Just a quick batch of four this time, fresh off the grill: __________
• Lumiquest SB-VI? Lumiquest SB-33? Nope, just two Lumiquest SB-IIIs, used over and under, by McNally in Charleston. (You have to scroll down -- I like this look.)
• Not able to find Honl stuff at retail stores in Spain, WIRED's Charlie Sorrel rolls his own. (I still like my DIY'd speedstrap better, Charlie.)
• It's official. They don't need us anymore. This photo wasn't retouched at all. It wasn't even lit. Because it's not a photo.
• And finally:
"Lord Vader, we believe our sensors have located the headquarters of The Resistance."
Regular readers of this site will know that I am a huge fanboy of Dean Collins, who was probably the best lighting instructor their ever was.
And today, we have some new (old) Collins videos today -- on lighting hotel rooms -- inside. __________
I came across three YouTube clips from one of his "back in the day" lectures at the Brooks Institute. These are not of anything that is available to purchase, and they have been sitting around on YouTube for quite a while. But they do give you an idea of what he was about.
If you like his stuff, there is some excellent stuff available commercially. There are three different DVD sets here, and all are highly recommended. The "Best Of" set is the best, IMO. I cannot recommend that one enough.
But the "Live at Brooks" DVD is also quite good, too. I just re-watched it this weekend. I was just gonna watch a few minutes to refresh, then he had me for the whole hour-and-a-half plus.
(RSS and Email readers, click on the post title to pull up all three vids in order.)
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
As you can see, Dean's hotel room shots are a little more involved than mine are. But even though I am using speedlights, all of the principles are the same.
Ever notice those cool water photos that drop into the Strobist Flickr Pool?
Water droplet photography is very easy to get started with, and you can get as complex as you want. There are three tricks to making beautiful, time-scultped water pictures with a single small flash: Light placement, timing and flash duration.
More, plus two videos, inside. __________
Water Photography Basics
(Very cool water drop photos by Andy W., top, and Steve P., both from the Strobist Flickr Group pool. Click the pic for bigger versions.)
First tip: You are not lighting the water. Since water is a specular object, you are lighting what the water reflects. So you light the area (most likely the backdrop) that you see reflected in the still water from your camera position
As for timing, that one is easy -- just take the junk mail approach. Lots of water drops, lots of repetition, and something cool and unpredictable will come back. This is part of the fun. Just make sure you get your technical stuff down pat first, so when that perfect moment happens, you'll have a winner.
Last, and speaking of technical stuff, you will want shoot in a (relatively) dark environment so the flash pulse can effectively be your shutter speed.
The first video below (a basic how-to) suggests a setting 1/16th power. That's a pretty fast pop -- about 1/11,000th of a second for an SB-800, for instance. But you can get even faster times if you drop the power further. And when freezing a drop of water, microseconds matter.
The tradeoff? Aperture vs. pulse length. You will need enough power to get you enough aperture to carry the depth of field you want. But don't overdo the power to get excess aperture, as that'll needlessly stretch the pulse length of your flash.
In lighting, everything is a tradeoff.
Check out this excellent "how-to" video below, by Gavin Hoey. (RSS and email readers may need to click on the post title to view the videos.)
See? Easy, fun and cheap if you can get that flash off-camera.
And these same techniques can be amped up to yield more amazing photos. Artist Martin Waugh has built a career out of making art from drops of water. If you are into this kind of stuff, make sure to check out his amazing gallery to get a glimpse of just what is possible.
Just below, a video featuring Waugh from a segment of the Discover Channel show, "Time Warp." These guys are filming in 10,000 frames per second, which is Chase Jarvis Kung Fu territory. At the end, they actually have drops colliding with splashes in mid-air.
This is worth the wait for full-screen HD. Especially at about the 5:50 mark. (And I see my same old Nikkor 55/2.8 macro on the high-speed camera.)
Other than the obvious cool factor, the takeaway for me from this video was a look into Waugh's lighting. Background gets one color, and the top light gets another. This way, you get multiple colors in the water depending on the angle of the water surface being reflected.
A very cool project for a rainy afternoon, IMO. Or even better -- offer to take the setup into you kid's science class at school and let them try their hand at stopping time to study how liquids behave.
If you decide to try it and upload to Flickr, be sure to tag your photos with the words, STROBIST, WATER and DROP and upload it to the Strobist group. That way, they will come up in this search and we can all see them. (Check it out -- there are already some killer shots there.)
Or if you would rather blog your water droplet lighting exploits for the whole world to see, make sure to include the intact phrase "strobist water drop" (no quotes) and we can all see it via this Google blog search.
