Salvaging a Dreary Day - 09 May 2021
The rain came early this morning and lasted all day. It was one of those steady rains that had dark clouds all day that never let up. A November rain. In May.
It did! In fact, when I hooked it up in the house I was getting 10-20 fps continuous flash in strobe-like effect from the combo. However, I found that it dropped to 1 flash pulse when I pointed it at the feeder 25' away, and it wasn't powerful enough to barely illuminate my subject.
I suspected that the TTL setting was causing the flash to max out power consumption to get the first exposure then needed to recharge. To test, I hooked up the XT1s transmitter and took the flash outside (in the rain) and set it up near the feeder to see if I could get more flashes per burst.
With the flash closer I was able to get 2 - 4 flashes in a burst depending on the brightness of the subject. This was ok because it gave me a chance to compare images w/ and w/o flash.
The birds were not fazed by the flash and did their thing despite the pops of bright light that lasted microseconds. The little extra light allowed me to get some deeply-saturated images on a day that would've produced dull exposures.
Though I do not plan to use the flash very often, its nice to know that it worked on the Sony a1. I could not get the flash to work on the a9 even though it worked well w/ the a7III. I may experiment more as time goes on, but I'll leave it here.
May 9, 2021 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Protocol: Stationary
Checklist Comments: Feeder watch
5 species
Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) 1
House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) 4
White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) 2
Orchard Oriole (Icterus spurius) 2
Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula) 4
View this checklist online at https://ebird.org/checklist/S1
This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (https://ebird.org/home)