Originally posted by THoog So many museums have rules against flash and tripods that I'm surprised when they don't. I've spent a lot of years practicing slow breathing and finding things to brace against. I've used the CPL trick - in fact, the most-viewed shot in my armour collection was done that way:
That's quite the picture, and I'm like you - I automatically assume that flash and tripods are not allowed.
It's pretty quiet about the K-S1 part of the forum, so here's a couple I took recently.
These polar bears were fun to look at:
It was hard to get close enough to take a picture though.
I came home from Vegas with a cold, so I've been reading Strobist 101, finally trying to learn how to use a flash. It's much more satisfying now that I have the Cactus V5 triggers, but not so much the first time I tried some of the techniques - it's really difficult to get a good picture of something that is both reflective AND refractive. On the other hand, I learned a lot about how NOT to do it!
My second try was with a subject that was neither reflective or refractive. I had 2 light sources - direct light coming from the window camera left and the flash camera right. This photo is actually a composite - the bust is from the picture I took with the flash and the background is from the one I took with no flash - the flash's light spilled over onto the background sheet too much and I wanted the darker background. Yes, I know the bed sheet hasn't been ironed and I couldn't open up the lens enough to have it more OOF, I now understand why many want Pentax to have the sync speed faster than 1/180!
The weather didn't exactly encourage me to go outside much. I was too lazy to move the tripod from the one room in the house that has a white wall into the room with this window. So this was taken hand-held using live view and focus peaking (the camera wanted to focus on the trees in the background, not the window). It had snowed the night before, the sun came out and melted it, but the temperature didn't get above freezing, so the water re-froze on the window.
Today was a little better - when I got up it was 16 F but it made it up to 33 F. Who says it doesn't freeze in Southern California???
On to the new year and more reading about flash. Do I now buy some type of grid? Or leave it for a while? There's so many interesting sounding things to get for a flash, it's like starting the photography hobby all over again!
Hope someone else got some fireworks pictures, they are banned up here and I wasn't feeling up to driving 50 plus miles to somewhere that was going to have a display.