Shooting with Nikon D50

[mmsundar]

Hello all,

 

I bought a Nikon D50 couple of days back and has been shooting some

sample photos with it. The picture quality is good. But I noticed

some strange thing while shooting. Normally, when the picture is

being taken, in an SLR camera, the mirror locks up, the shutter opens

and the film (or CCD) is exposed to the scene and then the shutter

closes and then the mirror is released. This means, at the time of

exposure, you will not see the scene through the view finder because

of mirror lock up. Right?

 

But when I take pictures with D50, I am able to see the scene through

the view finder along with the flash momentarly. That is, I could see

through the view finder that the subject is being lit with the flash

for a breif moment. I am not sure if this is normal or a fault in the

operation of the camera. Did anyone observed this?

 

I would appreciate any help.

 

Thanks in Advance,

Mohan

[NetR]

Hello Mohan

 

Are the photos OK? That is the main thing. I suspect that what you are seeing momentarily is the pre-flash that Nikon's i-TTL system uses to get the exposure correct. There is not one flash only as for film, but some very short flashes followed by the flash that lights the exposure when the camera takes the picture.

 

Regards, Ross

[john schroeder]

What you are seeing is the metering pre-flash. The main flash is going off while the mirror is up.

[jcuknz]

Can I gently suggest that you spend time reading the manual, not once but many times, until you fully understand how your camera is working for you. Digital cameras, even P&S, are complicated and clever,and cannot just be picked up and used. When I upgraded to what many folk consider a slightly different camera recently I spent three hours working my way through the manual before using it to take a photo, and frequently refered back to the manual in the first few days.

[work-page]

It's the pre-flash for metering the scene indeed. It's much stronger than the pre-flash on the older film-SLR bodies.

 

You'll notice it only in the iTTL mode. If you set the flash to manual (custom function 16: Flash Mode) then you won't see this pre-flash.