Outdoor fill flash..what did I do wrong?

I am the "class photographer" for my sons preschool. They had a social today that I needed to take pictures of. I knew the sun would be bright and I brought my 580ex Speedlite to help fill in some of the shadows. But, all of them came out terrible. Can you look at my shots and tell me what I did wrong?

Here is the first one:

That's great that you know HTML and the tags for adding an image, but on this Discussion board, it's a little simpler. All you have to do is enclose the direct URL to your image in a tag.....(just remove all the spaces) - [I m g] PATH_TO_IMAGE [/ i m g]

I'll do one for you....

OK, most likely what's going on is you need to set your 580 into High Speed Sync. This will allow the flash to work with shutter speeds faster than 1/250s. Since it was bright outside, 1/200s, even at ISO100 results in major overexposure.

Yep I bet it's HSS as well.

(Evan waves hello to New Zealand from Pennsylvania, USA )

I don't know anything about HSS. I'll have to do a search and see if I can figure it out. If I set it to HSS, would I want to take it out of HSS mode when I am shooting at lower speeds?

Wow, egordon99. You are fast! I first posted this with html tags and then immediately went back and edited it. You must have read my post as I was fixing it.

I believe if you leave it on HSS, it goes into "normal" mode if the SS drops below 1/250s. I pretty much only use it if I'm outdoors in Av mode, indoors I usually just fix the shutter to 1/250s (or sometimes less) in manual mode. Although sometimes inside I need it if I'm trying to keep a bright window from blowing out (and need a higher shutter speed)

kerry0621 wrote in post #6320798
I don't know anything about HSS. I'll have to do a search and see if I can figure it out. If I set it to HSS, would I want to take it out of HSS mode when I am shooting at lower speeds?

I'm holding my 580EXII right now, and to get it into HSS, press the "H/>>>" button (next to the zoom button) one time. You'll see the little "H" symbol next to "ETTL" on the display. Pressing this button again gets you into "Rear Curtain Sync" (flash fires at the END of the exposure instead of the beginning, really only makes a difference with SLOW shutter speeds), and pressing it one more time returns you to the normal "Front Curtain Sync" (non-HSS)

egordon99 wrote in post #6320763
OK, most likely what's going on is you need to set your 580 into High Speed Sync. This will allow the flash to work with shutter speeds faster than 1/250s. Since it was bright outside, 1/200s, even at ISO100 results in major overexposure.

That coupled with the 3.5 f stop.

When taking outdoor shots on a sunny day using fill flash in ETTL as long as you expose your shots correctly the ETTl will take care of the rest (sometimes its off and you adjust flash compensation as u stated you did)

If you decide to use HSS make sure you check the distance scale on your flash, HSS reduces the effective range of the flash so you may need to either move closer and zoom out or crank the flash power more.

If DOF isnt a big concern you may wanna even try TV mode, set your shutter speed to 1/200th ISO 100 make sure flash is in ETTL and fire off a shot to see if it needs FEC + or -

I like to use spot metering and meter of a persons face

Hope this helps

Way OVEREXPOSED even if you used no flash at all!!!

Sunny 16 rule of thumb says 1/ISO at f/16 in bright sunlight...so your camera was set to ISO100, so in the sun you would have gotten a pretty good exposure with 1/100 f/16. Your camera was set to 1/200 f/3.5, so that is about +3EV of overexposure, with no flash at all!

kerry0621 wrote in post #6320798
I don't know anything about HSS. I'll have to do a search and see if I can figure it out. If I set it to HSS, would I want to take it out of HSS mode when I am shooting at lower speeds?

Read here aout HSS

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=208520

wouldn't this issue be more of a mix of two much power on the flash and the 3.5 ap?

I'm not connecting where HSS would matter in this case? "you just blew my mind!" ~ cosmo kramer.

Also some great links in this post.

https://photography-on-the.net ….php?p=321800&p​ostcount=1

AND for everything about Canon flash, The Flash Bible

http://photonotes.org/​articles/eos-flash/

azpix wrote in post #6320895
wouldn't this issue be more of a mix of two much power on the flash and the 3.5 ap?

I'm not connecting where HSS would matter in this case? "you just blew my mind!" ~ cosmo kramer.

Yep, that why i posted the links