In this video I compare flash with continuous light to see which is best at freezing splashes.
AdoramaTV presents 'Take and Make Great Photography' with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama, the camera store
that has everything for us photographers. In this video I'm going to look at freezing
fast-moving subjects now this is something I've done many times before
here on AdoramaTV in all sorts of different ways but the theme that's always
run through them is the light. I use flash so the question I get asked and
the one I'm going to answer in this video is well, can I do the same thing but with
continuous light? So what I've got here are four different lights, I've got two different
types of flashes, two different types of continuous light, I'm going to use all four
lights to create this image that I'm going to call splash light and we'll see whether
or not it's possible to do it with different light sources. Now, I don't know
how this is going to work out so let's get this out of the way, set the pool up and
get splashing. So, let's start with the setup. Now I'm not going to go in-depth here,
check out the Adorama Learning Center for a lot more information on how I do
splashes but the basic setup is this. I've got a light at the back that's obviously
going to change as I go through the video. All of the lights are going to fire
through my tracing paper screen. I've got a paddling pool in the hopes that it will
capture some of the water, not get too messy. The actual light bulb itself is on
a black glossy floor tile, and because I'm only using a single light I want to fill
in the shadow side of my light bulb, hence the small mirror,
hopefully that will bounce a bit of light and we'll find out in a second. Obviously I could use a second
light, but the whole purpose of this video is to use just a single light.
So that's the basic setup. One more thing that's absolutely essential, you're going to
need a towel. This is likely to get messy. It's always a good idea to know where your towel is.
So what about the camera set up? Well, to keep things the same I'm going
to try
and keep all of my shots at f-16, a good depth of field, I'm really close
and splashes go way further than you realize.
F16 is my aperture of choice. Other than that, everything else is up for
grabs so my ISO, I'll try and keep that reasonably low, my shutter speed will be
proportionate to the light that I'm using. Let's just take some shots and see
what happens.
So I'm going to start with my go to light the Flashpoint Streaklight 360. It's a
powerful flash, it's got a short flash duration at its lowest power settings and that's
what I've got this set to 1/128th of its full power. Now, I'm just going to take a shot and
just see if it...that actually looks fine, actually brilliant. That's perfect. So its lowest
power setting is terrific. Let's pour some water on and see how that goes.
Now, the lowest power setting gives a flash duration of about 1/10,000th
of a second, should be pretty much perfect for stopping water. Here we go
let's make this kind of wet. That's ok we got a couple of shots like that, we'll
see how that goes.
Yeah, I mean that's fantastic. That looks really, really nice. The thing is, at that really
low flash power I should be able to set the camera up into continuous shooting,
sequential shooting here on the Olympus, and I should just be up able to pour it and keep going.
Let's have a quick test. Yeah, ok here we go. And it will just keep going and going and going.
That's fantastic. And it will keep up with me so things are getting messy, as expected,
and that is brilliant. The flash is easily keeping up with the camera,
although it's not the way I like to shoot, it does give me some great choices.
So now I've swapped over to the Flashpoint Zoom Lithium Ion Speedlite. It's a less powerful flash but
it's still set to 1/ 128th power. Not surprising, it's nowhere near as
bright as with the Streaklight so I need to increase the power of the flash.
That means keeping the flash on for longer, which means a longer flash
duration, less freezing power. I reckon that's about three ish stops. Let's go up
to 1/16thpower. I've tried that. Yeah, 1/16th power looks about right but is that
enough to freeze the action? Well, let's find out. Let's pour this on. Here we go.
Yeah, it looks pretty good. Except when you
get right to the edges you can see there's a little bit of smudging, a
little bit of blurring of those fast-moving drops so in this case it's
close. I reckon if I drop it down to 1/32nd power and compensate by
increasing the ISO to 400. Let's try that.
And again. And once more.
Well that is definitely better. It's perhaps, not as good as the Streaklight,
not surprisingly but I reckon that is probably acceptable.
So, the test. Will it do the continuous shooting? OK, well let's just see. That looks promising. I think it
might, you know, ok here we go.
