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Re: [OM] Flash techniques for total beginners?

Subject: Re: [OM] Flash techniques for total beginners?
From: dreammoose <dreammoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:37:28 -0800
This problem can have a cause which has nothing to do with your equipment or basic technique.

Automated photo processing equipment balances the whole picture to something like what they think an average picture looks like in terms of overall brightness and color balance. The best of them are pretty good. Some places have operater intervention, which may or may not improve things. I believe most use center weighting in these adjustment, since most pictures they process are of people and people are mostly in the center. Sooo, in way too many cases, a properly exposed picture of a person with the rest of the pic dark comes out with the person looking overexposed in 'drug-store' processing, particularly if the shining face(s) are not in the center. You can get similar effects for color balance. Try a picture of a person on one side of the frame against a frame otherwise full of a strong color. Most automated processing will give the person a strange flesh color.

You could try a different processor.
You could get a film scanner or buy a Photo CD with the processing and use a photo editor to do your own balancing. You could manually adjust exposure beyond the adjustment range of the processing. On an OM-2 or later with the F280 or T-32, use exposure compensation on the film speed dial. A set of duplicated shots at different minius compensations will let you know the best setting. In other setups, just lie to the flash about the film speed; pretend it is faster than it is.

M. Royer wrote:

Well I am a total newbie to flash photog and vcould
use some pointers. I wanted to get rid of red eye in
my pics and a BG2 certainly cured that. I then got an
F280 and T-32 to augment my flash collecion which
prior to my recent bout of Zuikoholism consisted of a
single well scuffed t-20. So I have eliminated redeye,
but I now face a new challenge. Ghosts. I am of a
Northern European background (non pc: white as white
can get) as is most of my family. I find that the
flashes I am using, although certainly adequate in the
illumination dept. Are in many cases way too strong
and make me and my family look like they just bathed
in bleached flour. My dad, who is a sun nut and likes
to roast till he is the color of a ripe tomato,
actually looks pretty good right now since he retains
that nuclear tan throughout. (yes we all know about
skin cancer I'm not talking about that) Unfortunatley
the rest of us who wear sunscreen do not have a good
color under flash photog. I was wondering what I could
do to either lessen the flash power to acceptable
levels, or configure the lens to take a good picture
in spite of the flash. Thanks for any answers.

Mark Lloyd

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