Just like it says: these people are hundreds of feet from the action yet they use flashes to take pictures. Correct me if I’m wrong but flashes only work for about 15 feet max, so what the hell are these people doing? Are their photos coming out okay in spite of their “incorrect” use of a flash?
They don’t know enough to disable the flash so it goes off. It’s that simple. Their photos probably come out alright, as long as the flash doesn’t hit anything close to them that’s in the cameras field-of-view. (That would give a bright spot that would probably throw off the developing and give them a dark picture.)
In a nutshell, because they’re clueless. Chances are they don’t even know how to turn the auto flash off their point-and-shoot cameras. It annoys me no end seeing all these flashes going off in row Z.
Quite apart from the fact that many of these point-and-shoot cameras have fixed wide-angle lenses (33mm or so) and so any action will be in a tiny area at the centre of the picture, the camera will be adjusting its exposure to allow for the flash doing its job, so you will end up with a woefully underexposed picture. If you switch the flash off, however, depending on the camera, it should increase the exposure time to a suitable amount - which of course means the pic will come out blurry if you are not holding the camera rock steady.
Ideally, in such a setting, you want a decent telephoto lens and very fast film (or equivalent high-ISO setting on a digital camera) to allow you to freeze the action in low light conditions. A tripod would help, too.
I’d disagree with that. The camera’s auto-exposure mechanism factors in the flash light, and so uses a shorter exposure. Seeing as the flash isn’t going to hit anything within range to be bounced back into the lens, the photo will be underexposed.
Depends on the sporting event, really. Most major televised events have so much stadium lighting that you can usually still get a good exposure if you turn the flash off.
Such has been my experience, anyway.
I wonder if the rise of digital photography, with more ‘intelligent’ cameras will put a stop to this.
My camera has a pop-up flash which I rarely if ever use.
That’s a pretty good question but I’m not aware of any point and shoot digicam that disables flash when the lens focuses to infinity. I think the issue may be that with small CCD cameras the focus distance for max flash is virtually the same as infinity. nn 9h6 nm
With P&S film the flash goes off, the film is underexposed and it gets corrected in processing. The result is a high contrast and grainy image but it’s an image and most users never bother to wonder why it’s that way.
There have been intelligent cameras out there for decades that are smart enough to know when a flash isn’t going to work. I don’t think the advent of digital has anything to do with it. Cheap digitals are going to have the same problem cheap film cameras had, expensive digitals the same ability of expensive film cameras.
The default setting on most digital camera that I’ve seen, as well as most of the point and shoots are to use the flash if the current settings aren’t enough. The cameras will generally try to stop down until they hit 120/sec. and then go for the flash as it becomes difficult (for inexperienced photogs) to hold the camera steady under that - at 60, one should be fine, but you’re right on the threshold of blurring.
If someone turned the flash off, of course, you’d still likely get a dark image. Most cameras have a low-light compensator, but I’ve never seen one that turns on automatically.
What impresses me is that the TV cameras can pick up a single P&S flash at rather large distances. You can even see this at NASCAR night races where the cameras can be a quarter mile away from the stands.
Princhester is right. Digital cameras are not really any “smarter” than their film counterparts. The main difference is the medium the final product is recorded on. Any flash-controlling software would be as applicable to digital cameras as analog ones.
Film that has been over or underexposed too much can’t really be “corrected” in processing, unless you mean pushing or pulling the film in development. Even then, you can only do so much and let’s face it-- people who use P&S cameras and can’t disable their flash in a stadium aren’t going to even know what push or pull means, let a lone ask for it to be done.
And the result of underexposed negative film will result in a low contrast print-- not a high contrast one.
Someone referred to cameras getting more intelligent with digital photography. First of all, film cameras are plenty “smart” right now. They won’t change much in the digital realm. In my opinion, the “smarter” a point and shoot is, the “dumber” it gets. Or more accurately, the harder it is to get good results from it easily. This is true for most consumer electronics in general-- the more the manufacturers try to get the gear to do all the thinking for you, the less you learn about the actual processes involved and more importantly, the less control you have over your gear. The fact that it can be impossible on some P&S cameras to defeat the flash in a stadium, or to turn on the flash in bright sunlight (in order to get a nice fill) is a perfect example of this.
