Flash

I'm an available light photographer foremost. The newer digital cameras allow you to take photographs in many situations, also indoors, without a flash if you have fast (=big aperture) optics. Still, I bought a small flash for my Olympus E-P2 as an early Christmas gift for myself. The Olympus FL-300R is a small flash made for the new PEN cameras. The built-in wireless functionality does not work with my E-P2 camera, though, but I ordered a cheap long TTL cable to test some fill flash for my bike photography. The TTL cable, which haven't arrived yet, is needed to get it away from the optical axis, in order to avoid the hard and ugly flash light which plagues most of the flash pictures you see.

The first test for indoor photography went fine. The flash is (just) strong enough to be bounced via the ceiling to give a more natural looking light. Combining it with e.g. the Panasonic 20/1.7 lens and a suitable long exposure times enables getting a good balance between the indirect flash light and the ambient lights.

I also brought the flash with me on an overnighter with the bike to test out some slow-sync flash pictures. In these situations the flash should be set to fire when the second curtain of the shutter closes, to get the light trails to end with the flash instead of to begin with it.


One test showed a funny side effect of the helmet light on half power. Since this particular Led light is dimmed by PWM (the light is pulsed) the light trail looks funny. It shows that the light is not on all the time.


Another funny effect was when the fairly strong lights burned out the foreground before the bike arrive at the place where the flash fired, causing the wheels to partially disappear from the picture.


Finally, the following picture shows what happens when the flash synhronizes on the first curtain instead of the second. The effect is not particularly visible on this picture, but one can still see the the bike and ride have moved slightly after the flash fired. In this case the effect actually brought a little more movement to the picture, but usually second curtain synchronization works better for this purpose.


The last picture is closest to what I envisioned using a fill flash for. There are lots of situations in the forest where it is too dark to get a fast enough shutter time to freeze the action. By using a shutter time e.g. between 1/15 s and 1/50 s the surroundings would be correctly exposed and a flash fired towards the bike rider would render a sharp image of the rider as well. The possible unsharpness of the rider that comes from the long exposure time is much weaker and only contributes to the feeling of movement. More experiments ahead...