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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Minimum shutter speed with a speedlite (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by frenshprince@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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Hi there,

I have a what I thought would be a simple question, but can find a simple answer on Google.

Some friends will have a party for Halloween, half indoor, half outdoor. Ans they asked me to take some pictures, since I’m the photographer. The thing is, it’s not really the kind of photos I make. And I have a little knowledge about using flash.

So here’s my gear :

Canon R6ii
35mm 1.8
24mm 1.8
Godox V860

I’m a little familiar with the concept of ambient light using a flash, but here’s my question : If I don’t want to crank up my Iso for ambient light, how slow I can go with my shutter speed ? People will probably dance and drink, so without flash, with good light conditions, I would probably go between 1/250 and 1/500. But with a flash, considering that it’s supposed to freeze the subject, how slow can I set the shutter speed ?

Thanks for your help

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[–] hukugame@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

with flash photography, shutter speed doesn't matter that much. If you want to use shutter speed faster than 1/200, or 1/250 for most cameras, make sure you have high speed sync on. your flash will pretty much fire at the same speed all the time (about 1/1000th of a second), and high speed sync just means your flash will try to sync up with your camera's shutter speed, by using very fast burst of light, so you don't end up with black lines on your shot.

so regardless of what shutter speed you use, your subject will be lit and frozen, and like you said, using slower shutter speed will introduce more ambient light into your scene, and may even create a cool blur around your subject.

when you use flash, only thing that really impacts your exposure a lot is your aperture.

[–] Expensive_Kitchen525@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Correct, I will just add few words. High speed sync uses more battery and is usually not that powerful. Some use them in opposite way, instead of nd filters, so in very sunny day, trying to get portrait with f/1.8 with 1/4000s. For halloween party I would not go for this settings, I would probably want to have some ambient lights involved, but froze the action with non hss. What is freezing the action is not the shutter speed. That works for continuous, ambient light. What freezes action is duration of the flash beeing burned. And these times are usually much much shorter, than sync speed, also depends on power of the flash. Full power burns usually longer, than 1/4 power. It may be 1/1000s vs 1/8000s. So. Turn off the flash first, expose for ambient light first. Then turn flash on and play with flash power. Now shutter speed and aputure will affect ambient light, aputure will also affect flash, but shutter speed will NOT affect flash. Have fun :)

[–] hukugame@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

this is a much better answer than mine! ♥️

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