There are days and events when I know I need flash to fill in the shadows, but somehow just don’t. And I’m not quite sure why. This, with a low late Autumn sun usually coming from behind or well to one side of the people I was photographing was one of them.
Sometimes its because I don’t want to disturb the situation, but there was really no need to worry about that in pictures like this of people chanting against the Daily Mail, wanting an apology from that apology for a newspaper about their attack on the late father of Labour party leader Ed Milliband. It was a smear that angered many, and was patently untrue – but that was hardly surprising for the Daily Mail, part of our right-wing press that has never let truth stand in their way. In some ways I find nicknaming Milliband the younger as ‘Red Ed’ more annoying – and equally nonsense. But when Ralph Milliband was getting ready to fight for his adopted country – and a country that from much of his writing he clearly loved and was deeply concerned about, the paper that now defames him was praising Hitler and the Nazis, and even now gives its support to the fascist Front National leader Marine Le Pen in France.
But as usual I digress. Why didn’t I use fill flash for pictures like this, which would have benefited them and saved me considerably time in post-processing to get usable results like these? Here I’ve had to burn in the sunlit areas of face and hands (and placard – and perhaps I should have done more on the hand and triangle of light behind the wood.) Then I’ve had to brighten up the shadow areas on the face and neck of the woman in the picture – and again in a rush to put this on line on the day I took it I’ve left her eye (on right of picture) too dark, as well as the shadow underneath it and at the side of her mouth.) It’s an image that I probably spent five minutes working on before I was happy to upload it, and even then haven’t quite got it right. With fill flash, probably all that would have been needed would have been a few seconds work.
Fill isn’t the answer to everything of course, and there are a few images where it wouldn’t have helped much if at all, for example in the few that are already frontally lit.
What I really needed here wasn’t fill flash, but a lighting team to light up the background with that Daily Mail clock.
But some days I just don’t seem to feel like using flash, and I don’t know why. Covering four (or five depending how you count them) events that day I only seem to have used flash for one picture, and I suspect that may have been the when the camera’s built-in flash accidentally popped up after I pressed the button accidentally.
Sometimes I don’t use flash because I’m defeated by it. I’ve had a lot of problems with flash units, both from Nikon and other manufacturers over the years. They don’t take kindly to abuse or even hard work, and aren’t shock- or waterproof. It’s hard to remember all the interactions between the Nikon units and the cameras and which mode or focus area or whatever does odd things even when both camera and flash are both working properly. Despite – or perhaps at times because of – all the automation, its still possible to really get in a mess, and there have been occasions when I tried a few exposures with flash, saw it was going haywire and decided to give up. When you switch on the flash and it changes your shutter speed to 1/60 or your aperture to f22 you know you have a problem.
But I think the problems on this occasion were more human than technical. A busy day before covering a number of events, something of a party later, a few glasses of wine, not enough sleep. Its probably why I forgot to check the ISO setting on the D700 until halfway through the second event too. Fortunately the results at ISO 2500 are so good it wasn’t a great problem, though I can’t remember having used 1/4000s before. Most of the pictures at the Daily Mail offices were in any case made with the D800E, which was at my normal ‘low’ setting of ISO 640. There is seldom any point in going any lower for the kind of pictures I normally make.
Pictures and text at Daily Mail You Told All the Lies.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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