You never know when you will need a bookcover style photo. Well, I don’t need one right now, but I had the setup out last night and jumped in front of my camera. I guess I should smile more when doing shots like this, but I am not the model type.

By the way, I gave my exam today. Give me a day or two to get them graded and then my time frees up until next fall. I’m looking forward to a summer of serious photography.

I read an interesting article in the NCSU paper last week. It pointed out how students are crazy to miss out on all the free stuff that is available to them. Sure there is free food at events, but that is not the important thing. Many departments offer weekly seminars or colloquiums. This is a free lecture from visiting professors about research going on. There are also many special guests to the university that offer lectures. Plays are always going on. Music is everywhere. It is there for the taking. It is free. It reminds me of my trip to Germany in the mid 90’s. I visited a relative who lived on a US army base. They commented on how many soldiers came for their two year tour and never left the base. They were in the heart of Germany and never left their base! I could not believe that. But I am seeing it now. Many students come to college and never take in any of the free things available to them. They come for the classes and that is it. There is so much more! But you know, it is not only for the college students. Much of these talks and presentations are open to the public. You just have to look for them. Even if you don’t have a college in your town, there are local events at schools. My kid had his 4th grade play this week. They presented ‘The Emperors New Clothes’. It was a musical and twisted so the kids could wear any costume they wanted. It was great and I’m not just saying that because my kid was in it.

Go see a play. Go see a concert. Go take a hike. Go take a picture!

We have had several projects now on the Triangle Strobist, yet we have not stopped to really figure out this flash off of our camera. When your camera works in TTL mode, it measures the background light and tries to adjust the flash to illuminate the main subject at a level close to that of the background. This keeps you from having a pitch black background as you used to have with bulb flashes. The great thing about taking your flash off of the camera and setting the exposure manually is that you can determine how well the background is lit and not leave that guessing to your camera.

Here I have shot 7 different images. I adjusted the camera in manual mode for the flash I had so that I would get proper exposure of the main subject (who is that ugly guy).

All shots were at F/11. The exposure times changed in this order (1/200, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/13, 1/8, ¼) Note how the flash takes care of the exposure of the subject. The exposure length takes care of how well the background is illuminated. I reached a neutral point around 1/13 of a second, the flash began to equal the background light. After that the subject was illuminated by both the flash and the ambient and was thus blown out. So TTL is good, but it is like an automatic car. It serves your interest most of the time, but occasionally you need to control what the RPM’s are. That is when you take the flash off and shoot in manual mode.