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Sony HVL-F43M Flash with A7RIII advice please!

tashley

Subscriber Member
I have a gig on Wednesday where I cannot take my Profoto gear so I am thrown back on on-camera flash. I dug out my HVL-F43M gun and popped it onto the A7RIII for the first time. And I am confused as hell. Please bear with me, I have read the flash manual and the camera manual, and googled and searched my a** off but I am still very confused.

You can only set Auto as the flash mode when you are in P mode on the camera - and I am just not a P mode guy. I'm an A mode guy. Which means I can only set other modes, of which Fill seems best.

My gig is inside a radio studio so I expect a lot of mixed artificial light and I also expect that I'll need to shoot at around 24mm so I was planning to bounce off the ceiling but use the white card for some forward thrust. I'd also add a large Lastolite reflector or two. The trouble is, how do I set the camera up? I did a dry run and it was confusing as heck. Ideally I would set ISO to auto, aperture to something around the f5.6 or F8 area and then expect the camera to keep shutter speed at a sensible level for the focal length and then bang out as much flash as it can. However, because it sees the job as a Fill one, it goes for the slowest shutter speed it can - as if it were metering for a shot without flash - and then pumps out some weak fill flash.

Should I go for M mode and set ISO to say 800, aperture to F5.6 or 8 and shutter to 1/124th and hope the flash works out the rest?

Sorry for being daft. I really know my way around a studio lighting setup but this so called simple TTL on-camera thing is really tough!

Thanks in advance for any help....

Tim
 
Last edited:

Pradeep

Member
Not sure I can be of help, but the Sony flash set up is very confusing, took me two days to figure out how to use the remote to trigger the flash off camera.

However, I did get it to work finally, and I am always shooting full manual with my cameras. The menu is very non-intuitive and you have to play with the buttons several times before you get to what you want.

I did set up the flash for TTL and it did work. Will figure out how I did it when I get back home later.
 
V

Vivek

Guest
I would put it in shutter priority mode, set the shutter to 1/250s and let the camera and the flash do their bit.

Btw, turn the settings effect to “off”.

It is quite simple, actually. :)
 

tashley

Subscriber Member
I would put it in shutter priority mode, set the shutter to 1/250s and let the camera and the flash do their bit.

Btw, turn the settings effect to “off”.

It is quite simple, actually. :)
Thanks Vivek. I prefer aperture priority under these circumstances though, because it will all be at quite close range and even with a 24mm I’ll need f5.6 to be sure of getting the right things in the right degree of focus.
 
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