Gridspot part 2

The human eye has much different capability than a dslr camera, and this can be used both positively and negatively. While the human eye can see about 13 EV levels, a camera might only be able to do 3 or 4. When the human eye can make out an object in a hallway, the camera can present that in a much different way. It is necessary to understand the tools and capabilities of your equipment and how they differ to envision how your photographs will look.


When I showed my wife the gridspot and the beautiful light circles it makes, the obvious question is why or when would I use it. Here is one example borrowed from the Saxon Pc website. The light circle is restricted to the subject, and the ambient light can be underexposed to show a black background. Even though the background is black, parts of her picture like her hand are actually overexposed and blown out.


This photo below is taken with the flash camera right at 1/16th power, shot on manual with a 50mm lens at f4.5, and an exposure of 1/180sec with the large gridspot. The lights are on but not visible. The darkened area behind is the white hallway in our apartment, but because the light was restricted so well, I was able to leave out all the ambient light by underexposing about 3 stops, which seems to be more than enough to lower the ambient light to darkness.



The manual settings are really useful to create the special effects. Otherwise, I could make an EV adjustment of -3, but I would likely have to compensate for that on the flash. While I could have done this in Photoshop (and likely would have blackened out the garbage can under the model), it would be very hard to duplicate perfectly.