Manual? What Manual? (A bit of tech talk)

So, I had a portrait shooting the other day. Can you imagine the horror when almost all things went south during the shooting? 

The Camera (Canon EOS 5D Mark III) was set to AV to ensure the amount of depth of field I wanted; a single remote flash was set up on a tripod (45° front). I tried it at home, it worked reasonably well there. Everything was set up nicely, I was only slightly nervous and then disaster struck.

Shutter speed was too low, resulting in streaks and blurry pictures.

What had happened? Canon decided to have the 5D react different when set to AV. Quote from another site: "

The flash exposure will be added-into the overall exposure, to create a "slow-sync" situation. The shutter speed will be chosen independently of the flash exposure, so if you're shooting in a dark restaurant, you may have 1 second exposures, creating lots of streaking. Sometimes you may want that, but most of the time I expect you don't.

I surely did not want that. What the heck, Canon? In all other programs and other (Canon) cameras this works different. 

I told the people to remain steady in their poses but this for sure isn't a proper solution every time. At the end I made some pictures with flash and some without just to be sure. The worst thing was to hide my dismay so that the people remained relaxed. I'm not sure that this worked all the time. The manual has at least an indicator on that situation but does not warn the photographer about what might happen:

Canon EOS 5D Mark III manual page excerpt.

So yes, my camera was set to "AUTO" because I lack experience in flash photography. Do I read the manual? Only when a special problem occurs. Do I own a book that explains things further? Now I do.

Lessons learned:

• Read the Manual
• Nothing beats Experience
• If you don't have experience, look for sources on the internet that explain things
• And get help if you're stuck. Most photographers are really nice and helpful guys.

Despite of that, I managed to get one or the other ok-ish picture from the shooting. Here's a sneak peek:

Becky Messer