Hunkered Down, and 2010-Bound

The twenty three inches of snow we got last week is melting fast after hanging around for a week.

But I have figured out how to put the remaining mounds to good use: We now have a rather large-ish, walk-out Diet Mtn. Dew refrigerator.

The caffeine will be timely and appreciated, as I am spending the week in The Cave trying to knock off my first of three, blog-related New Year's resolutions. More on that in a few days -- hopefully.

But before we head into 2010, one last look at some of my favorite stuff from Strobist in 2009, in case you missed it the first time. (Windows will open in a new frame, so you can 'command-W' to close them and remain either here or in your feed reader.)
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On Assignment: Manil Suri
Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Frozen Hummingbirds
Your Basic Freudian Light Stand
Visiting the Large Hadron Collider
FS: Brick 3BR TH, SB-800s Do Not Convey
On Assignment: Desert Falconer
Lighting Edgier Group Shots
Two-Light Techniques: Pt. 1, Pt. 2 and Pt. 3
Now You Can Sync Anything to Anything
On Assignment: Playwright
New Long-form Dave Hill Videos
Trashy Light
Light, in Tights: Bounceman!
Video: Dan Winters, Beyond Lighting
Dean Collins' Hot Lights Bike
Jon Fletcher's Night Shuttle Shoot
The Men Who Flash at Goats
An (as-yet unanswered) Challenge to Nikon
Drinking with Dead Guys: Beers With Vermeer


Have a happy (and safe) New Year's Eve, and we'll see you next year...

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Christmas Lights and Lighting Christmas

So, we're definitely gonna have a white Christmas here in Maryland.

We are buried in snow, with the high between now and Christmas only hitting the mid 30's. That stuff ain't goin' nowhere.

I took advantage of the first pristine evening to do a twilight photo of our house with the Christmas lights, right out of the tutorial that was referenced last week.

Twilight is the magic hour when it all comes together. And the snow is an added bonus, making large, formerly black areas in the photo very easy to compress tonally. You can underexpose it by a full three stops and it is still a rich medium grey.

Or in this case, medium blue. After the light goes down, the ambient shifts to a very cool color temperature. And by shooting between daylight and tungsten WB, you can play the warm against the cool very nicely.

Here, I used a daylight setting, shifted three units to blue -- which is about halfway to incandescent. That left the tungsten lights nice and warm. Our normal outside lights, BTW, are warm CFLs, which are warmer than tungsten with a little green added in.

Other than that, it's just a waiting game. In a rare moment of lucidity, I shot test shots of the neighbor's house through the window from my warm living room until the lighting mix was pretty close. Then I walked out to the street and made my picture within a couple minutes.

(I'm kinda liking this staying-indoors-during-a-major-snowstorm thing -- a pleasant change of pace from the last 20 years of chasing snow art.)


Lighting Christmas

For those of you not around in 2007, we did a walk-thru of how to easily light your whole living room with just a couple speedlights. It is designed for Christmas morning, but is a good technique to know for any time you have to light a large area with mobile subjects. For reference, you can find it here.

If you are expecting lighting gear under the tree, this might even be excuse enough to get to open it a day early -- just sayin'.

In the Hobby house, we are full-blown into Christmas mode right now, so please forgive any delays in moderating your comments, etc. And whichever holiday you may be celebrating this time of year, we hope it is happy, healthy and spent with friends and family.

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On Assignment: Photography for Social Media

I have been getting a new type of assignment over the last few months that I would have never anticipated even a year ago: Shooting corporate headshots and portraits specifically designed to be used in social media.

If you are a photographer who is savvy with Facebook and Twitter, you might do well to hook up with forward-thinking people who are heavy users of social media sites. More, inside.
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Ahead of the Curve

For me, the first thought of social media headshots was in an email exchange a while back with fellow blogger Ben Popken. He was sporting a cooler-than-thou avatar pic, and I asked him about it.

He told me that he "had it done," by photographer Nikola Tamindzic [NSFW]. In an instant, this made total sense to me. We register visual impressions in a fraction of a second, and Ben was smart enough to make the most of that for his online presence. Think of the number of images that hit you on a given day, and how efficient you are at making subconscious assessments based on image content and style.


Ben's avatar is current, cool and loose -- a perfect fit for his highly visible job Consumerist. But also is part of a group of photos at the ready for the speaking gigs and TV appearances that are part of his duties.

