[Leica] Flash with Leica! Sacrilege!

[don.dory at gmail.com (Don Dory)]

Peter,
Congratulations, you have just discovered the wonderful world of digital
flash technology.  All the majors have invest major dollars in flash systems
that will work with the digital sensor.  I think and this is just
conjecture, but that duration plays a key role in how the imaging chip see
flash.  Thrysister flashes cut off the flash when they see enought ligtht,
flashes can get as short as 1/50,000 of a second at really short distances.

Best bet is to use the flash on manual and build a table of f/stops for
specific distances just like we did in the old days.  Another approach would
be to get a small ball head and then an SC17 or whatever the new number off
camera cable so that you can move the flash and still be TTL.

Don
don.dory@gmail.com


On 5/29/06, Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net> wrote:
>
> OK folks, I know this is not exactly the Leica Way, and I'm as much of an
> available light guy as anybody here.  But sometimes you just gotta get the
> @#$%ing picture.
>
> I shot a friend's wedding, PJ-style, a week ago.  I used available light
> while it was available, and switched to bounce flash when it was
> not.  Once
> the sun went down and light wasn't coming into the skylights and windows,
> exposure would have been around 1/30 at f/1.4 at ISO 1600, with lots of
> shadows and variations.  As much as I love the
> grainy-film-noir-moody-motion-blurry look, it wasn't going to cut it
> there.
>
> So there I was, shooting my M6TTL with my old Vivitar 2500 auto-thyristor
> NON-TTL flash, bouncing light off the ceiling, with the lens set to f/2.8
> as recommended by the flash calculator.  It worked fine most of the time,
> except that I sometimes wanted a vertical shot.  The flash has only a
> bounce head, not a bounce-swivel head, so I had to switch to direct flash
> (yeech) for those, bounce the light off the wall if they were close
> enough,
> or forgo the vertical shot.
>
> So I got to thinking, maybe I ought to invest in a flash with a
> bounce-swivel head, so vertical shots would be more possible.  A used unit
> is certainly a possibility.  I'll need something with reasonably low
> trigger voltage, so I could use it on a digital camera and the M6TTL as
> well as an all-mechanical camera.  Any ideas?
>
> Something weird:  When I was testing the Vivitar flash before the wedding,
> I put it on my Olympus E-1. I shot with all-manual exposure on the camera
> at 1/60 second--well within the flash exposure range of the camera, and
> auto-thyristor mode on the flash.  Yet my exposures varied widely with
> distances between 3 and 20 feet.  On BW400CN print film with the M6TTL,
> there was some variation, but always well within the range of the film, as
> it's always been.  I got the same variation of exposure on the E-1 with
> another (non-tilting) old flash I own.  I was shooting an outside wall of
> my gray house.
>
> So I'm wondering if both flashes are working improperly, if the thyristors
> are calibrated for reasonable results with color print film latitude--not
> precise exposure, or if I generated some weirdness by putting an old
> two-contact auto-flash on a computerized E-1 digithingie.
>
> --Peter
>
>
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