November « 2008 « Neil vN

Nikon SB-900 thermal cut-out

November 28, 2008

[ ** updated: Dec 24, 2008 ]

One of the features of the new Nikon SB-900 speedlight is the thermal cut-out. This feature allows the speedlight to stop firing (ie, stop working), when there is danger of it over-heating from shooting too fast. The temperature guage can clearly be seen on the right-hand side of the SB-900 LCD display.

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I’ve shown in an earlier posting here what a speedlight can look like when it over-heats and starts cooking. Here is what my one SB-800 looks like:

I have to stress that this is through no fault of the equipment or the equipment manfucaturer’s design. *I* am using the speedlight outside of the recommendations. Purposely, as explained in the other posting.

With the SB-900 the Nikon engineers cleverly built in a thermal cut-out to stop someone from doing this by accident. It will let the speedlight cut out when a certain termperature is reached inside the unit. This is a good thing. It protects your speedlight from possible damage. Fortunately, the engineers also allows you to bypass this in case you do need to shoot faster than the speedlight is designed for. This is easily set via the menu on the speedlight. (One of the many plusses in favour of the SB-900 is the self-apparant menu.)

Some people don’t seem to be aware of this feature, which is strange considering they just spent $400+ on a top-of-the-range speedlight and didn’t bother to flip through the manual or figure out all the controls.

Others seem to think that this feature is a negative. They seem to think that this feature implies the SB-900 is prone to over-heating. Now, without doing destructive testing on my SB-900, I would say that I would be hugely surprised if the SB-900 is more prone to over-heating than any other speedlight, whether it be the SB-800 or any of the Canon speedlights. Having this feature does NOT make the SB-900 prone to this problem. It allows you to side-step the over-heating problem. In other words, it’s not a negative … it’s a positive, because the speedlight now warns you, and if need be, cuts out.

Therefore my take on the thermal cut-out feature of the SB-900 is that it is one of the advantages that the SB-900 has over other speedlights, and even more of an advantage that you can over-ride it. The best of both worlds.

Now, a few months of using the Nikon SB-900, I still think it is the god of all speedlights.

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** edited to add: Dec 24, 2008

With a bit more experience now of how the SB-900 thermal protection cuts in, I do believe Nikon over-engingeered this feature, because when the SB-900 goes into thermal protection, it also disables the camera’s PC terminal!

I photographed an event this past weekend, and when the on-camera SB-900 cut out, the PC terminal of the D3 was also disabled .. and this meant that none of my off-camera flashes worked. The off-camera flashguns would’ve saved me here, but in this instance the SB-900 over-rode the D3. There really is no reason for this to be designed this way, and is an unfortunate implementation of what really is a good option to have on the speedlight.

Similarly, if the batteries of the SB-900 become depleted, the camera’s PC terminal is once again disabled. And that’s just silly.

Filed under: Nikon, equipment review, flash photography, gear — Neil_vN @ 7:27 pm

Comments (18)

I live 20 miles at 65 mph outside New York ..

November 19, 2008

The title is pure nonsense. I live 20 miles outside of New York. That’s it. The complete description of the distance. Actually, I live 21.19 miles from B&H in Manhattan, which is like magnetic north for many of us photographers. We always feel drawn towards the toy-store. Now that 21.19 miles of course could mean either 30 minutes or 3 hours of driving, depending on traffic through the Lincoln tunnel. But I digress.

I could have described my distance from my house to New York as 20 miles, or disregarding traffic, as 18 minutes at 65mph. But it is nonsensical to describe my distance from New York as 20 miles at 65 mph. The 65mph becomes a superfluous bit of data when stated like that.

So why the strange title for this posting? Because as a digital photographer I see the same kind of nonsense perpetrated on a daily basis when image size is described in terms of absolute pixel dimensions (600 x 400 pixels) and a specific dpi such as 72dpi or 300 dpi also demanded.
It is unnecessary, or worse, confusing.

(more…)

Filed under: digital imaging, digital workflow — Tags: digital imaging, digital workflow, Photoshop — Neil_vN @ 11:52 am

Comments (13)

softboxes with speedlights …

November 14, 2008

Up until recently, I’ve been using the small Photoflex Litedome Q39 (16×22) (B&H) at my flash photography workshops. However, since I try to instill the idea that the larger your lightsource, the softer the light, a larger softbox became necessary. I therefore managed to re-arrange the lighting case that I travel with when I present the workshops, and now use two of the medium Photoflex Litedome Q39 (24×32) softboxes (B&H), instead of the small ones.

