One of the most important concepts in flash photography is sync speed. This is the fastest shutter speed that your camera can use with normal flash. For most DSLRs, the sync speed is 1/250″. Your camera’s sync speed may be faster or slower — so check your user manual if you don’t know.
Why can’t I use flash at any shutter speed I want? This is a fair question. It has to do with the design of your camera’s shutter. If you use a DSLR or an old-school 35mm film camera, your shutter mechanism has two curtains in front of the sensor/film plane. During the exposure, the 1st/front curtain opens and then the 2nd/rear curtain closes. The difference in timing between the movement of the two curtains is your shutter speed.
At many shutter speeds, the 1st-curtain will completely clear the sensor before the 2nd-curtain begins to close. If your flash fires at any of these speeds, the entire sensor will see the flash — which is what you normally need to make a flash photo. Your sync speed is the fastest shutter speed at which the 1st-curtain completely clears the sensor before the 2nd-curtain begins to move.
At faster shutter speeds, the 2nd-curtain begins to close before the 1st-curtain is completely open. The shutter literally becomes a slit between the curtains that moves across the sensor. So, there is no point at which the flash can illuminate the entire sensor.
My old hometown, Phoenix, is known widely (especially among snowbound tourists in January) as being in “the Valley of the Sun.” Phoenix was certainly the perfect sun-filled place last Saturday to share my high speed sync techniques with a gang of great students from around Arizona. Our venue for the day was Don Giannatti’s studio. [If you don't already read Don's blog Lighting-Essentials.com, you'll find it contains tons of great info.]
If you’re not familiar with HSS, as a Speedliter you should be — especially if you live in a sun-drenched climate. [And to my friends in the UK and northern Europe, you should know about HSS too so that you'll have another reason to head south on holiday.] HSS is a Speedlite-only technique that effectively turns the flash into a continuous light source for a brief duration.
HSS enables you to shoot at literally any shutter speed on your camera. The pic above was shot at 1/1000″, f/11, ISO 100 in full sun. By underexposing the ambient light with the shutter, I was able to saturate the color of the graffiti and bathe Ted in great light. The shot below is how the camera wanted to expose the scene in Aperture-priority mode. The difference in the ambient exposure is about 3-stops.
Click through on this pic to see a high-res version with lighting notes.
Learn More About High-Speed Sync
Dimming The Sun With High-Speed Sync: Part 1
Dimming The Sun With High-Speed Sync: Part 2
Speedliting Workshops & Events With Syl Arena
Activating HSS On A Canon Speedlite - on the back of the Speedlite, push the third button from the left (the one with the flashbolt-H icon).
Activating HSS on Nikon Speedlights – the subject of the hero shot above, Ted Wendel, is a Nikon shooter who attended the workshop. Look in your Speedlight manual for “Auto-FP Sync.” To activate HSS/AFP, you have to dig through a couple of menu levels into in your Speedlight. When you find it, set it on your “My Camera” menu for quicker activation. Thx Ted for the tip!
For Canonistas, activating HSS is just a button-push away.
It’s no secret that I abhor the use of a hotshoe. Even when using a single Speedlite, I typically move it off-camera on a long E-TTL cord (details here). I’ll admit, though, that there are situations where the hotshoe is a perfectly fine place for a Speedlite. My third location shoot with cartographer David Yun on the streets of downtown San Luis Obispo for San Louie magazine was one of them.
Sometimes you don’t have the time or room to light like you should. Between the traffic, the pedestrians, and an unusually hot day, this had to be a run-and-gun shoot. I did not have the time or the space to set up an off-camera Speedlite on a stand. The goal was to make a few quick portraits of David with his ultra-modern GPS system standing on top of a cluster of century-old solar tubes that illuminate a part of subterranean SLO. We had just a few minutes and then had to move on to our last location.
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My assignment yesterday, for the soon-to-be-launched San Louie Magazine, was to do an full-page portrait of David Yun, the head of Geographic Information Services for the city of San Luis Obispo. David supervises a team of mapmakers who plot everything from bicycle traffic and storm runoff to creating three-dimensional maps of all the buildings downtown. Like most of us, modern cartographers spend far more time at their computers that they do in the field. I was given carte blanche with a few loose guidelines… “think about layering of information, think about layering of the city.” I was given a rough draft of the story that my photo would accompany and David’s contact info.
So, in three parts, I’ll take you through the three different location shoots that we did over the course of three hours. Seems like three is today’s magic number.
