Depending on PhotoShopping to deal with shadows is not the best policy IMHO. To my mind, that practice is only meant for those shots that were not made right at the time of shutter release.
Well, as the previous poster implied and as I have previously stated, creative and controlled lighting is different from plain insufficient lighting.
If fill flash is used to provide a different type of lighting, which will inevitably produce different shadows, or perhaps no shadows at all, then the fill flash result might be preferred on the basis that the lighting on the main subject is
different in character rather than just being greater in intensity.
It's something I'm not completely certain about. If we had this new technology to experiment with, we could make some comparison shots,
with fill flash and
without, unless we were DB owners and then of course we wouldn't be interested.
I tend to think that the natural shadows resulting from the natural but weak lighting get wiped out with fill flash, but I would need to experiment more with this idea. It's an interesting topic.
As you probably know, the 5D does not have a built-in flash. I often wondered why, and I figured it was perhaps because the 5D has (or had when it was introduced) such sterling low light performance.
Nevertheless, the 5D has its limitations and there have been a number of occasions when, in retrospect, I wish I'd taken the trouble to take out my 550EX because of noisy shadows.
Following is a series of variations on a shot which I regret not taking the trouble to use fill flash ( ie. get out my 550EX and risk a bunch of nuisance tourists getting in the way) .
In order from left to right, we have:
(1) A basic conversion in ACR with no fill light adjustment showing the really dark shadows.
(2) A conversion with fill light adjustment, which is close to the best I could do with this shot, displaying shadows which are too dark, in my opinion, but which disguise the noise.
(3) The conversion with fill light
plus additional shadows/highlight adjustment in PS.
(4) A crop showing the noise due to the low DR of the 5D.
If the 5D had 12 stops of DR instead of around 9 stops, this shot could be rescued. If it had 16 stops of DR, then no problem at all and definitely no need for fill flash.
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