I had some trouble getting my new Fuji FinePix S3 camera to play together well with my dual Nikon SB26 flashes. I was afraid I was going to have to buy all new flashes to get this to all work the way I wanted it. The S3 has D-TTL capability, and was one of the major reasons I wanted to get this new camera. TTL is the ONLY way to realistically do flash photography, in my opinion.
Well after pouring over the flash manual and camera manual, I think I finally found the combination of settings that makes it all work together. So to test it out, I went outside and found this little spider that lives on my Jeep Wrangler. The way I framed the image was to put a black background behind him and got him to just about fill the frame in the photo. The body size on this spider is no more then the fingernail on my pinky finger, btw.
This was about a worst case scenario for taking a flash shot at extreme closeup. In a normal situation without TTL (through the lens metering) it would take a bunch of trial and error shots to keep the subject (the spider) from being washed out and completely over exposed). I just set the aperture to it's smallest setting (which amazed me, because the camera was registered F54!), and fired the shots. As you can see, the photos didn't turn out half bad at all! But I think I still have some digging around to do. I shoot in aperture priority mode, and the shutter speed seems stuck at 1/60th of a second no matter what aperture I select. Seems to me that in my S1 camera, the shutter speed was faster then that, so maybe there is yet another setting I need to find. At extreme closeups with the 105mm lens, camera shake (well, it's REALLY not the camera shaking!) can be a problem at the slower shutter speed. But I guess this will do until I find that other magic setting....
These shots were taken using the Nikkor 105mm Micro lens, by the way.
Well after pouring over the flash manual and camera manual, I think I finally found the combination of settings that makes it all work together. So to test it out, I went outside and found this little spider that lives on my Jeep Wrangler. The way I framed the image was to put a black background behind him and got him to just about fill the frame in the photo. The body size on this spider is no more then the fingernail on my pinky finger, btw.
This was about a worst case scenario for taking a flash shot at extreme closeup. In a normal situation without TTL (through the lens metering) it would take a bunch of trial and error shots to keep the subject (the spider) from being washed out and completely over exposed). I just set the aperture to it's smallest setting (which amazed me, because the camera was registered F54!), and fired the shots. As you can see, the photos didn't turn out half bad at all! But I think I still have some digging around to do. I shoot in aperture priority mode, and the shutter speed seems stuck at 1/60th of a second no matter what aperture I select. Seems to me that in my S1 camera, the shutter speed was faster then that, so maybe there is yet another setting I need to find. At extreme closeups with the 105mm lens, camera shake (well, it's REALLY not the camera shaking!) can be a problem at the slower shutter speed. But I guess this will do until I find that other magic setting....
These shots were taken using the Nikkor 105mm Micro lens, by the way.