I’ve been experimenting with a number of bright colored 12″ x 12″ sheets of paper that I picked up a while ago (at Michaels I think). Using flash with my FujiFilm X-T2. I was getting quite a bit of fall off from my flash from one side to the other of these small area images. At first I though I was just being bit by the inverse square rule. I thought it was a bit extreme but that was my first guess.

Then I realized that the fall off was not coming from the side away from the light but was consistently at the bottom of the frame. See shadows below to for light direction.

I tried adding reflectors to the dark side but still had the falloff. I could correct the images in post with a graduated filter to open the area. But it was not a perfect solution so I resorted to my, “when all else fails covert to black and white” (let’s hear it for Fuji’s ACROS simulation).

Frustrated I started out this morning trying one more time to try an figure out what was going on. The images were shot at less the the Fujifilm X-T2 maximum shutter speed so I dismissed it being caused by the shutter being set higher than the X-T2 maximum sync speed of the 1/250th of a second, above which the shutter is not open long enough to get all the image. The top image was shot at 1/60th of a second so it couldn’t be an issue with the focal plane shutter not being open long enough.

I change to front camera sync to have the flash fire at the beginning of the shutter opening and magically the falloff went a way.

Except it was. After a few more unsuccessful attemps this morning i realize that I had the flash set to rear curtain sync on the X-T2 which meant that the flash was not fired until the shutter was about to close. In fact at shorter shutter speeds the light was just not getting to the bottom of the frame.

Moral of the story is once again make sure you know all the setting of your camera and if the image is not turning out the way you like it, it’s probably your fault.