the Metz in auto mode, and set the camera in manual mode, setting the apeture to control depth of field and setting the shutter to control the impact of ambient light.
- In daylight, if I have time use the Metz in auto mode and manually set the exposure on the camera for the ambient light. If I am shooting more quickly and require the convenience of using Av or Tv mode (P seems to lock on 1/60s and f4 in E-TTL mode) then I will us E-TTL. But I want to do more experimentation before I trust it.
- I will also need to use E-TTL if I wanted to make use of HSS with this flash as HSS is not supported in any other mode.

I havn't got any shots to show you as I took hundreds of shots trying to find a pattern, and I was mainly looking at the histogram rather than the shot to get a more accurate comparison. I am also a bit tight on time and have already spent way too much of it playing around with this.

Ah - thanks for the useful info Woodsie!It's really reassuring to hear that there is some reasoning as to why ETTL is causing so many problems for so many people - and I guess it does kind of make sense.

Although I think it is fantastic that Canon are putting so much R&D into trying to produce the best flash system possible with E-TTL, I am very disappointed that they don't admit that it is really still an experimental system, then publish the conditions that it is known to work in, and then provide us with the option of selecting straight TTL for the situations where E-TTL doesn't perform as well.

But then, where would be the fun in photography if everything just worked perfectly all the time, and we didn't get a chance to experiment and play and make those rare but beautiful mistakes that turn into our masterpieces.