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Welcome to Quick Questions & Answers #1
As I wrote recently (here), I’ve been buried for the past couple of months with my US seminar tour and the completion of the ‘Speedliter’s Handbook.’ Along the way, I’ve tried to answer the many questions that were emailed in directly. In an effort to share the knowlege, I’ve decided to start Quick Questions & Answers. These are not going to be well-polished thoughts or well-edited text. In fact, they will be more like stream-of-consciousness ramblings.
To submit your question, please email it (along with your name and city/country) to
I won’t be able to answer every question. I will try to answer the most interesting ones.
Radio Triggers and Manual Control
Just wondering: is there a particular combo of a radio trigger and a speedlite (off-brand, Canon, Nikon, whatever) that would allow me to set manual power levels from the camera (either using the trigger’s transmitter or through some other means). It’s a bit of a pain to hobble over to each speedlite to change power levels, especially when one of them is stuck in an Apollo softbox. I know you can probably do this with either the Radiopopper PZx or the PW ControlTL setups; any other options? I mean, what if you threw a studio strobe into the fray?
Thanks, Sohail – San Francsico
You have manual wireless control built into the Canon system. Switch the Master to Manual and the slaves will follow suit. This enables you to control each group A-B-C individually. It’s best to do this via the LCD on your camera.
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When teaching new Speeliters how to dim the sun with High-Speed Sync (which I wrote about here in Part One), the question is often asked “why not just shoot at the normal sync speed with a really small aperture so that you can use regular flash?” My response is “you should go out and try.” [This article, by the way, also applies to all types of flash that won't work with your camera in High-Speed Sync: third-party speedlights, monolights and location/studio strobes.]
As a reminder, here’s the short version of sync speed: it is the fastest shutter speed at which you can nornally shoot flash. In a DSLR, the sync speed is limited to 1/200″ or so because the shutter is comprised of two curtains in front of the sensor—the first-curtain being fully closed and the second-curtain being fully open when the camera is ready to fire. In order for the flash to illuminate the entire sensor, it has to fire after the first-curtain has completely opened and before the second-curtain begins to close. That defines the sync speed. If you shoot faster than the sync speed, then the second-curtain will be covering some of the sensor and you’ll have a dark bar along one edge of the frame.
So, if you want to stay in normal flash mode, your shutter speed is limited to the sync speed. On my 5DM2, that’s 1/200″. Unless you are shooting a 1D-series camera, your sync speed is probably 1/200″ too.
If your shutter speed is capped by the sync speed, then you can only dim the ambient light via the aperture. O.K., so how dark will it be if I shoot at 1/200″ and f/22. Let’s head outside at high noon and see what it looks like.
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High-Speed Sync above / ambient sunlight light below.
High-speed Sync is, without a doubt, the feature that sets dedicated small flash apart from all other types of flash. By “dedicated small flash” I mean that if you are a Canonista, then you are shooting with Canon Speedlites, and if you are a Nikonian, then you are shooting with Nikon Speedlights. By “all other types of flash” I mean , 3rd-party speedlights (like Vivitar and Sunpak), monolights (like Alien Bees) and portable/studio strobes (like an Elincrhom Ranger RX or Profoto Pro-8). You have to have a dedicated Speedlite to shoot in High-Speed Sync.
If you’re not familiar with High-Speed Sync, the short version is that it is a special flash mode in which the Speedlite fires an ultra-fast series of flashes rather than one big pop. The pulse is so fast, topping 30,000 cycles per second, that it appears as a regular pop to us. What High-Speed Sync does is turn your Speedlite into a continuous light source so that you can shoot at virtually any shutter speed. When firing in normal mode, the maximum shutter speed on your camera for flash work is in the vicinity of 1/200″. [For more details on the basics of High-Speed Sync, read my article Simple Truths About High-Speed Sync over on PixSylated.] Thanks to High-Speed Sync, I can use super-fast shutter speeds to dim the ambient light (the sun) and selectively light my subject with a Speedlite. In short, High-Speed Sync gives me the ability to create images that I otherwise could not shoot.
So, here’s where I started: mid-afternoon sun coming straight at the camera. The first shot I always take is with my camera in Tv (shutter-priority automatic) at or close to the sync speed for my camera. I want to see how the camera sees the ambient light. There is no flash in the following shot.
Starting out: Shutter-priority automatic, 1/160", f/7.1, ambient only, no flash
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Speedliter’s Handbook
Nearly 400 pages of Syl Arena's how-to and why-to on lighting with small flash. Shoot Canon? The Handbook shows you the details of how to work the buttons and dials of Canon Speedlites. Shoot Nikon? Nearly 2/3 of the Handbook applies to all types of small flash.
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