UPDATE: For those specifically looking to discuss the Flex and Mini -- especially Canon interference issues and workarounds -- the best place I have found is on the PW Flickr Group. __________
For those of you interested the new PW Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 units, some updates on the Canon range issues -- and new features -- inside. __________
Signal vs. Noise
First things first, there have been reports of interference shortening the working range with the new PWs and some Canon model flashes. It was surprising to me, as I did not experience any first-hand range issues in my testing of the units I had earlier this year. But I shoot Nikon, of course.
The range reports that were coming in were certainly enough to get PW's attention. And when they looked into them they found that the Canon flashes themselves were putting out some RF interference that shortened the range of the FlexTT5 and MiniTT1 units -- and significantly, in some cases.
Upon further investigation, it turns out that not only were some of the Canon units noisy (RF-wise) but there was also a wide range of variability when it came to the magnitude of the RF noise. Some individual units were moderately noisy, and others were more like front-row-at-a-Metallica-concert noisy. (FWIW, PW did not see the problem during development because while they bought a dozen or so Canon flashes for testing, those were relatively new flashes with similar serial numbers.)
"We should have just bought the the flashes off of eBay," joked PW's Jim Clark, noting that the noise range was all over the map depending not only on the flash model, but how long ago it was manufactured.
This radio frequency interference does serve to shorten the range of wireless TTL synching. But since the problems are coming from the flashes themselves, it is now the flashes that get the fix. Rob Galbraith has a very detailed post on his homebrew fix(es) for noisy flashes.
PW themselves have just annouced an "AC7 Shield" which should greatly extend your range if you happen to have a noisy flash. It also doubles as a flash umbrella adapter which gets the flash almost exactly onto the axis of the umbrella shaft. They are sending them out for free to Canon users who are experiencing problems with interference from Canon flashes. Nikon flashes (actually, all other brands of flashes) do not leak RF as do the Canons and thus are not affected.
(NOTE: The photo below actually shows the next-to-last version of the AC7 shield. Minor changes were made to the final version, renderings of which are available on the AC7 announcement.)
Long story short, if your Canon flash is spitting out RF noise, shielding it should bring dramatic improvements in wireless TTL range. PW tests are showing new ranges of several times the distance of unshielded flashes, all other things being equal. Rob put it through its paces, and wrote a very detailed review, here.
For the Nikon shooters, RF noise issues are reportedly nonexistent with the Nikon speedlights. And all seem to get along well with the upcoming Nikon PW models, which are due out soon and available for preorder.
It's a Platform, Not a Remote
If you are using the new Minis and/or Flexes, you definitely want to make sure to use your utility program and upgrade your firmware pretty regularly. They aren't just fixing bugs -- they are improving the feature set and providing new capabilities. (You can always get the latest firmware info at PocketWizard.)
You have to remember that these things are basically black-box Trojan Horses that allow PW to hack (in a good way) into all sorts of features and abilities of the various flash platforms.
Example: One of the more interesting new features is a little timing hack that shortens the length of the pulses that fire in FP mode.
This reduces the amount of energy used by the flash in FP mode, thus giving Flex/Mini users shorter recycle times and longer battery life. FP photogs who are used to waiting for the recharge at high shutter speeds (thus, more wasted flash energy) just got a little bit of their life back.
This is not small potatoes, either. Efficiency gains are reportedly as high as 70%, and this also translates to higher output in FP mode on the various pulsed shutter speed settings. Anyone who has ever pushed FP flash to its limits (not hard to do) will behappy to hear that some camera/flash combos are cranking out up to two more stops of light in that neighborhood. (More details here.)
Also, due to the wide range of max sync speeds and shutter delays of various models, some flashes are better suited to shift from HyperSync into FP sync at different shutter speeds. And PW has given control of that crossover point to the user. You can now choose at what point the remotes will toggle between HyperSync (increased max sync speed) and FP (hi-speed pulsed) sync. If you are hanging out in the grey area on your model, you might choose a different point to make the jump than staying with the previous 1/640th default.
It important to note that anything I write here may well be out of date and eclipsed by the next firmware update. We will not be hitting every update but may set up some kind of an archive table for info or something like that. Especially with respect to the different microsecond delay settings for various camera and flash models for the HyperSync settings.
Shortly after the Nikon-specific PWs are out, I'll put out a call for numbers and we'll set up a comprehensive table/matrix of settings. For instance, someone with a D3 and Profotos will have a totally different ideal sync offset than someone with a 5DII and a set of AlienBees.
This is important information, because it buys you the very best sync speed possible with your camera/flash combo. And higher sync speeds effectively mean greater effective flash range. We'll give the readers a little time to experiment, then crowdsource the info.
