A few times a year I’m fortunate enough to photograph a destination wedding, where I fly out to a more glamorous location than New Jersey. The Bahamas, Aruba, Jamaica, and even locations within the USA are choice destinations for couples who are looking to have their weddings in an exotic locale.
The choice of equipment to fly out to photograph a destination wedding, as well as the way to transport them becomes a real concern. You have to have a flexible selection of gear with you, with a certain amount of redundancy in case something goes wrong with a piece of equipment. Yet it all has to fit into a portable camera bag or case – and one that can be taken on board a plane as a carry-on bag. This really is of great importance, since if you read some news reports it would even appear as if thievery from luggage at airports are rampant.
So there is the delicate balance – a sensible choice of equipment that has to fit into a bag that is the right size for international carry-on luggage …
.. will be the one where the camera manufacturers allow me some input into the matter. If only Nikon and Canon (and Pentax and Fuji and everyone else) would just gather around a table and listen to me. If only …
When I get to handle a new camera, I often wonder why the manufacturers designed a camera the specific way they did. It might be the strange placement of a button or control; or the omission of a feature, or even the deliberate hampering of features in the non-pro bodies. Sometimes I just wish they would bring in a feature that I love on another camera.
Here are the gear-head musings on what I would insist the Best Camera in the World would be like, if I had any say in it. (Sorry, but that means this posting will have a lot of words and no images this time around.)
Firstly, the Best Camera in the World would have to be a modern full-frame digital SLR camera (D-SLR) for the combination of accessibility, versatility and image quality.
I recently moved from using Canon 1D mkIII bodies to using Nikon D3 bodies. Personally, I think the Nikon D3 is the best camera that has ever been made to date. But there are a number of pros and cons, and not everything falls in favour of the Nikon D3. Therefore most of this post is a comparison between these two cameras, and which things from either camera I would want to see in the Best Camera in the World.
But before we even get there, I have to touch on something - Exposure Modes. Both these cameras fall down sorely when it comes to how the exposure modes are accessed. Pentax’s ingenuity here towers over them in this regard.
A technique I often use to get crisp images in low ambient light when I shoot without flash, is to simply put my camera on continuous drive, and let it rip for a second or so. So while camera shake may ruin some (or even most) images, I am usually sure of getting at least one image that is really sharp.
I know this runs counter to so much of the philosophising in photography – waiting for that oh-so-perfect-moment when it all comes together, and then with great precision and superb intuition of the moment you’re in, to take the photograph. Much of my personal photography is driven by the idea of The Decisive Moment – Henri Cartier-Bresson’s oft-quoted motif. Yet there are times, as with this photo session which were mainly static portraits in low light, where it is just easier to let rip with that motor-drive ..
More and more I find myself turning to using video lights when I use additional lighting for portraits in a more static environment.
In this case I also liked how the difference in the colour temperature between the tungsten video lights and the available light added even more drama to the lighting. In this case the available light was fluorescent lights, as described in this previous posting. Since video lights are fairly hard light sources, I had to make sure that the way the model turned and looked, was in relation to the light. In other words, the way that my friend Steve Z was holding up the two video lights, had to make visual sense in relation to how Priscilla was posed. I wanted the light to fall onto her face from an angle that opened her features, but not be flat lighting as it would be with the light coming from the camera’s direction.
There is a fair amount of play in working like this, and every image will vary slightly from the others since the video lights aren’t static on light stands … but are instead being held up by someone else. This means the lights do vary slightly in position as the other person tires a little, or follows the model … or simply changes position because they either listened to my direction, or intuitively changed the positioning of the light as I might need it. I described some of this way of working in a previous posting on using video lights.
This is exactly where the video lights become an interesting and creative lighting tool – since it is WYSIWYG in use, you can easily make small adjustments on the go. The video lights also come with barn-doors which help a lot in containing exactly where the light falls.
For the image above, Steve Z held up two video lights – one in each hand. He lit up Priscilla’s face with the video light in his left hand, and with the video light in his right hand, gave some rim light on her hair and lit up part of the background.
[ Nikon D3; Nikon 200mm f2 AF-S VR .. 1/100th @ f2 @ 1250 ISO ]
click on the image to see a larger version
My friend Steve Z from Colorado was around for a few days, visiting friends and family here in NJ. So we got together to do a photo shoot, and I arranged to meet up with Priscilla, a model with whom I’ve worked before. I also was fortunate in getting permission to photograph inside the Paterson museum - an interesting historic building.
Steve Z is also into photographic lighting, so we packed up a bunch of gear - a beauty dish, softboxes, speedlights and video lights. We were ready for a lot of playing around with lighting.
