It's 7:30 Pm

It's 7:30PM. I am in my backyard shooting birds. No sun, cloudy conditions. I raised my ISO to 2000. I added a flash. The shutter speed was 200 and the F 5.6. I needed a shutter speed of 1000. Any thoughts?

If it's too dark you can't do anything about it. Your flash won't work at 1/1000s for sure. Get some serious film lights and barbecue your birds ;)

The birds are cooked.

Are you using high speed sync on your flash?? You said the shutter speed was 1/200 and added a flash. If you are not using high speed sync with the flash, you shutter will be limited to the sync speed of your camera. 1/200 is a fairly common sync speed. Of course using high speed sync decreases the effective range of the flash greatly. You don't say how far away the birds are so maybe that isn't an issue. More info would help. Camera system, flash, etc.

I was about 50 ft. What I wanted to do is get a faster shutter speed. I raised the ISO to 2000,4000,and 5000 without getting a faster shutter speed.

Keith's correct you need to activate the high speed synch on your flash and he's also correct that using it will decrease the distance your flash will be effective. Using a better beamer can help offset this issue some. Do you use Canon, Nikon or another body?

Canon 5D.

Most of the Canon dedicated flashes like the 580ex and 580ex II have a high speed flash button on the back of the flash. On the 580s it's the 3rd button on the right going from left to right. It has an arrow and an h. If you push this button you should see the arrow and the h near the left hand corner of the lcd on the flash. This will put you into high speed synch and allow the flash and camera to operate together at speeds faster than 1/200. I leave it on most of the time because if you are back in a situation where you are shooting at less than 1/200 it will automatically revert to regular flash anyway.

Thanks for the help.

what lens are u using with the 5d

Canon 100-400mm L

Have not tried it, but I have serious doubts that high speed sync will throw much (if any) light that far. What you need is either a Better Beamer on your flash (used at full power, not HSS) or an Einstein monolight for with 11 inch LRT reflector to throw a ton of light. The shutter speed doesn't matter. You can simply crush the daylight with the flash. Ambient won't matter. With flash, shutter speed doesn't matter either.


Kent in Akureyi, IS

Have you considered simply placing flash close to where the birds perch and simply firing it with a CyberSync? Might be your cheapest option.


Kent in SD

With flash, shutter speed doesn't matter either.

Kent - That's only true if the flash is way above your ambient and really is your main light. Otherwise, you do still need a fast shutter speed in a lot of cases. Especially if shooting a fast moving subject, since some of the ambient is going to show up during the exposure.

7:30? 7:30 PM?

Well shoot. The sun isn't even going down till 10:41PM up here according to the weather service!

Since it's backyard shooting have you considered adding floods? I agree that shutter sync speed is your problem, and you have to work around that if the strobe is your principle light. You can buy some serious floods for a lot less money than you'll put into additional strobes, then do a custom white balance and be on your merry way.

David--

I was thinking that for a backyard shot, it would be fairly easy to simply overpower ambient using a 500+ ws monolight.


Kent in SD

...it would be fairly easy to simply overpower ambient using a 500+ ws monolight.

Sure, but it didn't sound to me like that's what the original poster was looking for. I took "no sun, cloudy" to mean an overcast day, and not wanting it to look like a heavily flashed night shot. But I'm making a lot of assumptions there.

Mike - It can help with this kind of thing if you give a complete description of the setup and what you're going for.

I was using a canon 5D,300Mm L,tripod,and cloudy day.