Owner`s manual

4.3. SHORT SUMMARY ON USING WIRELESS FLASH 29

P and A mode (called No-Brainer mode by Gary Walts in [15]). Just press the force ﬂash button on

camera body. The result will habe about one stop underexposed background/ambient light so it’s not

what you usually want as daylight-balanced ﬁll-in ﬂash. But it’s great for backlight.. .

In P and A mode you can use SLOW SYNC method. SLOW SYNC is designed to make your shutter

speed long enough to get proper exposure of ambient light

. According to Phil Brandons notes on

ﬂash programing(Table 4.1 on page 26 and 4.1.6 on page 28) the ambient light in this mode should be

exposed without any compensation (in my experiences it is sometimes up to 0 5 EV underexposed)

– the same situation you probably want with daylight ﬁll-in ﬂash. In my experiences it worked O. K.

except for the high-speed sync (HSS mode) when it has usually no effect on shutter speed

. When

you want especially subtle ﬁll-in you can dial 1 or even 2 EV ﬂash compensation.

P and A mode

– You need to compensate (ambient) exposure decrease invoked automatically by the camera

in those modes when ﬂash is turned on. Amount of compensation varies on ambient light

level but usualy you need to set about 1 EV. Unless you have Maxxum/Dynax 7 with ﬂash

compensation detached from ambient compensation bear in mind that ﬂash output increases by

the same amount as the ambient compensation set.

– Now you need to compensate ﬂash for both the automatic increase due to ambient exposure

compensation and the ﬂash compensation that you want to dial in. In case of 1 ambient

compensation you need to dial 1 ﬂash compensation to get original ﬂash power. Than you can

go further with your intended ﬂash compensation – if you want to have ﬂash power increased

by 0 5 you need to dial-in 1 5 total ﬂash compensation.

Disadvantage of this approach is in the fact that overall exposure compensation that camera sets

after turning on the ﬂash may be exactely one stop (if camera decides it’s frontlight situation) but it

may be even more so you never know what compensation exactely should be set unless you do the

measurement with ﬂash turned off.

Most precise ﬁll-in ﬂash can be obtained using M (Brainer mode) mode described above but it’s the most

time consuming. For faster work SLOW-SYNC would be probably the choice.

Notes:

When ﬂash is the main (only) source of light you can achieve following results with compentsation

– C 0; FC 0 – properly exposed picture

– C 0; FC 1 – one stop underexposed picture

– C 0; FC 1 – one stop overexposed picture

– C 1; FC 1 – properly exposed picture (no effect)

(this is based on tests with Dynax 600si/3600HS(D)/Kodak Ektoachrome E200 slide ﬁlm).

4.3 Short summary on using wireless ﬂash

[Author(s): Gary Friedman. Reviewed by: Petr Holub.]

Well, embedded within these comments lie two other misconceptions about Minolta’s wireless ﬂash which

will be debunked in the forthcoming article. However, I’ll outline them brieﬂy here:

Intent behind described in Minolta manuals is night photography with some foreground object – e. g. person – lit by ﬂash; both

foreground and background should be properly exposed

This behavior can be expected because of primary raison d’ˆetre of SLOW SYNC mode, i.e. low-light photography, when you

wouldn’t have your ﬂash in HSS mode.