Whew - I'm beat! Went to see a dr in another town today. Was going to do a headshot of the new assistant for their web page -but they were slammed with work and couldn't do it. Of course they had a patient that needed me to check the shade and of course I had 30 grand worth of camera gear in the car and didn't have the camera with the macro lens or the ring or twin flashes!
... so I improvised... I had the 1D Mark IV with a 24-105 on it, set to about 80mm or so. I used a 580 in the shoe mount, pointed up and bounced it off the ceiling about 5 feet away - which worked OK for nice even lighting but not as good as a real ring flash. So the dr went and got a Sigma ring flash that is used on the office Nikon D80. A little worried it wouldn't talk to my Mark IV correctly, I put it on and fired a shot. WOW - overblown! No TTL communication just full on full power. So I rolled the shutter up to 1/250th and the aperture around to ƒ22 and viola! It worked!
Got lucky this time - but i learned to always take everything i might need to a dental office... something along the lines of bringing a knife to a gunfight!!!
**** edited with photos for example ****
Here is the sequence...
Bounced the 580 flash off the ceiling 5 feet up and 5 feet back - makes a big softbox sorta light.
Not too bad!
Settings were
ƒ8, S 1/100, ISO 100, focal length was actually 105mm. (Ansel Adams - "ƒ8 and be there!")
Same settings on the camera but with the Sigma ring light... first time it did not fire at all
Same settings but this time the Sigma fired... and fired and fired...
So I quickly dialed it all back as best i could on the fly to:
ƒ22, S 1/200, ISO 100 and the focal length still at 105mm
and got this:
which in photoshop is about 1/3 over exposed still.
All of that to say, it would have been much easier and much more reliable to use the tools best suited for the job - intra oral photography. .. and while yes, you
can make something else work, the results aren't going to be as satisfactory as if you had just gone ahead and spent a few extra dollars and got the right thing to begin with. (or brought it with you in the first place)
I looked at the bag with the macro camera rig before i left yesterday morning and said to myself "am i gonna need that too?" and said "naw" and headed out the door... only to find out i did!