The Big, Black Camera of Doom

Experiment #1 was with distance. This is an ISO 100 shot down a dark hallway. Below is the same picture with the built in flash. Note also that the photo using the built-in flash is slightly out-of-focus. I'll talk more about this in a bit.

The swivel-and-tilt head lets me angle the flash away from what I am shooting. This allows for more interesting lighting as seen here (and yes, this is my teddy-bear).

Indirect flash allows for the otherwise impossible - like pictures of cats where their eyes aren't red, Satanic orbs of evil.

Even on Tharsis, who has particularly reflective eyes, even by cat standards. Eliminating red-eye on a person is a cakewalk compared to eliminating red-eye on a cat.

In this case I am reflecting off the wall and zoomed to the limit of my lens. I took a bunch of these of different little things around the apartment. I just happened to like this one. It also shows something else I am excited about...

...improved depth of field. The flash will work with extremely high shutter speeds (the camera is capable of 1/4000 sec exposures). This means I can fill-flash in bright outdoor situations and still have the aperture wide open. This will be good for weddings.

And now back to the out-of-focus picture of the hall. My camera on its own uses visible light for the auto-focus. If I am in a situation with limited light (which I often am) or pointing at something with insufficient contrast, the auto-focus has a hard time. The built-in flash can be used to illuminate the scene with a strobe, but the few times I've tried this with human subjects I've been met with cries of, "Augh! I've been blinded!" The new flash projects a red pattern. Not blinding and the pattern itself gives the necessary contrast for the auto-focus. This will be very handy for the portraits at Sin City and for fashion shows. This image was taken in near complete darkness (bathroom with the door shut and lights out).