Annika1980 wrote:
On Jul 27, 9:30 am, Tony Polson wrote:

Given that this is an f/1.2 lens, and you had plenty of headroom in
terms of increasing shutter speeds, why not use it wide open?

One word answer: Flash.

Longer answer:
I wanted to make sure I had enough flash to light him up.
Hence, I used Tv (Shutter Speed Priority) mode at the max sync speed
of 1/250.
Yes, I could have used high-speed sync, but that gives mixed results.


OK, understood. Thanks.

At least the bokeh at f/3.2 doesn't look too bad.

With the strong sunlight you had, you could have re-positioned a human
subject near a beam of sunlight coming through the foliage, and used a
hand-held reflector to direct that light to fill in the shadows. I
don't think that would be practicable with a cat, as the reflected
light would be a major distraction, preventing you from getting the
excellent shots that you did. The flash has the element of surprise,
so the cat doesn't get distracted.

I have tried hard to get high speed synch to work reliably, but even
with a Leica M7 and Mecablitz 54 MZ-4i, the results are very variable
at 1/500 and 1/1000 sec. It's a lot better at 1/250, which represents
a more than two stop advantage over the normal 1/50 synch speed.
That's because the slit in the horizontally-travelling focal plane
shutter is four times wider than at 1/1000 sec, so variations in
illumination are about four times less noticeable.

However, the flash output is so reduced as to make the feature all but
useless, except at short flash-to-subject distances.