Odd lighting question for experienced photographers.

Hi,

I'm hoping someone with hands on experience reads this and is able to shed a little "light" on this for me. (pun intended)

The way I understand it is that in the old days studio photographers would open up the front of the camera to let the light in and pop off a flash. Then they would close up the lens and the light from the flash would be the only light exposing the film. I have some old film cameras that I can not connect to my strobes, but I want to try this out.

Since it is film, I would like to keep my trial and error down to as little error as possible. I do not have a darkroom and I will be paying for processing.

I would be doing this in a dark room so the flash would be the only light.

So my thought, set the camera to bulb, manually set the strobes off, then close the shutter.

If I meter the lights to f/8 with a shutter speed of 1/125 and the light from the flash is the only light will I get a decent exposure or is it going to be over exposed because I left the shutter open too long and the flash is longer? I can't quite wrap my head around how this works, I am a hands on person.

Any help will be appreciated. If all else fails I'll just try it out with a digital camera first.

Thanks in advance!

Theoretically, if the flash is the ONLY light source in the room, you could leave the shutter open for the whole day. If the flash only goes off once, you should get a perfect exposure.


Tony.

To use a long exposure with flash as you suggest a 100% dark room is pretty essential.

Many "serious" product pics are taken using multiple flash exposures to highlight different parts of an item (you should see how they light cars!) These are don with cameras where the shutter is within the lens and is triggered independantly of any film advance or sensor system.

As per your suggestion... Why not practice on digital ? It may not be as pretty... but you can do the same things...

The flash is going to be a lot quicker than 1/125 A typical flash duration is 1/2000 of a second... The Sync speed is literally to ensure that the two events syncronise.

What sort of film cameras do you have without strobe contacts...? I have some 100 year old cameras which still have contacts. Some REALLY old ones have two sets... one set is designed to insert a delay in order for the flash powder to ignite on the board you are holding up... very Buster Beaton.

Baz

That's what I was thinking, but I haven't tried it out yet so I wanted to ask to make sure.

I have some old 35mm cameras, and I have a medium format TLR that I don't know the sync speed, so I am just going to take my pictures with it on bulb rather then ruin a roll of film trying to find it.

I have also started browsing ebay again... I am a junkie when it comes to ebay. I buy lots of things just because they are a "good deal" My wife is a pack rat so I can get away with all the camera junk as long as I keep it in my space

I also ordered a Holga and I want to play with that using my strobes. It has a hotshoe I think so I am also going to try the hotshoe to pc adapter and see what I get.

>>I have a medium format TLR that I don't know the sync speed, so I am just going to take my pictures with it on bulb rather then ruin a roll of film trying to find it.<<

Most cameras in the last 50 years with in-lens shutter has what is known as 'leaf shutter' rather than 'focal plane shutter'. Leaf shutters synch with electronic flash at any shutter speed (usually 1/500th is fastest available leaf shutter speed, and it will synch even there) TLRs always have in-lens shutters.

Thanks for that! It has a pc socket so maybe I'll try it out. It's only going to cost me about $15 to find out...

As said by Wilt a TLR will have a leaf shutter. These benefit by not being a curtain... Thus slight sync miss timings are not so noticable.. just mild vignetting...

I'll bet a bottle of Bitish beer to something from the Napa valley that it will sync just fine at 1/6oth

Doing multi exposure on a single frame in the studio...best to have a blackout cloth you can drape over the lens in between exposures and just leave the lens open, if you can work in a darkened setting...you don't want to bump things and end up with ghosted objects with multiple images registering.

It doesn't have to. Open the back of the cam & point it at a white wall. Trip the shutter while looking through the lens & you can see if it's in sync.

I was playing around with bulb my 20d and my 550ex. Here is what one of the pictures looked like.

You have a very tolerant wife.
What's this "film" stuff you speak of?

Curtis N wrote:
You have a very tolerant wife.
What's this "film" stuff you speak of?

She is very tolerant. Tonight I made her stand still while I took pictures of the back of her head I was having some issues in Photoshop and I needed her hair...

As for the film, I have been reorganizing my "junk" and fell back into shooting with film cameras. I figure once I spend enough money in developing costs I'll put them away again. Although today I was talking about building a darkroom

>>What's this "film" stuff you speak of?<<

It's what you get if you take a spray mist bottle filled with milk and aim it at your 24-70L or other red stripe lens, sit the lens down on its mount and walk away for a few hours.