OLDC: More Fun than Diagramming Sentences

Not everyone has access to their own in-house team of professional illustrators to create stunningly beautiful lighting diagrams.

For those of you who have not been following the Flickr threads, Strobist reader Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh has been developing an online lighting diagram creator, and it is ready for prime time. You can either do it on-the-fly in the browser-based version, or download a Photoshop file to get serious on your desktop.

And best of all, it's free.

(Check it out here.)

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Boot Camp 2, Assignment #4: What Moves You

Summer may have unofficially ended yesterday (no more white belts or manscaping for me) but we still have one more assignment to get through for Boot Camp 2.

Being strong believers in delayed gratification, I think I can safely speak for the entire staff here at Strobist International HQ when I say we tried to save the best assignment for last.
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Your Assignment, Should You Decide to Accept It...

This one, as you might have gathered from the post header, is about transportation -- literally, what moves you.

It's been a popular theme in the Strobist Flickr Pool for the last three years. So I thought it fitting to give some of you a chance to show off a little.

I'd like to point out that the photo above is of my own car in my own garage.

I'd like to point that out. But, sadly, I cannot. I wish those were my wheels. (Click through on that or any other pic in this post to get to the rightful Strobist group photog.)

Three vehicles comprise the actual real-life Strobist corporate fleet. The human-powered division is a 2004 Trek 430 hard-tail mountain bike. It was purchased used in a stunning stroke of good luck, given my ridiculously short frame size.

The internal combustion division of the fleet consists of a pair of 2006 vehicles -- a Scion XA and a used Yamaha Vino 49.5cc scooter. The combined mileage for the above is slightly over 69 MPG, I might add.

The point being that any of these types of vehicles would eligible for this assignment. Stretch it a little.


Use this as an excuse to get a little creative, as this assignment will not be nearly as constrained as the previous three. But try to keep the subject matter to an object which could reasonably be classified as transportation.

And, red sports car photo notwithstanding, try to remember that the assignment will not be judged on the hotness of the vehicle. In fact, if you do scrounge up a killer car, the onus will be on you to make an extra hot picture.


How You Can Help

If you are looking for the charitable component, this one is kinda no-brainer. Not only could you help someone sell a hot ride, but you could pretty much pick out exactly the vehicle you might like to photograph, sans any modeling fees.

In the US, I would suggest checking out the "used searches" in cars.com. If you don't have your own car to shoot, you might make a seller very happy with a cool photo (or group of photos) of their car. Plus, it'd make a nice keepsake after the car is gone. Just an idea.


Prizes, We Gots Prizes

Midwest Photo Exchange went a little nuts on this one, so we're pretty much throwing in everything but the kitchen sync.

For starters, how 'bout an LP120-based starving student light kit, a Speedlight Prokit 6 Reflector, and a new special Strobist Gel / LumiQuest FXtra combo kit.

And, as with the other prize packs, a set of Strobist DVDs and a set of Trade Secret Strobist lighting cards round out the package.

Remember, this is the last assignment and thus the last chance to shoot yourself into a pretty cool swag bag.

And, as the person coughing up for all of this international postage lately, I would like to point out that after the first three assignments the score is now:


Shifty-Eyed Foreigners: 3
U.S. Photogs: El Zippo.


(Kinda like watching World Cup Football qualifiers, no?)

Just sayin'.


The Fine Print

Because someone asks in the comments every single time, please refer back to the first assignment post for the basic info on how to enter your photo and where to go if you have Flickr problems questions.

But PLEASE NOTE that the tag is different for this assignment. It is:


SBC2ASSIGN4


So don't screw up and repeat the tag from the first assignment. The photo must also be in the Strobist pool (so remember to add that lighting info) to be entered. If you are successful, your photos should appear in this search within a few minutes. Please, only submit one entry.

If you want to ask questions, or otherwise discuss this assignment, you can do so in this thread.

And you can check out some of the other bloggers following along, here.

The due date for this assignment is end of day, local time, September 21st, 2009. Don't be late.

And for the verification shot (which will be required of the winner to prove he or she took it after the assignment date) reach around that camera and make a second version of the same shot with your hand showing four fingers in the foreground.

You know, just to keep it legal.

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DVDs are Back In

After being out of stock, the fifth printing of the Strobist Lighting DVDs (more here) is in and now shipping.

I am happy to report that, in addition to the US and UK/EU outlets, they are now available from Dubai in the UAE. This reduces shipping charges for those of you in the Middle East, Asia and AU/NZ.

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"But I Just Work at a Small Newspaper…"

Twenty one plus years ago I arrived in Columbia, MD, to start work as a staff PJ at Patuxent Publishing, a chain of community tabloid newspapers. Like most of the rest of the staff, I was young and full of piss and vinegar.

One thing I loved about working there is that we never let our size be a ceiling to what we wanted to do creatively. Staff shooter Matt Roth is carrying on that tradition there today, and I just came across a portrait series of standout high school athletes from this past spring season.