And consider APS (Advanced Photo System) cameras/film. A few years ago these were heavily marketed to the masses and sadly, many people trusted Kodak and other manufacturers and bought them up by the millions. APS film is not an advancement, it is a regression. For example, with APS you can chose between regular and panoramic shots. How does it make panoramic shots? By masking the top third and the bottom third of the negative so that the aspect ratio becomes more rectangular. Unfortunately, at the same time it greatly reduces the effective negative size which effectively reduces the resolution of your photographs. The APS neg size is already smaller than a 35mm neg, if you are in panoramic mode the neg area becomes about the size of the old 110 film (maybe 1 x 2 cm). Remember how grainy those were? Just sad.
You aren’t getting any extra image area on the sides with a APS panoramic shot, instead you are just permantly losing image information at the top and bottom. Better to take the shot with a regular 35mm and crop it later— then if still later you decide that you want to see what was above or below the cropped image, you still can–whereas with APS it is forever lost.
If you must get panoramic pictures, either buy a true panoramic camera (they make disposable ones, too) that increases the negative area-- not decreases it; or just use a regular 35mm and mentally crop the image in the viewfinder and then get it cropped when it’s printed, or just get a 8x10 print made and cut off the top and bottom.
Several factors at work here. They are essentially point light sources at that distance, the colour temp is much higher (or at least different) than the ambient light, and even a small flash has a lot of candel power. Add these factors together, and you get an easily discernable burst of light.
As for the OP, yeah, people often have no clue at all.
To Lobbers, just look at the “smart” capabilities of the latest Nikon, Canon, or Minolta 35mm SLRs. And then look at the $35.00 digitals displayed on the pegboard of a Sight & Sound cash wrap. Like the others have said, it’s not the medium that makes a difference.
[hijack]
I live in San Francisco, and therefore see Barry Bonds hit a lot, with a hail of flashbulbs in the stands. What cracks me up isn’t so much the flash, which generally doesn’t have much effect on the photo from a distance, and looks cool anyway. It’s the people who haven’t figured out there’s a five second delay between pressing the button and the shutter clicking. Every game, there’s a hundred people who took 27 pictures of whatever happened five seconds after Barry received a pitch.
What kind of camera has a 5 second delay between pressing the shutter release and the film being exposed? Whatever it is-- I don’t want one!
I know some digital cameras have a slight delay, but not 5 seconds!!!
My film cameras take the picture instantly (well, okay maybe there is a delay of several microseconds, but that’s really no delay to speak of.) A good digital camera also has a extremely short delay-- otherwise, what good would it be?
Five second delay?
What camera have you been using?
Even cheaper digicams, which are notorious for having some shutter lag, are nowhere near five seconds.
Or were you just being hyperbolic?
Using the flash can make for a delay because many feature a “pre-flash” to reduce red eye.
That is incorrect. An APS camera always uses the entire negative. The format switch generally does two things: slides the appropriate mask over the viewfinder, and changes how the camera marks the negative border. The marks are directives the printer follows when printing the negatives. One can take a frame originally taken as a panoramic and reprint it as a H (4x7) or C (4x6) size. The “missing” parts of the frame will be in the print. This was one of the original advertising points of APS. The printer crops out the appropriate part of the frame, not the camera. Although the panoramic size is an enlargement compared to the other two sizes, it can be reprinted at the other sizes should the image come out poorly in panoramic.
I always just thought that peeps were using mostly disposable ones where you had a built in flash and couldn’t turn it off. Either that or people have it set to ‘auto flash’ and the camera decided that a flash is needed even if it isn’t going to make any difference.
Man, my dad let me borrow his one of these the last couple of months. It has a couple of settings, one of which includes this pre-flash. It strobes for 3 seconds or so before it actually takes the picture. And this three second strobe scares the shit out of anyone who’s getting their photo taken with it.
It’s so bright! I wish I could say that I got pictures of people looking horrified, but I didn’t. It takes the picture right before they realise they’ve been blinded 