Home for the Holidays

I am very thankful to not be traveling this Christmas season. And as in years past, I won't be posting between now and the new year, either. What I do hope to be doing is spending as much time as possible with family and friends.

In the meantime, hit the jump for our annual attempt at a Year in Review. And this year we have a little twist… Read more »

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Rosco Plusgreen: The Magic Sunset Filter

Druids may get all festive around Winter Solstice, but you can bet your typical cubicle worker is equally pissed off. That's because most of them arrive at work barely after sunrise, and don't leave until after dark.

For that same reason, it is also when architectural photographers are most willing to go out and freeze their nu brave the cold weather to make skyline shots. At least in the northern hemisphere.

Buildings with their lights all aglow at mix light are much prettier than they are at mix during other seasons. In June (at 39 degrees north, where Baltimore is) you'd have to wait until 9:30pm to get this shot. And the buildings are mostly empty and dark by then.

Mix light is wonderfully unpredictable when it comes to the color of the ambient. And on top of that variable, here's a little tip courtesy the architectural photographers: When you shoot dusk skylines, try a few with your camera set to the FL white balance as in the example above. (Click the pic for a bigger version.)

Why?

Because it does two things. First, it cleans up the indoor fluorescent lights in your photos, taking out a lot of the grody green cast. And second, it adds about 30CC of magenta to whatever your post-sunset ambient light is doing. Even though I shoot in raw, I always shoot it in daylight, tungsten and FL balance just to get a feel for which one I might like the best while still on the scene.

Okay fine, Building Boy. What's all this this got to do with lighting?

A lot, actually ... Read more »

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Drew Gardner's Brown Bag Video Series

Long-time readers of this site are already familiar with London-based commercial and advertising photographer Drew Gardner. Many of you will be happy to know that he has just released a commercial series of walk-thru videos of over a dozen of his more notable shoots, broken into McDonald's lunch-priced segments.

I have always enjoyed Drew's lighting, but even more so his creativity and imagination when approaching a shoot. And frequently, that ability to source a location or bootstrap say, an elephant or water buffalo as a prop for a shoot is more key to making the magic happen than knowing where to put your soft box.

I have had a chance to view most of them, and the takeaway for me has been that there is generally one unexpected or unusual thing you have to figure out to make a shot come together. For me, that is a big lesson -- because I am usually about the light.

But Drew seems to have a talent for hitting the curve ball that comes at you from left field. And I would give a lot of lighting skill away to be able to do that so seemingly effortlessly. I learn something from the guy every time we talk.

Drew kindly made one of the tutorials free, and I have embedded it above. (Blip.tv is ad-rolling it, but you can click them away.) You see the other photos selected for video tutorials here.

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First Grope: Nikon SB-700

When Nikon first announced their new SB-700 speedlight three months ago, I went down the feature list and immediately took notice of one thing: The lack of a PC jack.

But I recently had a chance to talk to some folks from Nikon. And they're all like, Dave, you're putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. It's an evolution of the SB-600, not the SB-800. (And to be fair, they've got the SB-900 for that.)

Okay, fine. Maybe it is not the most PC flash out there. But given that, what's under the hood?

First impressions after a hands-on day, inside. Read more »

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A Pop in Page Views

Congrats to Strobist reader Edward Horsford for making the front page of the internet. Yahoo chose his photo of a water balloon (without the balloon part) as a lede image for their curated gallery of high-speed captures.

Cool tidbit: More than a third of the images in the collection were by Strobist readers.

It was the first time I have seen Yahoo leveraging Flickr content to create a main-page gallery. If this is to become a regular thing, I would expect we'll see more Strobist Flickr group members getting this kind of insane exposure. I did a quick check while this was up on the Yahoo front, and Edward's Flickr page for this photo was getting about 3,000 views a minute.

I'll bet he sure was surprised when he saw it, if he did. You can see exactly how Edward lit the photo (with two Nikon SB's) here.

