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December 8, 2010
your best digital work-flow tip / your best office work-flow tip
I’m once again on a mission to get more control of office work-flow, and to streamline my digital work-flow even further. In a post much earlier this year, I described my Mac awakening, and how a few key things changed my work-flow completely and made my life easier. De-cluttering my desk then made a big difference. Adding some pieces of technology in a more sensible way to my office too, made my life easier and allowed me to work faster. Well, I’m again changing a few things to improve my work-flow. (More about this later perhaps).
In a kind of parallel to this, there was the recent article on the extra items in your camera bag – with some ideas on organizing your camera bag by adding some non-photography essentials. There were some contributions by readers of the Tangents blog who came up with additional suggestions. Mention was also made there of the Shoot Kit – a neat collection of the smaller essentials, all neatly packed into an accessible canvas holder. It contains safety pins and a sewing kit and headache tablets and such. The kit, when rolled left-to-right is secured with a Velcro strip, but rolled right-to-left is easy and silent while opening. (Check the link to the shootkit for the exact details of what is included).
Tying this all together thematically with the idea of organizing your work / life / camera bag, there was a small contest, (now closed):
- post your best digital work-flow tip, and / or
- post your best office work-flow tip.
Even though the contest is closed, everyone is still invited to add their tips and ideas.
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We have a winner for the contest we had last week, where we had to reverse-engineer the lighting in a photograph. I’ll be contacting the winner who will shortly receive a $50 B&H gift voucher. Thank you everyone for vigorously participating!
Here is Josh Lynn to explain what he did for the lighting in the contest image, of which the photo above is the wider shot. This photo reveals more of the one light source. …
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December 6, 2010
using multiple speedlights with high-speed flash sync
This photo of Angelique, our model, was taken at 1/8000 @ f2 @ 100 ISO. Yes, an eight-thousand-th of a second. I wanted to use the unique look that an ultra-wide lens gives at wide apertures. (Click on the photo for a larger image). However, the shallow depth-of-field necessitated a very high shutter speed. So we were working in high-speed flash sync (HSS) territory here.
I also wanted to under-expose the city-scape and then use flash to highlight the model against the environment. So the lighting had to enhance the look of the wide-aperture wide-angle lens. The lens was the beautiful Canon 24mm f1.4 II (B&H). The camera that I used is the classic Canon 5D.
With high-speed flash sync, there is a dramatic loss in effective power, as shown in this previous article. To overcome this, you need to work very close to your subject, or gang up a number of speedlights as a group.
My friend Yishai, of HD PhotoVideo, had shown me his permanent set-up which he uses whenever he has the need of high-speed flash. His setup consists of four Canon 580 EX ii speedlights (B&H), held together via a Lightware Foursquare Block. To free himself up from line-of-sight restrictions, and give reliable control of these speedlights, Yishai had connected each speedlight to a RadioPopper PX unit. (They worked with perfect reliability during this shoot.) To have the speedlights recycle fast enough, they are powered by two Quantum 2×2 batteries (B&H). By ganging up four speedlights like this, we can start overcoming the loss of flash power when going into HSS.
To show me how these work on an actual shoot, we arranged to meet up with Angelique (on this icy cold day) on this pier in Brooklyn, for a photo session.
Here is what this set up looks like. …
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December 4, 2010
feathering the lighting
Comparing those two images, you should notice two things immediately:
- the sky is brighter in the top image.
- the grass in front of the group is more lit in the bottom photo. In other words, the accent is more on the guys in the top photo, since grass in front of them are less well lit.
Both images were lit by a single off-camera softbox, using a speedlight. My on-camera speedlight was set to Master, but with its output disabled. Therefore only the Slave flash (in the softbox) was lighting the group. I liked the exposure on them after dialing down the flash exposure compensation to -2EV. The initial test images were blown out because of the predominantly darker tones in the image, so I had to pull down the TTL flash exposure. Since TTL flash is an automatic metering mode, the camera will try to expose for the overall scene as a mid-tone. And I had to over-ride that with my FEC.
Now, about the two comments at the top …
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December 1, 2010
wedding portraits with multiple light sources
edited on Dec 08, 2010 :
contest winner has been announced, with feedback from Josh about this photograph
When we’ve previously featured photographs that we tried to reverse engineer, there was a great response by readers of the Tangents blog. Similarly, many participated in the recent Photoshop contest. So I’ve decided that we should combine the two. Maybe even make it a regular event.
The contest then is to reverse engineer this photograph in terms of the lighting.
The winner gets a $50 B&H gift card!
Again, the photograph to be analyzed was shot by my friend Josh Lynn. It was taken during the romantic portrait session during a recent wedding. The setup featured 5 light sources, and Josh was kind enough to give us a head-start with this diagram of how the lights were placed:
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