Or perhaps I should have called this things I should have remembered on Monday night with Nikon flash. Some of the results weren’t bad, but I could have done a lot better, and found myself much of the time pressing the shutter release with nothing happening, because the camera was failing to focus, and I couldn’t work out why the focus assist illuminator wasn’t working. Two minutes and a quick check of the manual when I got home and I was kicking myself.
I’d set Custom setting a9 AF-assist illuminator to ON, but had forgotten that this only works when the focus mode is set to S (single-servo autofocus) AND you are either focussing on the central focus point or using Auto-Area AF.
Without the illuminator, focus with the 16-35mm in low light is pretty tricky as I found, and I have the camera set (CS a2) only to take pictures when in focus. So I spent a lot of time pushing the release and nothing happening.
The other slight problem was that I had taken a picture at the start of the evening using Aperture priority, and although I had changed the working aperture back to f4 (wide open) I had forgotten to change the exposure mode back to S. Which means that the camera was adjusting the shutter speed to some quite long values to get correct exposure (or rather the selected -1 stop exposure) from whatever ambient light there was.
Generally it works better to set Shutter Priority, selecting the slowest speed that is suitable given the subject and ambient lighting. When you move into a darker area the flash to ambient ratio will change, giving a darker background, while the closer areas lit by the flash will stay more or less the same.
You can read about the protest and see more pictures in Bikes Alive – End Killing Of Cyclists on My London Diary.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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