Flash! Aaaa-AAAAh*
Our open-source light-meter has proven to be pretty useful and lots of people made/built them themselves.
One question that we keep getting is: “Will it have a flash-mode added?” The problem that we faced was that the initial sensor that we used was too slow for capturing flashes on the short timescales that they operated on (microseconds). RIP Flash Mode.
The Immovable Object vs The Unstoppable Stubbornness
But wait… rather than admit defeat, we built our own sensor from scratch, using fast components that would measure light on the timescales that you need to measure flash accurately.
Peanut for scale
To stress-test the new sensor, we used it with an old Nikon Speedlight (SB800). Speedlights fire for a very short duration at lower powers (source: Andy Gock). The graph shows the light intensity** against time since firing for all of the Flash’s power settings.
As a bonus, you can see how the flash works: It is only really firing at a single power, but being ‘snuffed out’ earlier and earlier. Most other flashes work in the same way. So as a rule, if you want to freeze motion, the lower power settings on a flash often work best.
We’ll be adding the new Flash Mode to our Github Repository in the first half of 2024.
** Voltage really, but the two are linearly related