Of Mice and Men
Last but not least, remember "Newton," the mouse who invaded Jim Clark's house last winter? He was thusly named because he yielded to the laws of Newtonian physics in the process of being spectacularly captured.
Well, Newton is once again free, looking for another house to invade for next winter.
Freeing him wasn't easy - Newton knew a good gig when he saw it. But he was finally coaxed out of his comfy "jail" and headed immediately for the trees. Yep, he went for the high ground, running right up the side of a tree fast enough to impress Jim, who just might have to engineer Mousetrap v2.0 next winter.
Last in this series we looked at Riaz, lit entirely by flash against a darkish wooden wall. At left is Brett, who was lit right where he sat in a classroom chair in an unfinished commercial building with a primed drywall background.
This time around: High-axis key light with just enough strobe on the background to separate it from black. More inside. __________
Start With the Key
I'll give you one guess as to what I used for a key light. It is really my go-to light mod for close-in speedlight portraiture now. Broken record, I know. But the not-hard / not-soft look, plus total control, in a small package is too much to resist for me.
If we come in high and in front of Brett, we create a shaft of "third-degree" -type light that you might see in an interrogation scene in a movie. The shaft is hard (-ish) and pointed straight down. Actually, it is even pointed a tad away from him and back toward me. Even so -- and even with the control you get with the SB-III -- his hair was still a little hot.
So we gobo'd the edge closest to Brett with two strips of gaffer's tape to make a quickie barn door. This gave the shaft of downlight a more defined edge. Which, in turn, created a more coming-into-a-shaft-of-light look. That's why the light gets darker as a crawls up Brett's head.
It is a crisp, 3-D look, IMO. Not nearly as out-there as what Peter Yang did earlier, but definitely on the same branch of the family tree.
Here is the setup shot, courtesy Syl Arena. The "boom" holding up the SB-800 / SB-III keylight is the flash arm off of a CSB Micro Mini. (I end up using that outfit chopped into separate parts just as often as I use it together.)
You really need some sort of boom on this -- gotta get that light right out front, and you do not want it moving. In that close, inches matter a lot.
So, our key is relatively powerful because it is in very close. Even dialed way down we will get plenty of aperture to hold focus through the face. Another bennie is that we have the ability to take that nearby white wall to black. This is all because of key-to-subject distance.
Now our white wall is totally black, which means we can make it anything with a second strobe. I chose to aim the second flash at the back wall, using a dome diffuser. This takes the flash pattern out of play and makes the tone of the wall a pure distance thing -- with a smooth gradient. If I want a fast-falling gradient, I put the light in close. If I bring the light away from the wall, the gradient gets less dramatic.
I can control the gradient's actual tone with the power setting on the flash, so the two variables can be adjusted independent of each other. I could make a barely separating grey wall by moving Brett and the light closer to the background wall, but I would lose this gradient control.
Variations on a Variation
And besides, I can do a lot with the rest of that key beam if I want. Remember, Brett is on the feathered edge of the beam, which means that we have a lot of lighting power being wasted out in the space in front of him.
I can catch that with a big reflector in low and fill those shadows if I want. Of I can put that reflector in front, just out of the frame and angled toward Brett's face for fill light very similar to that we used on Riaz. I can make the reflected light as bright or dim as I want by including or excluding the full force of the beam from the key light.
If I have Brett on the edge of the key beam, the reflected light could actually end up being brighter than where Brett is in the key. Lots of possibilities -- even maybe that pillow trick, Ã la John Keatley.
Long story short, the nose and chin shadows depths could be placed at any density you want. But the hard, toplight is also what gives the photo it's look. So you don't wanna rush in there willy-nilly and "fix" everything.
Just understand that you have complete choice in the tonal range of the photo -- even if you are just using two strobes and no ambient.
For the last six months this site has been long on spoon-fed information and short on homework. The result: A bunch of soft, pasty, newcomers who have drifted in since the last time we did any real work around the place. You newbs have been coddled long enough.
So, coming in June ...
Boot Camp II
Are you worthless and weak? Do you cry for your mama every time you need to balance a couple of flashes with the ambient?
Are you still using TTL bounce flash?
We are here to save you from yourself. This summer, you'll have the opportunity to get off your arse (as Zack would say) and do something.
Worldwide Recession Edition
Yeah, we know times are tough all over. Quitcher bellyaching and use this time to build your skills, to make contacts -- maybe even help someone out.
And just to make things more interesting, we gots prizes coming. Each assignment will have a little bonus attached to it for the best butt-buster of the bunch.
But more than that, you'll get a chance to see what photographers from all around the world create while working with your exact assignment.
So, recharge those NiMH's, field strip your LP604's and bore-sight those home-made straw grids. Spread the word: Boot Camp II begins shortly, at oh-dark-thirty.
