Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Pump Flash photography

When using a very small aperture and shooting on 5x4 cameras its difficult to get a good soft light with a depth of field from one end to the other. The best way to do is to do pump flash of your studio flash to achieve  this.  if you are photographing a pack shot on a 5x4 camera , several issues should be taken into consideration. First the vertices  which can be set by tilting the back plate . If you need a depth or sharpness to the end you can tile the front lens to get it. Keeping the focus 1/3 from front is very necessary.
Flash meter will give you a reading of at least F8 or F11 which may not be sufficient to get a good focus on both ends. A calculation for one more aperture value down you will need to pump flash at least twice while closing down the aperture.. If you need to capture at F32 or so you need to flash more than 4 times.
The room should be in complete darkness even the modeling light and the emitting  focus light from the camera  should be disengaged. There is also a fall back of light to the focus plane  and the bellows extension  which can give rise to more F drops. Therefore it is necessary to give more light which can be done by pumping the flash and keeping the lens aperture to a small number. Ultimately you will end up of over 4 stop difference when calculating the bellows extension.  I wonder if any one has done this technique on a digital back .