warren_wilson

What a nice moment of nostalgia this thread provides. I was one of those guys wearing glasses and blinking in the red light of the high school dark room, trying to wind 40 exposures onto a 36-exposure cassette and marvelling at the magic of the chemistry. It reminds me of those little notebooks I later carried to record the f/stop and shutter speed of each shot so that when the transparencies finally came back from the lab I would be able to ponder the variables: assuming the numbers on the slides corresponded with the numbers in my notebook. My photographic learning curve skyrocketed when each exposure was essentially free, the pertinent information was burned into the metadata, and the feedback on exposure, composition, lighting, white balance etc. was immediate. Some sort of arcane nostalgia is the only reason I’d have any interest in shooting film today — just as if someone offered me the chance to play with some wet collodion plates.

This conversation puts me in mind of debate on the superiority of digital images or transparencies. It has been a long time since I have set up a screen and projector to share images — and I daresay a longer time since my friends and family actually craved such an evening. My point is that it seems to me an important criterion by which these cameras (iPhone and Lumix) should be compared is how appropriate the device is to current practice in communicating through sharing images. Yesterday, for instance, walking the dog I came across a plant I could not identify. I took its picture with my iPhone and asked the device to identify the plant, which it did — as loco weed. I then sent the image to a farmer friend and asked him if he recognized it from the prairies. A few moments later he responded. If a key element of photography is communicating through visual images, it should be a criterion by which technologies are evaluated. I suppose my thought goes to rank-ordering the criteria by which we judge the two cameras: is the gaping f/stop of the iPhone more or less of an issue than the ability to share images?

Dinner time on the riverbank.

For fun, here is one of the little ruby-throats I got a few years ago with no flash. I love the aggression in the teeny tiny package.

Thanks for all the thoughts and insights into this issue. Having played with every setting I can find anywhere, I believe the culprit might have been that I had the camera set to spot metering. Normally I use the matrix metering. Having consulted that rarely-opened volume, the User’s Manual, I found that the flash uses iTTL if the camera is set to center-weighted or matrix metering. This is the one I want: a balanced fill flash that I can fine tune with the flash exposure. When the camera is set to spot metering, it provides TTL amounts of light sufficient to bring things up to a uniform brightness regardless of existing light (as I understand it). Lacking the offending images and their EXIF data, I can’t verify this was the case, but I think I found it. So thanks again to everyone who took the time to offer thoughts and insights. Unfortunately, the hummingbirds seem to have finished migrating through.

Thanks for the richness of ideas. I appreciate the responses — gives me lots to play with. The ISO question is slippery because I tried several, but while I do shoot in RAW + jpeg —i have allowed irritation to cause me to delete the overexposed images immediately, so I have none to examine for ISO or to post But lots to follow up on here: I’ll let you know where the sneaky devil was hiding. I’ve been off tending to medical matters, so a little slow to get to the camera.

Thanks, Gary: I think I have mentioned twice now that I have done that — in my OP and in a response. Thanks — I will try the spot metering to get TTL without the iTTL. Good idea in any case with such a tiny subject. While I have been trying to avoid using manual flash, it might be a good exercise to review the process — I see the full table in the Users Manual.

Relatively diffuse, and I have been varying the EV on the camera to see if I can better balance flash and ambient: worth more experiment, though: this is beginning to irritate me!

Thanks for your thoughts, folks. I’m taking hummingbird pics with my trusty 70-200 2.8. Fully modern lens. The birds pop a lot more with a touch of flash. I am not sure how much the aperture matters with TTL flash — I thought the whole point of TTL is that the flash knows the aperture along with other variables. But it gives me an idea to check my manual to see if I can use the pop-up flash manually: never considered it. As I mentioned in the OP, I have used both exposure compensation and flash exposure compensation — going as far as -3EV on the flash. I use these controls regularly; they are not the problem. And after I did the reset I tried all variations of the shooting modes (P & A at any rate) — and ran through the compensation settings again. As to mounting Nikon glass to Nikon cameras, I’ve been at it since 1975, and it seems to me with any dSLR I will just get an error message if I don’t have the aperture ring locked and the camera will not fire. Thanks for taking the time to reply — I am haunted by the notion that it is something entirely simple that I am not seeing!

My flash photos are washed out. I am using my D800’s pop-up flash and cannot correct the over-exposure. I have switched from Rear to Slow to Normal — no difference. I have tried to underexpose the flash by various degrees (starting with -1.7): it only moves the histogram slightly away from the right wall at -3 EV. I have tried in Program (as well as Aperture, which I normally use). I have performed a factory re-set. I have the flash sync speed at 1/250 (tried several others). I have the flash shutter speed at 1/60 (tried several others). I also have the suspicion that the solution is staring me in the face and I just can’t see it! Suggestions much appreciated.

And one more dotty pic just for fun -- the morning dew on a spider web.

A few water drops on an old CD.