The Unreal Me

A habit I’ve found myself getting into as I drive around is keeping my eyes open for interesting things to shoot. A few days ago I was driving to the supermarket and I noticed this old tree trunk, almost branchless, with no top, sticking up among the other trees. It looked kinda spooky and so I decided to use it as the subject for learning something about using my flash. The task I set myself was to single out the tree with a flash and make everything else black.

When I arrived I took a reference shot of the tree so you can see what it looked like to me. Settings were ISO 3200, f6.3 @ 1/50. 

 

I then fiddled around with some exposure settings to get the background darker, attempting to get it to go black and noticed a nice effect in the clouds. ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th.

 
I quite liked the effect, so I started shooting some frames at similar settings but using my flash to light the tree. The surrounding area was a little cluttered with other trees and junk so I decided to handhold my flash on my left hand as opposed to setting up a lightstand. This meant I could quickly try a few different angles on it too without having to stop and move the stand all the time. This first shot I think my flash was on 1/8th power, and as you can see from the shadow I’m holding it up and left, facing down and right. ISO 400, f8 @ 1/50th.

 

I then pointed the flash up as opposed to down and this resulted. Notice how the shadows from the bush on the left now cast onto the trunk, making things look a little messier.

 

Next I bumped up the power of my flash to 1/2 and took this picture after moving to the side of the tree. Unfortunately with this framing, the branch of some spindly tree comes into frame, and the flash is so bright it lights the surrounding tree on the top left too. ISO 400, f6.3 @ 1/50th.

 

Next on the list, I decided to pop my white shoot-through umbrella in front of my flash and take a shot. See how the transitions between light and dark on the shadows is smoother than without the umbrella. The flash is also on the same power as the previous shot (1/2) but the image is exposed less due to the umbrella sucking up light.

 

I then decided to go back to my black background tests and so adjusted my camera settings to ISO 200, f6.3 @ 1/200th, bringing everything down 3 stops. I then took another shot and got this.

 

To finish off the night, I threw on a couple of filters, the first being a Lee Golden Amber gel which unsurprisingly produced a rather golden, amber photo. The second filter was a Lee Full CTO gel. In case you don’t know the Lee Full CTO is designed to take daylight and turn it into tungsten; something you’d do if you were using your flash inside under normal tungsten lights and needed to balance the flash to the lights. As an aside, the Lee gels were simple gels from a sample pack that I’ve had lying around for years. The samples are the PERFECT size to cover the bulb on my flash and with a little DIY to make a plastic flash holder, voila, I have free flash gels. I’ll post about this little adapter and the gels in another post soon.

Anyway, overall I found the experience very interesting. It was great to get out and finally test my flash in a more realistic way, but I do have to say that the resulting photos were a little depressing. While the clutter was a bit of an issue, I can remedy that in post to some degree, but the two big things that I would have liked to have done better is to light more of the tree (I might need a bigger flash, or a high stand) and to get a better angle on it. I wanted the tree to be ominous looking against a black sky but it didn’t turn out that way. Maybe a wide angle lens, combined with situating myself lower and at the base of the tree would have worked but I just couldn’t get close enough.

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist

I had a bit of an “Ahhh” moment today when I was reading a Strobist article on balancing subject light with background light. The article was talking about controlling ambient light while using your flash to bring your subject into an acceptable exposure range. The article proposed some exercises to do and I was going through the steps in my head, imagining the output that I would get should I do them. Unfortunately I found myself confused when, after reading about taking some initial shots at f5.6 @ 1/60th, I read the following:

“But now, also shoot some frames at 1/125, to underexpose the background by a stop. And try a few at 1/250th to underexpose by two stops. You should see a very different feel in these photos, but they should all look okay…”

Underexpose the background? Won’t adjusting the shutter reduce exposure over the entire area? Surely they meant to say “increase the shutter speed and adjust the flash power up to compensate.”? After all, we’re taught in photography 101 that increased shutter means less light, means darker photos. I kept reading, hoping they’d correct it later on but the article kept suggesting that you change the shutter to change the background exposure only. I was getting truly frustrated and so had to stop reading and try to think about all the things I’ve learnt recently about flash photography that I must not be taking into account. That’s when it hit me.

FLASHES FIRE VERY, VERY FAST

Not only do flashes give you more light, but they do it so fast that they effectively render your shutter speed unimportant with regard to exposure of whatever the flash light is falling on. Imagine this scenario. You are in a perfectly black room aiming your camera at a subject. You set your camera’s shutter speed to 10 seconds. Because the room is completely black, no light will hit the sensor of the camera in that 10 seconds and you’ll have a black picture. Now add a flash that when fired will illuminate your subject for perfect exposure. When you hit the shutter button, the flash fires for a tiny fraction of a second (Maybe 1/1000th) and then for the remaining time the room is black again. Changing your shutter speed to 5 seconds, or to 20 seconds would have absolutely no effect on the resulting picture because for 1/1000th of a second there is light that the sensor can read, but for the remaining time it’s black.

Now, change the black room to one that has a little bit of light in it. Your 10 second exposure will now be doing something. It will be exposing the sensor on your camera with a little bit of light for 10 seconds. The flash will still fire at the start, exposing your subject perfectly, but the remainder of the time is spent exposing the picture with the little bit of light. Hence, your shutter speed allows you to control background exposure, while your flash does it’s own thing effectively independent of it.