When we arrived at the museum, my heart sank when I saw the place was flooded with fluorescent light. In my experience thus far, fluorescent lights = ugly light. I decided that perhaps this was an opportunity then to get some material for a tutorial page on how to use flash with fluorescent lighting. When I’ve dealt with the ugly green look of fluorescent lighting before, I always over-rode it with flash. Fluorescent lighting often has a green colour cast, and the discontinuous spectrum makes it difficult at times to get great skin tones. Also the lights flicker and the White Balance can even vary as you hit different parts of the cycle. So I thought this might just be material for a tutorial here …
Most discussions about equipment where the pros and cons are weighed in favour of something, have flexibility to it. For example, I can see the debate about filters – yes or no? lasting forever. There are valid points to either view about whether filters are detrimental or useful.
But one topic which shouldn’t be up for discussion, is whether lens hoods are recommended. Not to be dogmatic about it, but I can’t see how anyone could argue in favour of not using lens hoods. They are just so obviously useful. Mostly though people think of lens hoods as something to help minimise lens flare. But there is another additional advantage – protection of your lens. This alone make the use of lens hoods a complete non-debate.
This is what the lens hood looks like on my trusty Nikon 28-70mm f2.8 lens. It’s taken quite a few dings over the years as you can see by the scuff marks and paint scrapes on there. But most obviously, there’s that crack in the lens hood.
This is not quite so much as a review as it is a preview – I managed to get hold of a set of the new PocketWizards – the miniTT1 and FlexTT5- and got to play around with them a bit.
The first thing that is impressive about the mini TT1 and Flex TT5, is that they will do away with sync cords. That constant struggle to figure out a way to use the older PocketWizards while you have a speedlight in the camera’s hotshoe, is now a thing of the past. Both the mini TT1 and Flex TT5 units have a remarkably low profile on top of the camera’s hotshoe – and can take a speedlight.
A minor hiccup was that I first tried this with the Canon 5D mk2. After being frustrated in not being able to consistently get results from the on-camera speedlight while mounted on top of the camera-mounted miniTT1 or FlexTT5 .. I bothered to read the instructions and noted that the 5D mk2 can’t yet be used like that. Such are the problems when reverse engineering and improving existing technology. These types of incompatibilities will occur. Hopefully the PocketWizard crew will be able to sort this out in the future with a software update.
So I borrowed a friend’s Canon 5D to test the new PocketWizards out further.
One of the things that makes the new PocketWizards so interesting, is that they are designed to expand on the current wireless TTL flash technology and make it more reliable, and workable over longer ranges .. while offering you all the advantages of wireless TTL flash. One of those things would be high-speed flash sync.
1/800th @ f2 @ 100 ISO
Canon 5D; Canon 85mm f1.2 II
Where high-speed flash sync shines is in allowing us to use wide apertures for a specific look. Photographing my model, Allison, in Hoboken, I wanted the Manhattan skyline to be just a softly out-of-focus haze in the background. This meant a wide aperture like f2 on the 85mm lens. This in turn implied a shutter speed of 1/800th.
The PocketWizards were simplicity itself to use here.
Slide them into position, and switch them on. Dead simple.
But there was more to it than this …
My good friend Randy Kepple, who is a Portland OR, wedding photographer, has made his favourite actions available as an action set. The image above was processed with the Sold My Soul Blues action. Now as much as actions can be a sweet short-cut to get a specific look with our images, it is often better (and more fun) to get your hands dirty and start mix-n-matching them and playing around with them to extend the look you get with an action, into something more specific to your own idea of what you wanted to achieve. Randy’s action set can be purchased via Fundy’s site where there is a special deal on at the moment. Check it out.
choosing the necessary aperture for depth of field (DoF)
Depth of Field (DoF) is one of those elementary factors in photography which seem to mystify most (new) photographers. A question that I’m often asked is, “How do you know how much depth of field you need?” Now anyone who has delved into the topic and has done some research knows that you soon stagger back .. your head spinning trying to tie together all the concepts: circle of confusion, focal length, subject distance, size of enlargement, format size, hyperfocal distance, and so on.
But a working approach might just be simpler than that …
An image from a boudoir photo session today. I ended up mostly using a video light (or two) for the directional and dramatic quality of the light. I tried on-camera bounce flash a few times, but even when I carefully flagged and bounced the flash, there were a number of times where I found that the bounce flash just evened out the light too much. Sometimes it is soft light, and sometimes it just becomes flat light.
With the video light (held up by my assistant), I was able to ask my assistant to flag the light and drop the light off dramatically to the model’s legs. That’s the beauty of using video light - it is completely WYSIWYG. You can make immediate changes to the position of the light – or how you position yourself – based on the light and light patterns on your subject. And with an assistant holding up the light, instead of fixed on a stand, you even have voice-activated automation in how the light is placed.
