Bass Turd

It's an interesting picture but I think it's too much "I was there" and not enough, "I created something". As well it looks like flash on camera which is not a pleasing light.

I was attracted to this as an interesting display of subtly complimentary colors. Given that the historical placement of the restored artifacts was supposed to be in the North African desert, I was quite pleased with the overall final color rendition. It looked in person very close to how you see it here. It was less about the bike and merely being in front of it, and more about the colors.

As far as applying a flash fill, if one has experience exposing transparency film outdoors (this was a hazy bright afternoon), one knows the reduced dynamic range pitfalls all too well. In return for some unnatural secondary shadows and flattened textures (see the foreground grass) one gains a far more appropriately reduced overall contrast level that is a much closer match to what the eye can actually see in person. Outdoors with chromes there are always tradeoffs to be negotiated.

For example, see that shaded dark area immediately behind the bike that I used to highlight the flag and helmet? Had I chosen to forgo the fill, the entire lower shaded portion of this darkish olive drab motorcycle (engine, upper wheels, namesake box) would have looked similarly dark and lacking in detail.

But as I stood there in person I could easily see all of those details with my (auto-adjusting) eyes. So since this was definitely not a studio environment where every light source is controllable, some real world exposure decisions and tradeoffs had to be made.

I was pleased with both the colors and the contrast. Perhaps next time I'll think to expose an identical Provia frame without any fill, just so it will be more apparent how unrealistic and harshly ugly the alternative can be outdoors...

The bike with perhaps the tent in the background to help with historical context is the "star " here and needs to be well exposed which it has been. Seems to me that the fill-in flash was needed and as you say trade-offs have to be made. I probably wouldn't have done it this way which is why my slide wouldn't have achieved what your slide has

I understand your dilemma, BUT, the problem is, is that what you have is not really fill flash, which is a tool to fill in the shadows generally a stop or two under the main light. Instead you have really just an on camera flash that is the main light, not the fill light. As can be seen but the shadows under the bike. And an on camera flash as a main light is generally not a pleasing light for a number of reasons, one being that it almost always gives an artificial flat looking picture. But I'll take your word that you could not have achieved your goal any other way, all I'd suggest is you do some burning and dodging to eliminate that artificial look. Burn down the foreground a little in places, burn in some of knapsack and from fender a slight bit, all to try to make the light look light it wasn't generated from camera flash. Also dodge the engine a little in places. But I agree the tones are great and it has a nice monotonic feel.

There is merit in your observations. I've looked at the frames from that afternoon closely on the light table, and have come to the conclusion that for all intents the minus-one stop fill ratio ended up being pretty close to synchro-sunlight or a bit more on all of them, even though I was generally pleased with the outcomes. The machine gun nest and the furthest tent are pretty close to the much nearer bike overall.

The base exposure was read from a highly reliable incident meter. The true shutter speed had previously been measured as well, and its correction factor pre-programmed into the meter (0.36 stops slow). And the flash-to-subject distance was read from the focusing scale and matched intuition. Plane of focus was the star on the gas tank, about one-third into the bike. The fill exposure worked out to just about exactly minus one stop at that distance.

This is the approach I normally use for relatively open shadows in b&w negatives, yet here it's admittedly too much. So some more experimentation is needed. Being transparencies, minus two stops seems like much too little. So maybe one-and-a-half is a good place to try starting with the next rolls. As I recall, Kodak's recommendation was minus one-and-two-thirds?

As for dodging and burning, no can do without breaking the APUG Prime Directive. Since traditionally printing slides is no longer an option (I did once do Cibachromes during my stint in a commercial darkroom in that galaxy far, far away), these transparencies are the end-of-the-line final product for me. The challenge is to be correct out of the camera, then scanned exactly as they appear on the light table.