Aside from the size, what makes the medium sized Q39 better than the smaller version, is the additional baffle inside that diffuses the light even more. Even thoughBut frustration with the flimsiness of the Photoflex Connector had me looking at alternatives. (The Photoflex Connector is the one that keeps the Speedlight mounted to the softboxes’ speedring.)

After looking at various options, I settled on the Westcott Magic Slipper (B&H), designed by Bruce Dorn. Although it is spendy, and a little more bulky than I would’ve preferred, it is sturdy. Solid. And better yet, simplicity itself in setting up. (The Magic Slipper also comes with an umbrella clamp which I don’t use in this specific setup.)

This configuration of the better design of the Magic Slipper made a big difference at the most recent workshops I presented, in allowing me and my assistant to assemble the items much faster than before. In the end, a slight rethinking of the other bits & pieces I take with me, allowed me to still keep the light-case under 49 lbs and not be hit by the overweight charges from the airlines. phew!

The one thing that I did change with the Magic Slipper, is that I replaced the hotshoe with the better built Nikon AS-10 flash adapter. (B&H)

Now both softbox assemblies that I now use at the workshops will each consist of the monopod, a Manfrotto quick release .. on which rests a Magic Slipper, with a Nikon AS-10 holding the speedlight in position to emit light into the medium Q30 softbox.

Here is a close-up shot of the Magic Slipper. Click on the photo to bring up a larger image.

Filed under: flash photography, gear, lighting — Tags: u — Neil_vN @ 9:21 pm

Comments (37)

workshop views: Miami & St Petersburg, FL

The penultimate set of workshops for 2008 was held this week in Florida with a series of just two workshops - one in Miami Beach and the other in St Petersburg. What a difference going from cold and rainy New Jersey to Miami Beach!

Part of the workshop program in the evening (where weather and location permits), is to go out and improvise and find various surfaces and objects to bounce flash off, like we were able to in Miami Beach. Using the available light from the city locations and combining it with careful use of bounce flash, surprisingly good results can be achieved.

One of things that seem to surprise workshop attendees is that you don’t always need a very specific area like a wall to bounce flash off. Quite often you get great results still by bouncing flash into a very large room or hall, or like the example above, where I bounced my flash behind me off some random architecture – or what became the catch-phrase for the evening – ‘random shit’.

In this pull-back image you can see the structure that I bounced flash off, directly in front of the models – those white pillars and overhang and pole.

And just to show the difference that adding flash made, here is the available-light-only image:

As a side-note: I’ve made some changes to the equipment I bring to the workshops in order to streamline things a little bit more.

Thank you to everyone who attended, and made both workshops enjoyable events.

Here is a review of the workshop by Debra Weisheit.

Filed under: workshops & seminars — Tags: flash photography, photography seminar, photography workshop — Neil_vN @ 7:51 pm

Comments (7)

more off-camera lighting

November 4, 2008

Rooms with wooden panelling are notoriously difficult to shoot in when using flash. This is because of the tendency for the light source (flash) to create large hotspots on the wooden surfaces. I’ve had someone ask me specifically about these images from a recent wedding, and how I avoided those specular reflections in the wooden panelling.

The best way to avoid them is to make sure you don’t “see” your light-source / flash-tube in the wood panelling. Imagine the flat surface to be a mirror – and then from your angle of view make sure you wouldn’t be able to “see” your flash in that surface. This goes back to the tenet that angle of incidence = angle of reflectance. So just make sure you don’t see the reflection of the flash in that surface.

The best approach then is to hoist the light source (flash heads) as high as possible, while using a longer lens so you don’t “look up” into any possible hot-spot.

With such a big group though, it was tough not to see that reflection. I usually have two Q-flashes (T2 models) on tall Red-wing lightstands that I fire with Pocket-Wizards. I sometimes use white shoot-through umbrellas or umbrellas with a black backing. In this case I tried the white shoot-through umbrellas but I was getting hot-spots in the panelling. The best solution I could come up with was to bounce the two Q-flashes (on either side of me), directly into the ceiling and thereby have my lightsource as high as I could, and as diffuse as I could.

Tangents