Hi Nenad, E-man, Darryn, et al.... Glad to have been of some help. I hope I've left you with fewer questions than you started with. For me, the easiest way to think about fill flash is to consider the camera (body and lens) as totally separate and independent from the flash unit. I use the meter in the camera body exclusively to measure ambient light for the background, and set aperture and shutter speed on the camera so that the background will be correctly exposed. I then set my flash unit to one of the automatic modes, where I can use the sensor on the flash foot to measure the intensity of the flash (which of course will only illuminate the foreground subject). My Sunpak flash units have switches to change both the film speed and the aperture, in case I need that kind of flexibility. If I want 1:1 lighting, I set these switches to the "true" values. If I want less fill-flash, I set one or the other of these switches accordingly. (For instance, set the aperture to one stop wider than the lens is really set to, or set the film speed to twice the actual speed of the film I have loaded. Either of these choices gives me one stop less foreground illumination.)
Nenad has the right idea for using TTL flash metering, I think -- set the camera to manual, then meter the background and adjust shutter and aperture for proper exposure (with film speed set to the ~correct~ value), and THEN manually change the film speed setting on the camera body to fool the flash TTL circuitry into delivering a less powerful flash of light. As Nenad has suggested, it's possible to do the requisite tricks by setting the flash to TTL metering. It just makes the arithmetic a bit more fiddly, and you have to think a little about what you're doing a bit more. I usually find it easier to set the flash unit to auto instead of TTL, then make the adjustments to the switches on the back of the flash unit. Many, but not all, flash units offer you this kind of flexibility. Emmanuel was last trying to figure out how to fool his AF-330FTZ into delivering the correct fill ratio. As I understand, this particular flash has contrast control. Isn't contrast control supposed to take care of fill-flash ratio, or does it just allow you to balance lighting from a master and slave flash? (Which is another problem entirely....) E-man, you'll have to look at your manual on this one. Otherwise, you might want to try Nenad's technique. By the way, if you have to change film speed instead of aperture, a 2x change in film speed will be equivalent to a one-stop change in aperture. For example, suppose your camera is actually loaded with 400-speed film. If you can convince your flash unit that you're really shooting 800-speed film instead of 400-speed film (e.g., by manually changing the ASA setting on your camera body to an "incorrect" value of 800), the flash discharge will only be half as bright (i.e., one stop less light). Darryn sounds like he's got the right idea -- he simply worked through the arithmetic in the reverse direction with respect to what I did. (He calculated for the foreground first, and then the background. Works just as well.) At the distance to his foreground subject, a full-power discharge from his flash would properly illuminate the foreground subject if he set the lens to f/11. At this aperture, he would need to set the shutter speed at 1/15 sec to properly expose the background. Everything worked fine. If Darryn wanted one stop less foreground, but a properly illuminated background, he could have set his aperture to f/16 and his shutter speed to 1/8 -- a very tricky proposition if you're hand-holding the camera. If Darryn wanted to use a faster shutter speed, he could set his flash to a lower-power manual discharge (don't know if this is possible on the AF-200T). Alternatively, he could set his flash to one of the auto modes and use the method I describe. Hope this helps. Bill Peifer Rochester, NY - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
