PhotographyBanzai.com

My family and I decided to attend an event Mitt Romney was hosting in Rockford, Illinois at the Machine Shed Restaurant. I took my camera along and tried to get a few decent photographs. This isn’t a political blog, I consider myself someone who is not fond of the 2-party system and not especially fond of either party’s policies. I’d like to see a lot more cooperation and understanding between people. My photo results were not that positive, but it’s good to get some practice in a situation like this regardless of the result. I shoot with fixed focal length lenses most of the time, which makes things like this a big challenge. For this event I brought along the Pentax K-5 and 31mm f1.8 lens. Inside the restaurant it was dark with strong light flooding in through the windows. Without the use of flash, there isn’t a set way to counteract the large difference in light intensity. In addition to the difference, there is the issue of lens flare, which the 31mm suffers quite a bit from. This...

I talk about camera flash communication methods (TTL vs E-TTL i-TTL p-TTL) as well as thyristor sensor based auto mode.  Flash talk Here is the Youtube video: Diagram for TTL and pre-flash based TTL methods: TTL and more advanced methods. Standard TTL: This was the original method of flash power control. It happens as the film/sensor is being exposed to light. There is a dedicated sensor near the film that monitors the reflected light off of the film/sensor and eventually tells the flash to “quench” (stop) outputting light. The nice thing about TTL is that it works with any lens and was generally pretty reliable. p-TTL, E-TTL, i-TTL, and similar systems that use pre-flash: This is the newer method that all of the camera manufacturers use now. The flash sends out a pre-flash burst of light (or multiple bursts) and records the results with the standard light meter built into the camera. So this all happens even before the mirror has been flipped up and of course before the sensor Thy...