I am working up the final Boot Camp assignment post today. But in the interim, stop by Matt's blog and check out his pix for those could've-been-boring end of year feature stories.

If you are trudging through your high school sports shooting season, these should be sufficient to get you off of your butt. Kickass.

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Annie / Mad Men BTS Video

[UPDATE: Even though the "autoStart" tag in the embedded video is set to "false," the vid seems to be auto-starting anyway. Apologies to the clandestine viewers locked in their cubicles. I am placing the video and the rest of the post behind a "read more" jump to give you a chance to turn the sound down.

Any further flash coding tech help mucho appreciated!]
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If you saw Vanity Fair's Mad Men spread in the current issue, here's a quick behind-the-scenes video of Annie Leibovitz shooting it. (After the obligatory pre-roll ad, of course.)

Just a little bit of lighting seen in this one, and she's mostly aping ambient with the Photek Soft-Liter and a voice-activated boom again. Balance-wise, she is more fine-tuning the quality of the ambient than overpowering it. And the result is both subtle and beautiful.

As for your Labor Day weekend, rest assured it is probably more relaxing than Annie's. She has a $24,000,000.00 debt payment due Tuesday. I'd roll that baby forward to a new Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards card and fly free for-EVER.
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[UPDATE: Oops. Annie's weekend just got worse...]
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(Thanks to Sean for the tip.)

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Lord of the Ring Flash

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Okay, so maybe that's a stretch. This guy doesn't even use ring flash. But I had Headline Writer's Block and it was the only thing I could come up with. Best me in the comments.]
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"I immediately knew I wanted to look into the dark barn and not work against the huge, open bay door. The light outside that door was, like, ƒ/32,000, and the light inside was a weak ƒ/1.4 at best.

I’m not gonna fight city hall here. Where I am looking is dark, but dark I can light.

Dark I can control. I like the dark. Yessss, my precious..."
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Quoth Joe McNally, in a nice, long OA-style piece in Digital Photo Pro. It is Nikon CLS-centric, but still worth a read to anyone interested in lighting in general.

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Q&A: Popping a Cold One

From the comments on Monday's OA post, Gavin asks:

"I love the macro shots and your explanation, but since everyone is going to talk about those, I'll throw out a different question.

The shot through the window is also very successful. Did you do any gelling there, or is that all existing room light?"


Thank you, Gavin.

And actually that shot is lit entirely by flash. Or rather, flashes -- four, to be exact -- and every one is gelled. Diagram and walk-thru, inside.
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We were shooting each of the scientists and students working with the halophiles in this particular lab at the Center of Marine Biology in Baltimore.

I photographed Valerie working in a "refrigerated incubator," which is not a bad place to be in Baltimore in August.

I wanted to show temperature as a visual element, and the classic way to do that is to use cooled-down color temperature in your lights. This is where the CTB (color temperature blue) gels come in very handy, as not only do they come in relative strengths but are perfectly offset by the corresponding CTO (color temperature orange) gels.

So, to show temperature differential I would "blue" the inside of the fridge. As a contrasting color, and to make the blue stand out, I decided to use a corresponding warming gel on the outside.

This is where one of the Strobist gel packs can come in handy. They give you that set in quarter, half and full strength. Not exactly being a subtle guy, I went with full. But I could have nuanced this as much or as little as I wanted, were I one of yer more sophisticated types.

In addition to the warm vs. cool thing, I also had to shoot through the window without seeing my own reflection. This would be a little tricky as the window was small and I would also be lit by the exterior light.

So, I fired the (CTO'd) outside light from over my right shoulder, and shot diagonally through the window. Both of these served to kill my reflection in the glass. The outside light was also snooted, to put a little gradient in the door as the outside corners fell out of the beam.

Here is the diagram:



Inside, I wanted the whole room to be a contrasting, cool color. So I lit it with two speedlights with full CTB gels. Nothing fancy -- just sat them on the waist-high counter tops next to the near inside wall and bounced them off of the ceiling.

This got the effective light source (now, the ceiling) far enough away to light the room pretty evenly. I lit the room to about one stop down. Then I stuck inside flash #3 on top of the upper cabinet on the left and pointed it down, to add a light to Valerie.

Being as the room is already lit up to only one stop down from this little spot light, it is very subtle. But it does clean her up, light wise.

This light is also CTB'd, which keeps the full color of the interior consistent. But I did do a quick little cheat in post, lassoing Valerie's face and hands and warming them up a tad. Not all the way back to normal, but enough to sell the cold blue without Valerie looking too cadaverous.

We built the light front to back, one layer at a time. I shot at a 250th, to nuke the interior fluorescent lighting, and built the outside light up to a decent aperture. F/8 or /11 or something like that. Then my exposure was set and I just brought the interior lights up to match. No flash meter, no hard numbers. Just work fast and add salt to taste.

It took us about ten mins to set up and another three or four to shoot. The only stand involved was the one outside the door with the warmed up light. The rest of the flashes just balanced on stuff.

Quick and easy, really.

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