Take a moment to check out the bottom/right sidebar at Consumerist, which features Ben's headshot as seen above. Just below him, Meghann Marco's photo is also from a pro shoot, albeit a tight crop. It's from a cool group shot by the same photog of the (then) three editors at Consumerist:


The other sidebar shots are more typical of what you would normally see used as a bio pics or avatars. And to me, there's a huge difference in the first impression left by the different types of photos.

Consumerist doesn't have a gazillion bucks to go out and fund a big shoot. But even in 2007, they were smart enough to give themselves an instant leg-up on projecting a cool image.

What's amazing to me is that even in 2009, some much better-funded companies using social media still don't get this. In fact, some companies actually are using employee I.D. badge photos as avatars for their Twitter folks. Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.

If you are corporate social media type -- or just very visible on the web in your profession -- how much is riding on that first impression? Should you really be letting some guy down in security make your avatar photo on his ID-O-Matic mugshot machine?


Have a Compass Point

The trio of headshots up top came from a recent shoot I did of a social media team at a financial services company. They work directly with the public, and wanted to project an attitude of being fun, smart and approachable. Not exactly your father's corporate headshot. One of the ideas I tossed up for this shoot was a "Fast Company" look, based on the very smart Biz 2.0 mag of which I am a big fan.

As good as Fast Company is, one of the things that irks me about them is their willingness fall back on the same Jill Greenberg-style cover, say, 6 times a year or so. But that does give them a look, and one that is recognizable to even their non-photographer readers. This common knowledge is helpful in finding a visual compass point before the shoot. And they went for it right away.

I'll confess to having a love/hate thing with that Greenberg style. I like where she starts out, but frequently do not like where she ends up. Way too much over-lighting and post work for my taste.

My preference is to go with the natural, 3-D look of that wrapping style of light, and go lighter on the post work. I'm just not a big fan of the highly Photoshopped, alien-looking plastic skin thing.



Here is a pullback for Suzanne, the subject on the left up top. We kept this lighting pretty consistent throughout the shoot, which involved six people on that day.

As you can see, there is a beauty dish for key, and two gridded strips behind her for separation. Not a lot of juice on the strip lights, either. Just enough to define the area rather than nuking it. What you cannot see is a diffused (bare-bulb) SB-800 close to the collapsible backdrop, and an ABR-800 / Moon Unit for on-axis fill.

That last light is important, as it allows you to dial the contrast up or down as needed right from the camera position. We nixed the fill altogether on Rob (on the right) for instance. And if you don't have a ring you could use an umbrella right behind the camera in a pinch.

This lighting scheme gives a lot of control, as you are pretty much lighting every plane in the photo. Thus, there is a volume control on everything. But by keeping the ratios close, it all just look very crisp and 3-D -- and not so nuclear as in the Fast Company fronts.

The files were pretty close right out of the camera. I only added a little bit of high-pass filtration with hard-light layers to punch it up a little in post.


Bring Some Attitude

In the end, the edited photos set the tone for what should connote a fun, person-to-person feel in a social media environment. So while you should definitely start out with some standard corporate neutrals and smiles, get past that stuff quickly and work a wider variety of expressions. Then you have the ability to make choices in the edit later.

For these, we decided to go with more of an impish, fun look for the avatars, with a range of expressions inside on peoples' profile pages. When you think about it, everything in business comes down to person-to-person relationships. And being willing to open up a little bit in a corporate environment can pay big dividends in social media. It helps that this particular group of people were smart, funny and outgoing.

Which, of course, also makes them the ideal type of person for this job. Clarky, in the center, is hard-core social media. She had tweets timed to drop in while the shoot was happening. (FWIW, I sometimes use Future Tweets to space mine out, too. Keeps me from looking like a freak by dropping in tweets at 3:00a.m. when I frequently am actually awake writing.)


Just Do It.

If you are interested in building a social media portfolio, the best place to start is by photographing people in your circle who are already blogging and/or on Twitter. It's great for them, obviously. And done right, you will already have the beginnings of a viral marketing arm for your work.

Come to think of it, if your goal is to spread the word you might want to find the people who are already social media hubs in your town and work with them right off the bat. Being the chatty, social types they are, the first thing they'll probably do when they throw up the new photo is to talk about and link to the photographer who shot it.

But the important thing is that you get a subject and they get a photo. Lather, rinse and repeat until you start getting a better comfort level -- and a better, more targeted portfolio. Then you'll be ready when the word of mouth starts to come back to you.

This is an area I am interested in for several reasons -- not the least of which is because it is an intersection point for several areas of my professional life. So I have been shooting friends and colleagues to create the beginnings of a body of work in social media.