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Profoto: The Light Shaping Retina Searing Company

Remember the guy who zapped words into German tourists' photos with his DIY flash projector gun?

Suffice to say when you swap out the speedlight for 4800 watt-seconds worth of Profoto Pro-7B, things can get a little more interesting.

(Tip via Joel)

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On Assignment: Brian England

I shot a job last month for a story on the downstream impact of the new Jobs Bill (as in small business, not Steve.) Local auto shop owner Brian England, above, was one of the voices in the story.

It's your basic talking head. And just about anything would suffice for this kind of story in the local biz publication. So I always see these kinds of job as a perfect time to try on a new lighting style for size. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by experimenting -- as long as you cover yourself in case it doesn't work. Read more »

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Greetings, Newbs

Are you just stumbling in after learning about us in the New York Times gift guide for photographers? If so, thanks for dropping by. You'll probably want to start here.

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In Which a Commenter Gets His Soapbox

Today, a peek inside the sausage factory that is this blog.

Every blogger has to deal with this question at some point: What do you do with commenters who attempt to use your site as a large platform on which to go after a third party?

To my view, it is the equivalent of a guest who has had too much to drink standing up in your living room and uncorking loudly on another guest within full earshot of everyone else. And clearly, it reflects more on the commenter than the target of his or her rant.

Normally, this sort of remark falls well outside of the comment guidelines, which have evolved to the point where they effectively screen out this kind of stuff.

And really, I do try to err on the side of publication. I do not want to censor peoples' views. But neither do I want to cede the comments section to the lowest common denominator. And that's the lens through which I normally view comment moderation.

But today, a comment of such ironic merit that I am elevating it to the status of a post. Fully annotated, of course. Read more »

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Hangin' Eight, with Dave Black

Editor's note: You're gonna wanna watch this one in 720p, full-screen. So do yourself a favor and res-up now, to let it start loading in while you read.
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What do you get when you slap together 8 SB-900's, an SU-800, one RadioPopper transmitter, two receivers, two FourSquares and two sets of Michael Bass fiber optic bundles?

Well, you get $5,000.00 lighter in the wallet, for one thing.

But you also get a (32) AA-battery-powered monoblock with a 2-second recycle that can reach out and touch someone -- in TTL and/or via high-speed sync -- at very great distances.

And today, sports photographer Dave Black is gonna use it to make some rad surfing shots.

(Oh, and you'll also need $4800 for a Nikon D3s and another $5800 for the Nikon 200-400, too. Just saying.)

Hit the jump for another vid using a similar setup on motocross riders and a link to more speedlight insanity from Mr. Black.
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So, here is the 8-cylinder speedlight engine being used on motorcyclists at distance in full daylight conditions. Pretty impressive. And before you start whining about the cost (or logic, vs. real monos) for many this would be an ideal, lightweight solution.

Dave is a big TTL/FP sync user. So for him this makes more sense than a case of big lights which would limit his sync speed to 1/250th of a second.

You can see lots more from his excellent lighting website, Workshop at the Ranch.

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It's DIY Thursday

Fancy yourself a bit of a … modder?

Well, we gots not one but two DIY tips today, courtesy intrepid readers. Hit the jump to learn both how to add a nipple (not my term, mind you) to your SB-800 and how to make a very cool speedlight-to-AlienBees adapter. Read more »

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Matthew Jordan Smith Gives Tyra a Ring

We normally think of ring flash as having that signature, wrap-around shadow on the background. Or, increasingly, as a fill light. But it takes on a completely different look if you use it as a key and take everything else away -- background and any reflected light.

(Oh, and it helps if your subject is Tyra Banks, too.)

Matthew Jordan Smith explains in the first of an upcoming BTS series for Profoto. And not to just bang the Profoto drum here, either. We are always looking for the other educational BTS vids that the other flash manufacturers should be creating. Ahem.
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More Profoto BTS:

Gregory Heisler shoots: Springsteen | Giuliani | Jeter
Annie Leibovitz: Pro-8 and Machine-Gun Annie

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