The last two posts have been about the Panasonic GM5 camera with the tiny 12-32mm kit zoom and the little Olympus FL-LM3 flash. They worked well for me indoors at Thanksgiving. Because both items were new to me it was my first experiment with this gear.
An early discovery was that there is a flash limitation with the GM5. I discovered that no matter how I set the camera (P, A, S or M mode), shutter speed could not be set faster than 1/50th. It could be set lower, but not faster. I later verified that indeed the flash sync speed is a paltry 1/50th. I thought perhaps the electronic flash might give me a higher sync speed; but the flash is inoperable with the electronic flash and/or silent shutter.
That being said, what worked well for me was Auto ISO and Aperture priority with the aperture set wide open. At full zoom of 64mm (equivalent) this meant F5.6 and 1/50th. Setting the camera’s flash setting to TTL (not manual), the camera would choose an ISO that was typically one stop lower (sometimes two) than I would need without the flash. For example if without the flash I would need ISO 2000, with the flash the camera would choose ISO 1000. This means ambient light was cut in half and the flash provided the other half of the light requirement. To me, using the flash meant a higher quality light (half ambient and half flash which I could bounce in any direction), better color (the flash is close to daylight temperature), and a cleaner file due to the lower ISO.
[The same results can be achieved by using M mode and setting the camera manually to F5.6 and 1/50th. Again, I found Auto ISO worked nicely.]
The flash operates in thousands of a second (1/2,000 ?) and froze most of the subject movement, but since some of the light was ambient light being gathered at 1/50th second, there were one or two occasions where I got a blurry subject and a frozen subject, all rolled into one. One of the examples is below.
In this photo our granddaughter was jumping from the chair (which is why the top of her head is out of the scene, unfortunately). Notice that the flash froze her left hand during the first 1/2,000 (?) second of the 1/50 second exposure, but the remainder of the 1/50 exposure allowed too much movement to prevent blurring. There are essentially two exposures at work, the flash exposure (very fast) and the ambient light exposure (somewhat slow).
Personally I would not want to change any of the camera settings for this particular shooting situation. The 1/50th limitation was fine… for snapshots of even active grandchildren at family indoor events. I am a fan of small flashes. Even though they require high ISO adjustments, this gives a nice balance between ambient and flash. It looks more natural this way. Had I used a more powerful flash, set ISO at base 200 and blasted a bounce flash, ambient light would have been eliminated and the result would look like a flash was used, with a bright foreground and a dark background. Importantly I also couldn’t put a camera and big flash in my pocket like I did with the GM5 plus FL-LM3.
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