Last month (March) has been for sure a rainy one, and now it's getting into the dry season, and outdoors become are reality. As many know, I enjoy outdoor photography, and have invested in a high speed sync strobe (Godox) that enables one to shoot outdoors even in blazing sun. The strobe basically strobes several times per second to sync with the rear curtain of the camera so a continuous strobe light is captured. Basically, you set your camera on a high shutter speed like 1/2500 sec and any F-stop )say 5.6) and the strobe will "strobe" the light so the camera sees not the sun light, but the strobe light instead. This creates a HDR like picture where shadows are compressed as are highlights, but at least you are in the linear range of the sensor.
Without the strobe, the picture will either be blown out from high sun, or too dark *below CCD range) and grainy.. so the strobe fixes this. In fact all pro fashion studios use these outdoors.
As far as I can tell, any camera that accepts a hot shoe and can sync with an external flash should work - not cell phones, but a dedicated camera will be fine. I would look at the man tutorials on youtube to get an idea of what these are about, and make the decision to buy or not later. I really think these transformed my pictures, so that I no longer worry about blown out highlights, and too dark shadows.. additionally, I also shoot in RAW, which is not a compressed picture format and has the full gamut of color and up to 5 stops of exposures. A jpg has none of this and usually has limited editing capability anyway - avoid it like the plague! A png may be compressable or lossless, but has limited gamut and no exposure or white balance, I would import the raw, and output .TIFF in 16/24 bit.. Yes files are 250MB each, but quality is essential.
Here's a few pics of our picnic together, my doll lady and I and a nice warm day!
Enjoy
Click on image for full size & gallery
