Photography Scribblings

I haven’t yet spent the quality time with my new flash that I had hoped to by now, but I got a couple of things wrong. It isn’t an off-camera flash, exactly. It fits into the flash shoe above the lens barrel. So…still might have red-eye probs. Grrr. It comes with an offset attachment for use with a tripod so that must be where I got the impression it wasn’t an over-the-barrel flash. The flash unit swivels upward so that I can reflect the flash onto the subject.

The manual has a drawn picture, showing that the angle of incidence between the flash and the ceiling should be the same as the subject and the ceiling. Well, that’s nice. I could have guessed that but I’ll be honest - spatial relations are challenging for me. I don’t do it easily. Judging the angle to a point on the ceiling that is half way between me and the subject? Just ain’t going to happen accurately. Hope there’s some forgiveness in the system. Alas, it will not solve my problem at cons because the ceilings are typically high enough to string lighting trusses and sound equipment if one wanted. And they tend to be black. Not so good for bouncing light.

The Sony manual is their typical job. That is, not really helpful. *sigh* I don’t have it at hand to quote, but it’s not uncommon for it to say things like, “Test button: push to test flash” and “Select the ‘manual’ mode to adjust automatic settings.” Oh gee, thanks. Couldn’t have figured those out. Meanwhile, there’s rarely something explaining the differences in the intenstities of flash that one can choose amongst much less suggestions as to when one might want to try them.

An amusing note: whoever proofread the manual didn’t notice that the ’s’ looks similar to the ‘g’ in the chosen font, so there’s much mention of the way in which the flash integrates with the “disital camera’ — especially distracting since there is a word ‘distal’ and I used to use it all the time when I identified and described bones from archaeological sites.