Xpert Advice: Overpowering the Sun Using a Leaf Shutter

One way to naturally add extra punch to an image is to increase the contrast. When you do this, you make the viewer concentrate more on specific areas of the scene–and what better way to do this than to overpower the sun or natural light around you. So how do you do that with your Fujifilm camera? You’ll need to remember some basic parameters first.

To overpower the sun, you’ll need a flash of some sort like a Fujifilm EF-42 (or maybe two of them.) Then keep in mind your exposure parameters:

– Shutter speeds: control the ambient lighting, in this case that’s the sun and the natural light around you.

– Aperture: Controls depth of field and how much of the flash’s output affects your scene.

– ISO: Controls the overall sensitivity of the scene.

When this flash is mounted to a camera like the Fujifilm X100T or the X30, it becomes so much simpler to overpower the sun because of the leaf shutter inside. This means that the shutter unit is in the lens as opposed to the camera body and allows you to shoot at faster shutter speeds with a flash firing than a DSLR or other mirrorless cameras can normally.

By using this setup, you can easily make the natural light appear darker by underexposing it while evenly illuminating your subject by adding output from a flash. This is even simpler to do because the two different types of lighting are linked to different camera settings.

Use this for portraits during the Golden Hour, at weddings, when trying to make a product that you’re about to sell on eBay more appealing, and for many more types of photos like macro shooting. Here’s more on overpowering the sun and more results.

Xpert Advice is a monthly collaboration between the Phoblographer and Fujifilm designed to teach you photography tips and tricks in a bite-sized package.