I think it did pretty well actually keeping up with the high-speed
continuous shooting. So with continuous light there are as many choices there, as
there are in flash. I'm going to start with something small and cheap. I've got just
a 10 watt LED torch flashlight around the back there. It
gives a beautiful beam of light. 10 watts of LED light is really, really bright. The trouble is you can't
see it because I've got even brighter video lights lighting the room so let's switch those
off. Now, it is a bit gloomy in here so you'll have real trouble seeing me, I appreciate that,
but let's just take a shot at the same settings as I had for the Speedlite, and
it's pretty much under exposed not surprisingly. I'm going to increase my
shutter speed to 1/1000th of a second. I reckon that's an absolute
minimum I need with continuous light to get something even reasonably sharp and
then I'm going to increase my ISO until I get correct exposure, so I'm still,
oh my goodness, I'm still way under. I'm a stop under at 256,000ISO. This isn't going to
work. That 10 watt LED light is not bright enough. Now, obviously I need
something a lot brighter for my continuous light and I kind of thought
that might happen so I have prepared a, well it's one of my video lights
actually. It's got four fluorescent bulbs in it. Each one is a 105 watt fluorescent. That's
equivalent roughly of about 1,900 watts, 1800 watts of continuous tungsten light
so it's pretty darn bright, as lights go. It takes a minute to warm up so let's
just turn that on. Now, once again to be fair on the test I need to turn out my
video lights because if we're
shooting with ambient, that is going to make a difference and these video lights
are seriously bright. There you go, but nonetheless you can see the difference in brightness
between the LED that I had earlier and this light because you can still see me,
which is a good thing. Now the first advantage of using continuous light is you
get a preview. What you see on the screen is what you're going to get. Fantastic and I
can see I need to move the light back and that's really helpful because with flash,
you know, you can figure it out but you never really know until you've taken
the first shot. OK, that's better. So what about the exposure? Now I had the ISO
dialed up to maximum for that
LED light, I can reduce that ISO a lot as I'm getting at least plus three stops. In
fact I can come down to 1600 ISO. There we go. Let's just take a shot like that and see
if that works. OK, here we go.
And the answer is no. It's rubbish, absolutely terrible. It looks fine but the minute
you go and have a closer look you can see the amount of smudging on those
water drops as they're flying through the air.
1/1000th of a second is not even close. Now, I can increase my shutter speed to
1/2000th of a second but of course my shot becomes underexposed so I would either
have to increase my ISO or I'm going to have to break my own rule and adjust my depth
of field. I don't want to do either, that's the trouble. I mean, yeah, I could add in
an extra light, one more light, the same of that, would give me one more stop of
illumination. I'm going to choose the ISO and I'll go for the ISO and have a grainy shot with
depth of field rather than a less grainy shot with less depth of field. Let's try that.
Test shot. Yeah, that works fine. Here we go.
OK, and that is better. That is better, but it's nowhere near as sharp as the flash.
The Pen-F goes up to 1/8,000th of a second but to get that I need to lose two stops
of depth of field. That's going to bring me back to F8, 1/8000th of a second,
3,200 ISO and of course I can put this in continuous shooting as well because I'm
using constant light, I don't have to worry about flash recycling. OK, here we go.
Clean the lens, because the lens will get filthy dirty, and very, very damp and does show.
Well, you know what, if I look beyond the shallow depth of field and the more noisy image, that did
really well. In fact, that actually did far better than I thought it was going to.
That's not bad. So with everything packed away I've looked at the images and I've got some
conclusions.
Let's start with the really obvious stuff. The torch 10 watt LED flashlight
is a brilliant flashlight but there's nowhere near enough light to illuminate fast-moving
subjects. That was a fail. The other end of the scale, the Streaklight 360 just
blew everything else out of the water. By far the best light here, short, fast
duration, crisp, wonderful shots. Things that did surprise me, the other two lights. The
Speedlite did really well. OK, I had to increase my ISO a bit but it was able
to keep up with the continuous shooting from the camera and I still have that
crispness that flash gives me. The floor light, the continuous lights, the four
fluorescent bulbs in here, they did better than I thought. Now, I knew I'd have
to compromise and sure enough more ISO, shallower depth of field, nowhere near as
crisp as flash, but at a push yes you can light this stuff with continuous light. Is
it as good as flash? No its not, not even close, but if that's your only light
source you can make that work. Now, if want to see more videos from myself and the
other amazing presenters right here on AdoramaTV, you know what you got to do? You've got to
click on the subscribe button.
See, I found a use for the torch! I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.
Subscribe!