Indoor & evening Fashion Show

I shot this evening indoor fashion show a couple of years ago, when I first bought my 7D. Needless to say, I should have left it at home and used my backup since I really didn't know the 7D well enough. Ahhh...hindsight...a truly wonderful thing.

I have been asked to shoot it again this year so here are my questions regarding flash.

Canon 7D and Speedlite 580 EXII

The event was pretty dark so I had to use flash. Am I better off to use Aperture Priority and ISO adjustments to get a reasonable shutter speed? Set the flash to E-TTL and dial up or down the flash power as required?

What metering should I use?

Any other comments or thoughts?

Bob

You should go manual and ETTL. The reason for this is twofold, the first being that AV mode selects a shutter speed (as if the flash werent contributing) and you dont want it to go too slow to the point where you get ghosting or blur. Secondly by selecting a shutter speed, ISO, aperture and letting the flash provide the lighting for the gap you control the ambient to your satisfaction and its there consistently.

Great advice gonzogolf. So in my case, using Manual, I set the aperture where I want for a relatively shallow DOF, shutter speed fast enough to freeze movement, reasonable ISO and then the flash set to ettl should give me enough light. Looking forward to trying it out.

Bob

bianson wrote in post #16302320
Great advice gonzogolf. So in my case, using Manual, I set the aperture where I want for a relatively shallow DOF, shutter speed fast enough to freeze movement, reasonable ISO and then the flash set to ettl should give me enough light. Looking forward to trying it out.

Bob

As long as your flash exposure is about a stop and a half over the ambient the flash duration will freeze the motion of the subject rather than the shutter speed itself.

I am confused on the "ambient", can you explain further? I can adjust my flash to a stop and half higher, but higher than what?

Bob

bianson wrote in post #16303719
I am confused on the "ambient", can you explain further? I can adjust my flash to a stop and half higher, but higher than what?

Bob

Ambient is the light that is there before your flash fires. So if you meter your scene without flash you might come up with something like 1/30 of a second at f4. That would be your ambient exposure. If you raised the shutter speed to 1/60 thats one stop, 1/120 is two stops. In this case we are underexposing by 2 stops, but the flash fills that gap so we are actually two stops brighter than the exposure we have established. That means the light falling on the subject from the room will not record enough to cause ghosting. That means the flash duration freezes the subject's motion.