Which, in turn, has also led me to what I think will be the most interesting project I will be working on in 2010. Not ready to talk about it here yet, but suffice to say that the serendipitous aspect of just jumping in and making things happen can be very powerful.


Your Examples

Knowing that a lot of you are on Twitter, I'd be curious to see some of your choices for cool avatars there. It's a small amount of real estate, but some folks are creating a kickass first impression with it.

For instance, I like Tim Ferriss's avatar, which is perfect for the globe-trotting lifestyle engineer that he is.

Whose avatar -- other than your own, of course -- do you like? Hit us with a comment, and include a fully-formed URL (i.e., http://www.twitter.com/ahetherington) in the comments.
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Next: STB: John McIntyre

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DIY Awesomeness: Level-Headed Light Stand Mod

We love Reuben Krabbe's lazy-leg light stand mod so much we will be more than happy to help pimp his blatant appeal for new followers on Twitter and Facebook.

This mod is designed for a standard light stand. But for those of you who use compact, 5-section light stands, remember that they work differently because of the 180-degree leg-fold design.

Just eyeballing it, my thinking is that the extra holes on the leg -- going further down the leg -- would have to be spaced much tighter than two inches. (Half an inch, maybe?) I'd line it up and check the angles before drilling. Also, you might have to pull the pin and re-insert it to get it to close completely.

What a great mod, Reuben. Lots of tripods do this, but I have never seen it on a light stand.

[UPDATE: Apparently, Avenger makes a lazy-leg stand. Still liking this DIY route, tho.]
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(Via the always excellent DIYPhotography.net, where Udi has lots more light stand DIY stuff.)

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"Donner, Party of Four, Please…"

We are snowbound here at Strobist World Headquarters, 14 inches into a forecast two feet of snow. The whole Mideast Atlantic is getting pummeled.

I'm an indoor cat today, not at all missing the mandatory snow art assignment at The Sun.

We are (I hope) sufficiently stocked up on food, and cracking the occasional "Modest Proposal" sub-reference around the kids. They remain clueless as to why we think that's funny.

Happy to be snuggled up near the fire and working on an OA post for next week. If you are traveling -- in any form -- on the East Coast today, please do so carefully.

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Nikon Shotguns the Web With Goodness

Hey, you.

If you are a Nikon shooter and use CLS, you definitely want to head over to Nikon's site for three new free lighting vids. Heck, even if you aren't a Nikon type, it's worth the watch for the McNally lighting theory tidbits.

There are three vids so far: here, here and here.

Big props to Nikon USA for moving into high-quality, free instructional video on the web to make their customers better shooters. Every company oughtta be doing this. Really.

Not leaving well enough alone, you can also get Nikon World for free on your iPhone/iPod Touch. And if you are on Twitter, you can follow Nikon there, too.
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As for the Canon equivalents, lessee…

Oh yeah: Fake Chuck Westfall is busy on Twitter. Mind those virgin ears, tho (or cubicle passers-by) -- as Chucky frequently uncorks the odd NSFW rant.

(Seriously, if Canon or any of the other major camera manufacturers is doing good quality lighting videos, sound off w/URLs in the comments.)



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10m Nikon/Canon TTL Cords Now on Ebay

After several months of use, I am a pretty big fan of my YongNuo 10-meter TTL cord.

Most of the time I do not use it for TTL. But I frequently use it as a rock-solid, quick PC cord that can also handle FP sync when I want to do an f/2.8 portrait, lit in full sun. And if you are using CLS, it is also great for getting the master flash to a place where it can see all of the remote flashes.

The problem has been where to find them, as no one seems to have picked up the ball at retail. But they have finally popped up on eBay in quantity on both Nikon and Canon platforms, and from someone who ships worldwide.

As of right now, the specific pages are here for the Nikon and Canon versions. But those auction listings will change, so you can always search Nikon 10m TTL and Canon 10m TTL to track them down.

Both versions are under $50 USD, with free worldwide shipping.

And if anyone knows of any established retail outlets (as opposed to eBay sellers) who may also be stocking them, please feel free to post a direct product URL in the comments.

(Thanks to Selbosh for the eBay tip via the comments.)
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Pixel TR-331 Update

And speaking of remote TTL capability, I placed some first-person review notes (from VA-based photog Don Harper) on the previously mentioned Pixel TTL remotes in the Flickr thread dedicated to that product, where most of the best info is already collected.

And there is another, excellent review in that thread, here.

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