(If you want to watch the video go here!)
Hey, it’s Jay P. here from The Slanted Lens. I’ve got Elsie here with me today. “Hello.” We’re going to show you how to set up a speed light to be able to shoot high-speed sync on location.We’ll show you how to set up the Westcott FJ80se to do high-speed sync. Then we’ll show you how to use that speed light to high-speed sync in bright light situations like this and some more contextual situations and some really tight beautiful bokeh situations. So let’s get out there and learn how to do high-speed sync using a speed light.
So what is high-speed sync and why do we use it? If we’re shooting outside and we want a very shallow depth of field we want to go to like f/2.8 on our aperture. Now our shutter would have to be much faster to give us a correct exposure in direct sunlight. It’s going to have to be like at 1/1,000th or 1/2,000th depending on the situation. Cameras will only sync up to 1/200th of a second unless you have a global shutter. Which is coming out in cameras now, that’s a whole other story. But if you don’t, then you need high-speed sync.
Because what happens is up to 1/200th of a second your shutter opens and closes, opens, flash, closes. At 1/200th it opens and closes. After 1/200th of a second, when it goes to 1/250th of a second, the bottom blade of the shutter starts to move across the sensor and closes. 
There’s never a time when the entire sensor is open and allows the light to hit the sensor from the strobe light. So you have to be able to high-speed sync. Which means that as that curtain moves across the sensor the strobe is pulsing, pop, pop, pop, pop. It paints in all of those different, paints it in as it goes up, and gives you an image. That’s what high-speed sync is.
Shutters are two curtains that open and close, the first curtain and then the second curtain. At speeds slower than 1/125th of a second, sometimes 1/160th, depending on your camera, the first curtain opens and stays open until the shutter closes. Then the second curtain closes. That’s for slower speeds than 1/125th or 1/160th. At shutter speeds faster than 1/125th of a second, the first curtain of the shutter opens and before it can completely open the second shutter starts to fall behind and close. This means that there’s no time that the sensor is open to light all at once. 
A small opening is traveling across the sensor exposing it as it goes. If your strobe goes off during this time it shows a black bar on the bottom of the frame. The way high-speed sync solves this problem is it starts firing the strobe in pulses as the first curtain opens and it continues to pulse until after the second curtain closes. This pulsing is happening so fast that the sensor perceives this as continuous light.
So it’s important to understand that high-speed sync is when you want a shallow depth of field. If you’re fine shooting at f/16 you don’t need high-speed sync. But f/16 doesn’t look very good. Everything is in focus. 
Everything is just, there’s none of that beautiful, soft bokeh that makes your background look soft. And looks simple and creates kind of an isolation for your subject matter. The subject matter stands out better. It gives you a simple image. That’s why you use high-speed sync, in order to get that really shallow depth of field in direct sunlight.
Let’s see how we set up our speed light and our trigger to be able to do high-speed sync. So when I first turn my FJ80se on I’m going to be in this main menu. Here I can set my camera, I’m on Lumix because I’m shooting on the S52 today. Now here I can also choose my sync. It’s got rear first and rear or high-speed sync. So I’m going to set that on high-speed sync.
Then I’m going to take my mode and I’m going to come over here to client mode. I know I’m in client mode because you got a little Z there that has a little arrow at the end of it. Now I’m in client mode on my FJ80se. Now as I turn my trigger on, on my trigger I’m set for Lumix. I’m on channel one which matches my speed light. And right here I have three options.
This top button is for the A group. This is A group and I can put it to sleep. I can put it on TTL or I can put on manual mode. We’re going to be on manual. From manual here, now when I click on it allows me to change the power up and down. And then from here I’ll sync. 
So now we’re in high-speed sync. So we can set the trigger on our camera and we can get started. And we can move the light away from the camera.
So today I’m going to be shooting on the Panasonic S52. I’m going to be using an adapter to use a 70-200mm f/2.8 Tamron EF lens. It’s a G2 lens. Beautiful lens because you get that 200mm so things fall out of focus on that end. I’ll probably shoot the second setup with a 28 to 75mm so I get a wider contextual shot. But still at f/2.8. So let’s get to it.
As a touring music photographer, lately my regular clients have been Halsye, Kacey Musgraves, Marina, Madeon, Porter Robinson. It’s very important to be able to read the room and know when you should be clicking the shutter and when you should just be putting it away and enjoying the moment.
And sometimes if you’re not sure, sometimes you just go, “Are you comfortable with me photographing right now?” and they’ll say it and then we’ll go. You know, always get their consent. It always, it just depends on the person you’re photographing. Sometimes they’ll say, “You know what, it doesn’t matter. I could be crying on the floor. I could be doing this. I could be completely no makeup, it’s fine, shoot everything.” Some artists are more of a, “Let’s wait until I got my makeup on.” It just depends. You always got to gauge it.
Hi, I’m Yasi. I’m a touring music photographer and my SKB case goes all over the world.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and see how we set up high-speed sync on our camera, our camera settings. First off, I’m going to set my camera to manual. I usually go right to f/2.8. That’s as wide open as this lens will give me. And now I’ll step back at a 200mm lens and I will shoot and just look at my meter and get the background to where it’s exposed correctly.
