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Flash Duration vs High Speed Sync: What’s the Difference?

Chris Gampat
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03/23/2015
1 Min read

Last Updated on 03/23/2015 by Chris Gampat

Screenshot taken from the video
Screenshot taken from the video

Two big terms that strobist photographers and anyone looking to get into flash photography will hear are flash duration and high speed sync. In lay man’s terms, flash duration will stop fast moving motion and high speed sync will deal with ambient lighting–but it gets even more complicated than that.

Dan over at Adorama created a video to show how this works. He demonstrates high speed sync and shows how at f1.2, you can get a very shallow depth of field in mid-day lighting while killing the ambient lighting and mixing it with strobe output to look natural.

Then he goes into the studio and shows how flash duration stops fast moving motion and how you need to have almost no ambient lighting in the scene for the best effect.

The video is after the jump.

flash flash duration high speed sync Photography
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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