Friday 28 March 2008: Daffodil

I can't go in to the office quite yet because my laptop is running some tests, so I thought I'd get in an early blip. We got a bunch of daffodils in the supermarket last weekend for £1, and they have come out beautifully so I thought it was time to share.

I didn't want a distracting background, so in the end I used one of my favourite techniques which is setting the shutter speed so fast there is no natural light in the image. The camera then uses just enough light from the flash to illuminate the subject, as long as it is in fairly close.

Many people think that (especially on a compact camera) a flash is just on or off. In fact, most decent compacts use TTL (Through The Lens) metering to shut off the flash once there is enough light in the image. Mine lets me set the exposure target for the TTL flash seperately from any other manual/auto exposure modes. In this case I set it to -0.7eV to help ensure the background was dark and to preserve the more delicate tones on the petals.

I use this technique a lot underwater, like here.

Geek? Me? Never!

• SP560UZ:
• f/5.0:
• 1/160":
• 4.7mm:
• ISO 50

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