Sunshine and flash?!

What sorcery is this? Broad bright sunshine AND your on camera flash at the same time? What madness am I going on about? Simple as this. Sometimes, to get the angle you want and the exposure you want you need to pop off your flash (be it an attached flash or your on camera) to get a little bit of fill light to get the image where you want it. How does it end up looking? Well, something like this.

You start out with an image that is framed a lot like you want it to be, buuuuut when you expose for the sky and click that shutter you get this.

ISO400 14mm f/8 1/3200sec

NOW then, framing is alright, sky looks nice, the shore looks alright, but darned if those rocks don't just plain look dull, boring, and well, frankly, completely and totally worthless and underexposed. How do you fix it? You add some fill light!

ISO100 14mm f/22 1/160sec

So, now that we have added fill light you can see that the image just plain pops so much more. You get great highlights up front and a sky that is still nice and defined and not all washed out and overexposed. If you'll notice though, the settings have changed CONSIDERABLY. The reason I had to do this is to accommodate for the D600's maximum shutter sync speed of 1/200th of a second. This is rather inconvenient because in a situation like this where you have a gloriously sunny day, you really need to be able to pop that shutter off as quick as you can. So, I stopped down the lens as far as it would go, minimizing the light coming into the lens. Then, I reduced the ISO to 100 reducing the sensor's sensitivity to light, which allowed me to have the shutter slow down enough to get me the sky exposed correctly and still have the flash give me the right amount of fill. Also, because it was a very bright day, I had the flash bumped down to -3.0 so it wouldn't overwhelm the setting. 

The only unfortunate thing about using the on camera flash though is that with the Rokinon 14m lens the lens hood (which is quite solidly attached) casts a shadow, visible above, when using the built in camera flash on the D600. I could have pulled my bag around and pulled out my SB-900, but, I was balancing on two small rocks over the creek and didn't want to risk dropping something in the water. Oh the things we crazy photographers will do to get the shot, eh?