Flashes are where there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation in photography. But why? The deepest, darkest parts of me want to say that people are stupid and don’t want to learn to light. Instead, they’d rather do it in Photoshop because that’s just what all the influencers and marketers tell them to do. That, and people don’t think critically. But in truth, that’s only partially true and flash needs to take a quantum leap forward. Specifically, TTL flash needs to step up.
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TTL flash works in a pretty straightforward manner. The camera tells the flash what the aperture and ISO settings are. Based on that, the flash outputs an amount of power that it believes should be delivered. TTL flash works far better on-camera than it does off-camera. There are some complexities with Matrix metering and all that stuff involved too, but metering is metering at the end of the day.
One of the biggest problems with TTL flash is that it has to know what the lens aperture is. So if you’re using a third-party adapted lens with no communication, you’ll have to switch the flash into manual mode. However, camera sensors can truly get an idea of what sort of light is hitting the sensor. Set your camera to give you a depth of field preview or something like that and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
So that brings me to my point.
Why can’t modern TTL flash take a reading off the camera sensor instead to deliver its best educated guess on what to output?
I think that the only company possibly doing anything like this is Profoto using the Profoto camera app and lights like the B10 series. And I think that it’s absolutely possible. We’ve seen that camera companies are capable of doing some insanely amazing things. What am I talking about?
- Leica said years ago that a full-frame rangefinder could never be done.
- Sony said many years ago that a larger battery couldn’t be put into the a7 series along with dual card slots
- Canon brought Eye-control AF back into their cameras
- Fujifilm made the first 50mm f1 autofocus lens for mirrorless cameras
- Nikon made a camera meant for still photographers that doesn’t have a physical shutter. It can do HSS at all flash speeds.
Instead, modern flashes get the stiff end of the stick. Sony’s flashes introduced recently didn’t even have USB-C interface upgrades. But their cameras can do crazy things like Bluetooth and more.
So why can’t TTL flash work by reading off of the sensor? To take that even further, why can’t TTL flash work via Bluetooth or Wifi? All these cameras have those capabilities, why can’t the flashes?
A major problem with all this is surely sales. Photographers fetishize cameras, and companies promote this. Photographers also fetishize lenses, but camera companies don’t do much to promote their lenses, unfortunately. But lights? Lights are a tougher sell. People don’t know how to use them. Folks also can’t really tell the difference between what one flash can do vs another. I mean, let’s be honest here: how many folks can tell the difference between a Profoto light and a Godox? At the end of the day, it’s just a light. But how they work is where it all changes. And to that end, camera manufacturers need to fundamentally change how TTL flash works.