Relaxing after a big day

I found myself on the other side of a camera lens last Saturday at my nephew (or as he is now, my godson) Samuel’s christening in Carrigaline.  My role as godfather required me to stand in for a few photographs in the church after the christening and required me to leave the photography to someone else for a change.

After the christening we all went back to my sister’s house for some post-christening refreshments, and I did manage to take a few photos there.  Being late afternoon at this time of year, there wasn’t a whole lot of available light, so I took the opportunity to use my flash in a mode that I rarely use it – TTL.  TTL stands for “through-the-lens”, and refers to how cameras meter light for a flash exposure.  When a flash is used in this mode the camera fires the flash before it makes the exposure, meters the light from the flash coming back off the subject back in through the lens and then makes adjustments to the flash power based on that feedback so that the actual exposure will be good.  All this happens in, literally, the blink of an eye, and it looks to the subject as if the flash has just fired once.  It’s a sophisticated technology that can fail as much as it can succeed.  For instance, in much the same way that a camera can get confused when exposing a very bright or a very dark subject, TTL flash exposures can get similarly confused, and so it is important when using it to be willing to override it to some extent by adjusting the power up or down on the flash.

It is this technique that I was playing with for many of the shots I took and indeed I found the TTL flash worked well when I added 2/3rds of a stop of flash power, to account for most of the shots including Samuel who was first dressed in a white christening gown, and later in a white “baby grow”, both of which were bright and had potential to confuse the system.

For the shot I’ve posted above though, I reverted to available light.  Why? So that I wouldn’t wake Samuel.  He had just fallen asleep and been put down in his beanbag and I didn’t want to be the one who woke him back up!   I liked this view of him balmed out after a busy day as the centre of attention, so I turned off the flash, bumped up the ISO, opened up my aperture, and managed to get a 1/50th of a second shutter speed that I could hand hold to grab a wide-angle shot of him recuperating.