More Flash and Water

I quite like working with water so I putting a couple of recent ones from a recent set I did in the shower. This also demonstrates a principal it took me a while to understand about freezing motion, normally if you want to freeze a stream or a fast moving car you up your shutter speed to say 1/1000, this is fine if you are out side but a bit different indoors as most cameras can only synchronise their shutter with the flash to speeds of about 1/250 (this is the cameras x-sync speed). This always panicked me as 1/250 isn't really fast enough to freeze the water BUT as a scene like this is lit with flash only, ie no ambient light the duration of the flash is a lot quicker than 1/250 so you could actually leave your shutter open for say 1/30 which is nowhere near fast enough to freeze water but as long as there is no (or little) ambient light the flash will be enough to stop the motion of the water. These two were taken at f6.3 for 1/200 at 170mm ISO 100. It was lit with a single speedlite to the camera left and I had a piece of orange card behind the shower. The levels were tweaked in Lightroom after, another rainy day project.

A Trip To The Armouries

Yesterday a friend and I went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds, he had just got a canon 400D and wanted some tips on using the shutter priority and aperture priority modes. I said as a general rule of thumb, to avoid any motion blur from shooting handheld always use a shutter speed of 1/focal length ie at 50mm don't go slower than 1/50, at 300mm don't go slower than 1/300. A quicker shutter speed is needed at longer focal lengths (more zoomed in) because the shake of your hand is amplified.
This was put to the test when we went inside the museum, where even with the aperture wide open (low f numbers, 2.8 or 4) we were still getting shutter speeds too slow to hand hold, flash would have been helpful or better still a tripod but I think we would probably have been shot at by the guards if we even attempted to break out the tripod, so we just cranked up the iso settings.
The test was a bit extreme but it helped my friend get to grips with the relationship between shutter speed and aperture, we also had a go at panning shots (of people jousting none the less) but thats another story. Anyway for those still reading this shot was done at 1/400 at f8 at 38mm, I realise this wasn't exactly practicing what I preached but I was at iso 800, I would have rather been at iso 100 for 1/50, but I was lying down and the suspicious looks of the guards watching 2 seemingly pro photographers was making me a little uneasy.