If you are shooting golfers outdoors and you cant take a chance with your equipment then I suggest getting the SB 700 or two Yougnuos (one as a backup :] ).
My initial thoughts on shooting golfers with an on camera flash (I assume you are moving around with the camera vs a portrait booth).
Get a flash bracket with a sync cord and put a small diffuser on the flash head. This puts the flash a little higher and allows you to shoot portrait as well without shadows.
Set your camera in manual exposure mode and the flash to TTL. Set your manual exposure to approximately 1 stop or less underexposed (while spot metering on your subject) and let the flash act as a fill flash in TTL mode, metering on your subject through the lens (TTL). You may have to lock exposure this way and recompose the shot depending how you are metering the scene. If you have relatively flat light you can get away with matrix metering. If you have very bright backgrounds then you might want to meter off of the background for your manual settings so the background is not blown out. This technique will make your backgrounds not too bright or too dark (which often occurs when shooting in Auto, A, P, or S modes with flash) and make your subject pop off the image a bit. First select you preferred aperture and ISO combination depending on conditions and use the shutter speed to control the exposure of your backgrounds.
Remember when shooting with flash you are really taking two exposures at the same time. One exposure is the ambient light and the other flash.
If you are taking any motion shots (golfer swinging, etc..) make sure your you flash is set for rear curtain sync so your motion blur looks natural.
practice this technique.
One thought just popped into my head. I cant imagine you are allowed to use flash outdoors during a golf event???? May distract the golfers?? Are you shooting the after dinner indoors?
See attached sample images.
one image show good indoor lighting plus an SB 700 with manual camera exposure and TTL flash exposure with a head diffuser and green filter on the flash to compensate for the indoor gymnasium lighting; the other shot shows poor indoor lighting with the camera set on auto everything with a camera mounted hot shoe flash set to TTL. You can see that the auto everything ruins the background. The third image shows using flash outdoors with the background slightly under exposed where the fill flash lets the subject pop a bit.
- This reply was modified 53 years, 11 months ago by .