So I’m just going to look at the background. I want the background to look good at f/2.8. And whatever shutter speed that takes, it may be 1/500th, 1/1,000th, 1/2,000th. Once I have that I’ll now turn on the speed light. I’ll generally go to 8 or 9, full power, and just see exactly what that gives me. Now I have control of that background. I can make it brighter or darker but it will affect the face some. Even though my aperture is set mostly to match the power setting of the speed light, there’s enough ambient out here that if I go from 1/500th to 1/1,000th of a second, her face will get darker. So I’ve got to be able to bring the speed light up. This is where you do hit the one disadvantage of an FJ80. It’s 80 watt seconds. An FJ200 is 200, that’s a stop and a third. An FJ400 is now two and a third stops. So that more power when you high-speed sync will certainly help you to control the background better. But with the FJ80se I’m able to control that background just fine in this situation. I get a beautiful light on her face. But as I do change the shutter and make it faster and faster it makes her face a little darker. So I’m going to probably stay around 1/500th of a second, maybe a 1/1,000th. But somewhere in that range is going to give me a nice background.
I’m shooting towards the shadow side here. I’m not shooting into a super bright background. If I shoot into a really super bright background it’s going to be different. I’m going to have to go to a faster shutter speed. In order to stay within the limits of the power of this unit, I’m going to shoot into a little darker background, which gives me more control in the background and enough power to light her face. It looks absolutely beautiful. So here’s a couple of shots. Let’s take a look at them.
So there’s our first shot at 1/500th of a second at f/2.8. 
I have my speed light at 8. So it’s not at full power yet. The background looks very nice. I’m going to make the background just a little darker. 
I’m going to go to a 1/1000th of a second. But I’m going to need to take the speed light and I’m going to push it up to a full power, go up to nine. And I think that’s going to give me a pretty nice shot. That’ll look very much like the last one. It looks very rich and the background is very deep. It’s just a nice look. 
But I really kind of like, I think maybe not 1/1,000th of a second but I think I would probably go to 1/800th of the second. I’m going to come down with my power just a little bit to like 8.7 and get another shot here. That looks beautiful, it really does. It has gorgeous light on her hair. Beautiful light on her face. And the background just has a rich kind of depth to it and just a rich saturation to it. So great, just a beautiful image.
So there’s how we’re going to change our high-speed sync. Sometimes you do have to raise the power and lower the power of your speed light in order to give you the right light on the face when you change the shutter. So that’s something to be aware of as you’re changing your shutter.
So here’s our first lighting set up. And let me tell you why I chose this place. I only have one light and so because I only have one light I still want some separation. And I want some light in her hair. So I turn her and I’m looking with the sun as a rim light from behind. So it’s going to give me rim light in her hair, which looks really nice. Now I can use that as kind of my second light. Because the sun is behind her, I’m looking into the shadows. So I’m not having to overpower as much light back there as if I was looking into a broad sunlit scene. So it just makes it much easier for me to create a nice high-speed sync portrait here. Because I’m not having to fight too much light in the background. It’s still bright and it’s still sunny out here. But it’s not so bright that it’s going to overpower my speed light. So this is my choice, rim light from behind looking into the shadows.
One other thing I considered when I chose this location is that all the foliage is not super close to me. It allows things to fall more out of focus, if they’re further back and further away from me. If all this foliage was right next to her, like a few feet, you’re never going to get that to look as nice. 
If it’s a little deeper, further behind it’s going to fall into a nice bokeh much quicker. So let’s take a look at some of these images.
So I may move around a little bit and just change my background. The foliage is going to be a little brighter in some places, a little darker in others. Come back and do a little wider shot so I see a little more like down to her pockets. 
So if I move to my left there’s a very dark background back there. Especially if I move in a little bit, very dark. Whereas, if I move to my right just a little bit, I see this kind of young tree back there and it’s just a little softer, a little more spring looking I guess, if that’s a term, spring looking. 
If I keep coming around and I get a lot of that bokeh behind her it’s just a lot more airy, not quite as dark as on that other side. Oh, it’s a beautiful look. See the grass and the trees? That all looks really pretty.
So when I go to 70mm I get a more wide view here. It becomes a little more contextual and so I really, I see a lot more of that background. Which means it’s a little brighter for me. So I changed my shutter. I went to 1/800th of a second and that kind of help bring that background back down and in control. But her face still looks really good. The light on her face looks really great. “Just a nice simple, smile here, there you go.”
So in this situation I’m shooting and I’m wanting to show more of the environment that we’re in. I’m not trying to isolate the background. So it’s just her and an out of focus background. I want to see the fence. I want to see the trees. I want to get a sense of where she’s at. So I’ve gone to a much wider lens. 
I’ll go to 24mm for some, 50mm, maybe a 70mm. But the high-speed sync is going to brighten her face. But I can allow the background to be burned in with the shutter. So I’m setting my shutter back to about, now I got my shutter at 1/500th of a second. And that 1/500th of a second is going to give me just the right amount of background. I think it works really well. And I see this fence kind of curve in and go into the background. It looks really nice. So it’s really good for this kind of contextual as well. It doesn’t have to be a super long lens to give you a nice image. It keeps the background under control and gives you beautiful light on the face. So let’s shoot a few more of these and take a look at them.
So there are other situations where high-speed sync is really an interesting concept to use. And that’s when you’re inside. So we’re going to do a lesson on that. Just see what you think. High-speed sync inside. Why would you do that?
So let’s wrap this up. High-speed sync is a beautiful way to work outside in direct sunlight because it gives you that shallow depth of field. A speed light, generally speaking, does not have as much power. Well, speed lights don’t have as much power as larger strobe heads. But even so, with a speed light you can do high-speed sync in lighting situations if you just control the background and where you look. It allows you to give you enough exposure from the speed light to get a great look on the face and a beautiful background. So I think using a speed light doing high-speed sync is a beautiful look. I hope you enjoyed this. So keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!