I was working with an off-camera flash this weekend for some portraits of my son. I was shooting in medium sunlight (early morning, partly cloudy, w/ some shade), and I like the lighting control I got with the flash (it softened the shadows on his face), but it sort of messed up my aperture control.
Using a 30D w/ 50mm F/1.8, I can get a narrow DOF at low apertures, but since the use of the flash constrained my shutter speed, I couldn't use apertures low enough to produce as much bokeh as I'd have liked.
I'm thinking that one solution would be a neutral-density filter to let me use a lower aperture. Would this work, and if so, is this the preferred way to handle this situation?
Answer
In your shooting conditions the constraint is that a large aperture requires a very short shutter speed to expose the ambient light appropriately and you can't sync the flash faster than about 1/200 sec on the 30D. A strong ND filter might solve this problem. Alternatively, if your flash supports HSS, you can use that to reduce the exposure time (as little as 1/4000 second, I believe). If neither is available, an expedient solution is to move the location and the background into dark shade: you can still get some nice ambient light but it can be reduced several stops.
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