Metz flashguns....

I bought a Metz flashgun from this guy off Ebay and arranged to pick it up from his place. Although he wasn't a snapper, he'd come across this Metz kit which intrigued me as he'd listed the flash with a "Mecamet 45-20" unit. After a bit of research it turns out that a Mecamet 45-20 is a power control unit for when the flash is used manually. It'll allow you to split the 'manual' setting into full, half, quarter etc. right down to 1/32 so naturally I dived in...

The problem with Metz's is that the manual setting output is limited to full power unless you get a CT4 and even then they're limited to 1/2 or 1/4 power. The plug-in Mecamet 45-20 gives you speedlight-level control which is invaluable. Now, having sussed out the Mecamet, I was itching to give it a go. I dug some kit out of the car and Jon was up having his pic done so I set to work. He's stood in bright sunlight with his back to the sun. Without flash, he would be a backlit silhouette so I fired the flash through a brolly to fill in the shadows. The main exposure was for the sun and set at 1/180th at f11 and this meant that Jon would silhouette. The sunlight lit up his hair and shoulders so I set the flash to f8 to auto to give one stop less than the sun which worked out fine. I then tried the flash on manual and use the Mecamet. The Metz on manual metered at about f22 so using the Mecamet, I dialled it down to give me f8 and fired away. Jon was good enough to stand around whilst I messed about with the Mecamet until I understood what it was about.

I got back home and decided to do some more portraits so I nipped down to my local woods with a mini-project idea of snapping dog-walkers. I like that idea that owners are like the dogs they choose because sometimes, they're is an element of truth in it. I set up the flash to fire through a brolly and give f11 on the subject, and metered the daylight to record some highlight detail. At a 1/90th of a sec, this makes the tree's etc. feel more like a studio backdrop.I was explaining my mini-project to this guy when his dog Oscar decided to have a nosey in my camera bag. Oscar's head disappeared inside the bag and left behind copious amounts of slavver and snot. As I shot a few frames off, the guy got his mobile out and phoned a friend who turned out to be a professional dog-walker and was on her way day down with a dozen hounds. Although this wasn't quite what I had in mind for the project or my camera bag, it was a great opportunity to play with the Metz. Unfortunately, I got a bit carried away and was firing away like crazy. My new toy made one last 'crack' and emitted a tiny puff of smoke and was dead ! I suspect that it hadn't been used in a long time and firing enough shots to drain 3 battery packs was a little 'excessive'....