Here are some samples pictures showing this in action. Each picture was taken at a very different shutter speed inside an almost pitch black cupboard. Notice how the exposure is almost identical? The flash dominates the exposure and you can see only a slight difference resulting from the longer exposure times (There was a gap under the door with some ambient light coming through). 

 

1/10th second exposure	1 second exposure
2 second exposure	5 second exposure

 

If I was shooting this without flash and just using shutter for the exposure (NOTE: I would have had to let in more light for you to actually see anything at these relatively short exposure times) you would have seen vastly different exposures; the 2s exposure would have been twice as bright as the 1s exposure.

So, now that I have finally become aware of this practical use for the speed of flash, the Strobist post becomes clear and it opens up even more control possibilities when doing flash photography. I plan to go out in the next week or so and do some flash tests. It will be the first real world stuff I’ve done with my flash so I’m looking forward to it.

 

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist

Being an amateur photographer that doesn’t make a cent from shooting I can’t justify spending cash on many accessories in order to experiment with a new technique. This means I have to build my own and today I want to talk about my most recent construction – a grid.

A grid is essentially a, well, grid of honeycomb, circles or other shapes designed to funnel light into a narrow beam. The result is a spotlight type of effect that feathers off at the edges. The major benefit to this is that you can then control where the light spills or doesn’t, highlighting your subject or background as you see fit.

Now, if you had a spare US$24.95 + shipping, you could purchase a well made pro grid for your Speedlite from HonlPhoto like this one. Your friends would envy you, you would look cool, and you would be able to have a little more control of your light. But if you’re like me, you have to give up the envy and the cool by building your own; although you will still get some control over your light.

Before I start I want to say that this is NOT my invention. I first came across a homemade grid via Strobist which took me to a couple of sites; DIYPhotography.net and lightingmods. Visit those sites for some more indepth information and other DIY treats. I’ve posted instructions here for both posterity, and also to help you locate those black straws if you’re in New Zealand. I couldn’t find them anywhere else.

First you will need to get all the equipment.

• Scissors (The Warehouse, $1.95 if you don’t have them already)
• Black straws ($4 from Carlton Party hire for enough to make about 6 grids, or 1 grid and a cocktail party)
• Tape (Black Gaff is the best) (About $4 from The Warehouse and it will last you forever)
• Cardboard (Cut up a book on programming in Java)

Uncategorized DIY, Photography, Strobist

A few weeks ago I discovered an amazing blog called “Strobist“. The aim of the blog is to teach you how to light your photographs using a portable off camera flash unit (As opposed to a studio flash). The philosophy is that your on camera look-ma-everythings-glowing flash is awful, but if we take it off camera and diffuse it, snoot it, bounce it and myriad of other things, we can get some truly great light for our photos. On top of that, it’s small and runs off batteries so we can easily take it out with us.

I read through their tutorials and found myself getting more and more excited at what a simple, one flash, portable system could achieve and I wanted to try out the techniques on the site. Of course before I could do that I actually needed to have a flash and once I had that I had to have something to trigger it. The first step was a visit to Auckland Camera Centre to get the flash. Thankfully I pretty much knew what I want because the service was awful and I will likely never return, but I forked out my $500, grabbed my flash and left.

Now I had a nice flash but the only way to use it was to sit it in my camera hotshoe. While this flash is much better than the built in one on my Canon 300d, it was still facing straight ahead and could burn retinas in an instant while simultaneously lighting everyone in the room in that bright, flat light that most people’s grandmas are bathed in at family gatherings. So I needed to get it off my camera which meant I needed something to trigger it. One option is to use a PC cord which joins the camera to the flash but I was more interested in a wireless solution for ease of use and flexibility, not to mention avoidance of tripping over it and destroying my gear and my body in one foul swoop.

One option was to go with a defacto set of PocketWizards but those things are EXPENSIVE (US$3-400 for a set) and just not something my bank balance could handle. So again Strobist came to the rescue when I started spotting people talking about these Cactus V2 systems from a Hong Kong supplier called GadgetInfinity. They didn’t seem as reliable in their firing, and their operation distances were small but they were cheap. At US$32.95 + US$5 shipping for the V2s (The one that works with the 430EX II) they were about as good as I was going to be able to afford.

So I placed my order and within about a week they turned up.

 

I was pleasantly surprised to find the box was reasonably well made and it was packed well in a padded bag. On opening I found all the pieces where they should be with the flash stand underneath the plastic tray that held all the main pieces. 

 

The system itself is plastic and reasonably well made. Not anywhere near the level of pro gear, but it’s also pretty solid for the most part with the one concern being the metal hotshoe bracket on the bottom of the receiver. It looks a little flimsy and I can imagine that a knock of the flash while on this receiver might pull the metal bracket away from the plastic body. I will allay this fear at a later date when I start getting into modding the unit as many others have done to increase the range and reliability of the system.

Pulling out the pieces I put in the battery, set it all up, and fired a test shot by pressing the ‘test’ button on top of the transmitter (That’s the piece on the right in the photo above). Nothing happened. I checked the channels were matched between receiver and transmittter, as the system can be set to 1 of 4 possible channels, but still no go. So I grabbed the small manual, flicked to the Troubleshooting section and looked at the “Flash does not fire” section. The first solution in that section simultaneously made me happy and embarrassed. It read: “Ensure the plastic covering on the battery is removed”.

With that out of the way, I tried again and the test firing worked – excellent! Unfortunately I had to leave everything there so I have yet to have a good session with the unit and my newly purchased diffusion umbrella, so for now I’ll leave you with a picture of the stand and setup and return later with some actual photos and experiences with the unit.

 

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist