Underexposing the background

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Originally Posted by Colin Southern

Speaking personally, it's a number of things, like the reliability & longevity that a quality item delivers -- but it's also the performance. Using flashes as a case-in point, how many times have we heard of folks buying cheap flashes and finding ...

- Inconsistent exposures from models that do have ETTL

- Models going into thermal protection after just a few high-power shots

- Poor build quality

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Understood. I have experienced the three above.

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Kinda reminds me a bit of the time I needed a charger for my Nokia phone; the genuine product was $80, but one could buy a knock-off charger for $19.95. No kidding, I bought no less than THREE of those $19.95 knock-off chargers ... and then spent $80 on the genuine product. Total cost? Around $140.

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I've experienced this too. A good example was a P&S that came with an extra free battery. I kept getting OK shots but often horribly blurry ones. I finally realized that the blurry ones only occurred when the generic battery was in the camera.

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With flashes, I think a lot of people don't fully understand the need or the requirement for them

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Guilty... Even though I do my homework first to see what I am getting, I don't understand the need for some functions. (Like now with triggers that don't support TTL or HSS).

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With the 600EX-RT series I can trigger them with radio - I have ETTL II - I have HSS - I can control up to 5 different groups - the flashes even report back to the master controller when they're ready to fire. They're not cheap, but then again, cameras and lenses and computers and editing software together cost a LOT more - and yet lighting makes probably more difference to the quality of the shot than the quality of the camera, lens, or PC.

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You convincing me more and more to use my lens budget on new flashes.

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Unfortunately, Photography isn't a cheap hobby if one wants to constantly improve their work. I used to fly twin engine planes for a hobby (at $400 an hour) - and I swear that it cost me less than photography!

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For sure. I used to try to explain to my wife why I needed a new microphone every few months, and now that my mic locker is full, the explanations ave moved to camera gear. Difference being my wife can at least see the mics bring in money.

Hi Colin, regarding color casts, I don't do any special with my processing with cokin photos, so to your answer, nothing really. Like I said, the color cast is usually undetectable :)
In regards to flashes, Kenny makes a good point about knowing what you are buying, don't just blindly go with the cheapest, that WOULD be wasteful. When I bought my first cheapo flash, I knew exactly what I was buying - a cheap full manual flash with an optical trigger! I also knew that I could learn and practice the basics of flash photography with that and a $30 rf trigger, versus buying a flash, a pw tx, and a pw rx for ~$1000. One last thought, when you were learning to fly planes, what were you flying? Surely one could make an argument that you just weren't flying the best, so why bother?

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Originally Posted by speedneeder

One last thought, when you were learning to fly planes, what were you flying? Surely one could make an argument that you just weren't flying the best, so why bother?

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Unfortunately, they didn't have F/A-18's at the Aero Club :(

Thankfully I was just hiring what I did learn in though :)