TTL vs Manual

There has been lots of questions about TTL and now I have one too.

I would like to know if it's posible to get the same exposures with manual control on your strobes, as you would with TTL, I'm especially thinking of macro. I know i can't do it on my compact G7 wit a DS 125, but I'm about to upgrade to DSLR and I thought that with more f-stops to play with it might be possible.

The reason I ask this is that if I want to keep my Ikelite strobe, and even add another, and I choose a non Ikelite housing, I have to choose a Nikon camera to get the iTTL adapter from Ikelite.

It's not that I don't like Nikon, I just don't want to narrow down my options.

I hope I made sense

Steen

Many of the best pictures are taken with manual settings turn on. TTL just makes the photographer do less thinking, plus ttl is not always perfect so you can/will get better pictures with manual.

So, yes you can get same or better pictures with the strobe.

I had a g7 and z220 strboe and the strobe was always in manual mode. I did not have ttl conectivity.

I'm a confirmed TTL user [Macro 100%], I really don't like to think - and zero switch fiddling time can be good for catching behaviour.

I also have to admit it is possible to have exactly the same results using manual, it just takes more practice and experience with the range of lighting and colours of critters you will encounter.

When you swap to a non-Ike system then it may be a good idea to pick up a manual controller, it has more intensity settings available.

My view is that it is nice to have ttl as an option.

I would like to know if it's posible to get the same exposures with manual control on your strobes, as you would with TTL, I'm especially thinking of macro.

It is possible to get the same exposures with manual as with TTL. Not certain that TTL could expose all the lighting effects possible with manual, although as Tom implies, if you have TTL you can always switch it off.

I took all the flash-lit pictures in this gallery with manual strobes (except for one, which was with TTL) and with Nikon cameras!, so I would say that you can produce reasonable images if you do not have TTL, and in either case your photography will be better if you know what lighting you want to produce with the tools (TTL or not) that you have.

Hope that this helps,

Alex

I would like to know if it's posible to get the same exposures with manual control on your strobes, as you would with TTL, I'm especially thinking of macro.

 

Steen

This is extremely easy to do with the Seacam150 Dig. The digital readout tells you what % of the output was used in iTTL. One merely has to dial in the closest value. Otherwise it is back to trial and error with chimping.

Thanks for the info guys. It helped me alot.