{"id":3781,"date":"2014-04-23T18:18:14","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T17:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/?p=3781"},"modified":"2014-04-23T18:19:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T17:19:27","slug":"speedlights-brollies-and-zooming-flashes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/?p=3781","title":{"rendered":"Speedlights, brollies and zooming flashes"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve used a Speedlight then you\u2019ll have spotted the zoom setting which can be used to make the spread of light from the flash match the angle of view from your lens. When it comes to on camera flash that\u2019s great news as it helps to maximise t\"Flash-Bare-1\"<\/a>he efficiency of the flash but go off camera and it\u2019s something that can easily get over looked. Setting the zoom for off camera speedlite work is one of the handy tools in a photographer\u2019s bag of tricks. It can be used to shape the light into a tight rectangle or spread it wider and rounder. Most speedlight\u2019s even have a pull out diffuser for a crazy wide spread of light. So what should you do with the zoom setting when you\u2019re shooting your flash into an umbrella or softbox? In a nutshell I tend to zoom out to the wider end of the flashes zoom range but I wanted to see how things changed at different zoom settings so I did a little experiment. \"Flash-Brolly-1\"<\/a> Let\u2019s start with the side view. At my Canon 580EXII\u2019s maximum zoom of 105mm the flash is diffused fairly well but it\u2019s noticeably bright in the centre with a lot of fall off at the edges. Things don\u2019t change much even at 50mm zoom but by 24mm zoom the light spread from the umbrella is a lot more even. Flip out the wide angle diffuser and zoom reads 14mm, now that\u2019s wide! The resulting light is amazingly soft and diffused but it\u2019s so wide it actually passes the edges of the umbrella completely! \"Flash-Softbox-1\"<\/a> It\u2019s the front view which probably make things clearest. The hot spot at 105mm to 50mm is clear to see. At 24mm the flash coverage is better but at 14mm it\u2019s very VERY even. So what conclusions can I draw from this? Well the obvious one is don\u2019t zoom the flash when using an umbrella or softbox. 14mm looks very tempting but one thing to note is the flash power was roughly a stop less than at 24mm. So I\u2019ll be sticking to 24mm for my brollies but I might consider going for 14mm in softboxes when I can accept shallower depth of fields or higher ISO in my photo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve used a Speedlight then you\u2019ll have spotted the zoom setting which can be used to make the spread of light from the flash match the angle of view from your lens. When it comes to on camera flash that\u2019s great news as it helps to maximise the efficiency of the flash but go … Continue reading Speedlights, brollies and zooming flashes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[23,79,36,78,24],"class_list":["post-3781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-featured","tag-flash","tag-photography","tag-speedlight","tag-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3781"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gavtrain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}