Category Archives: Gear

An important law

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The “inverse square law”, passed by the Ontario government in 1988 as part of bill 42-C sub… no never mind. It is a law of nature:

And that is why forward flash from your camera gives you those bad black backgrounds (not even mentioning the shadows, the oily skin, the deer-in-the-headlights look, and so on).

This inverse square rule should be part of your photographic DNA, if is isn’t yet. Move a flash closer, and it can have more power. And vice versa.

But this law is sometimes understood incorrectly. It applies to distance between light source and object. NOT distance between object and photographer.

Find that hard to understand?

Then consider this: does a pale person turn into a dark-skinned person when you move back? Does a black-skinned person turn Caucasian when you approach? No. They turn into, respectively, smaller and larger persons (so the rule that fewer photons reach you does hold), not into darker or lighter persons.

My all-new flash course runs at 2pm in Hamilton: two and a half hours to go. I had better pack!

 

Handy gadgets

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Gadget Recommendation Time here at speedlighter.ca!

I often use “studio type” flash. This, by my definition, is flash…

  1. Whose power is set manually, and…
  2. Which is fired with a simple “fire now” command, rather than through TTL (“Through The Lens”) metering.

Strobes are all like that. Speedlights can optionally also be used this way.

Outdoors, I use Pocketwizard II Plus radio triggers to fire studio-type flashes. They use radio to convey that simple “fire” command: one on the camera, working as a sender, and one on each flash, working as a receiver. Click, and all flashes go off. Simple.

In indoor studio situations like the one pictured below, if I have strobes, I use Pocketwizards combined with “cell” sensors. Studio lights have light sensitive cells that detect a flash, and that fire when they see such a flash. So one studio light has a Pocketwizard; the others use their light sensitive cell.

The catch: Studio lights have that “cell” ability, but Canon speedlites do not. (Some Nikon speedlights do have it: with the usual Japanese ability to use obscure terms, they call it “SU-4” functionality).

So if I want to use four Canon speedlights, as above, I need five Pocketwizards. Each of which cost a couple of hundred dollars; and then I need a special cable to connect the Pocketwizard to the speedlight.

Enter the new Flashzebra.com Optical Slaves. These are small and very affordable sensors with a light cell, that connect to your Canon flash. They need no external power: all you do is plug them in, set the flash to manual mode at your selected power level, and you have a slave flash!

These slave cells come in various versions. One has a standard 3.5 mm jack:

You would use this for any Canon flash, by means of a female-female converter and a special Canon hotshoe cable, some of which I already own:

There are also options that plug directly into the flash if it has a PC-type flash connector (the one with the concentric rings; such as a 580EX II). See on the left:

Also, the same, but with a cable:

There are many other variants, as you can see here:

http://www.flashzebra.com/opticalslaves/index.shtml

I just used one of them to make all these pictures, by the way. Here you can see it, plugged straight into the PC connector of my 580EX II:

So, why am I happy with these optical slave devices?

  • First, they are simple and do not require a whole lot of cables, brackets, and so on.
  • There are Canon-specific versions available.
  • I do not need to worry about their batteries running out.
  • I save significant money, since now I do not need as many Pocketwizards.

When do I not use optical slaves?

  • When I am outdoors, certainly on a bright day. Unless I have very reliable line of sight, optical slaves are not great outdoors.
  • When the range is too great. Pocketwizards can cover hundreds of metres.
  • When I am using any sort of TTL. TTL (“Automatic flash”) uses a pre-flash, as my readers here know well; this pre-flash would set off the slave flashes, so that a few milliseconds later, when the shutter opens and the “real” flash goes, the speedlight is not yet ready.

So now I am ready to roll with even more small, light and affordable options. And I like small, light, and affordable.

How well are these optical slaves made? They are cheap (made in India!), but that does not mean they will break. They seem solid enough. I shall do a long duration test, but for $16, I am not too bothered if any of them ever break: I’ll get more. More important is that they do not damage my flashes, as such devices can; I am happy to report that everything is fine.

I have been buying from Flashzebra for years, and recommend them wholeheartedly, and I am not being paid to say this: I love their range of affordable cables, brackets, and other flash gadgets, and I am always very happy with their service, should I need it.

Flashzebra.com for flash gadgets and Honlphoto.com for small flash modifiers: these are my goto places for flash needs. And yes, Dave Honl is a friend but no, he is not paying me to say this either!

___

Allow me to point out these few additional learning opportunities:

All workshops will be announced via email and press release next week, but you, my readers here, get first option!

 

Backups revisited

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Another quick note about backups, today.

I have talked about them before, in posts including these two, which you may want to (re-) read:

Why bring all that up again?

Because hardware dies, and I hear too many disaster stories every week. Hardware dies. All hardware dies. Let me repeat: eventually, all hardware dies. We just don’t know when.

Examples, all of the last few weeks:

  • My Macbook’s hard drive died in the middle of Santa shooting over Christmas. Yes, I had backups.
  • Also, I just now deleted my new laptop’s Lightroom catalog. And again, yes, I had backups (I use Apple’s Time Machine as one of my additional backup mechanisms).
  • A client called me last week: her husband’s backup drived had died, and the original (photo and Lightroom) files – his life’s work! – were also lost. Fortunately, we had set up a backup scheme using two external disks, as in my first post above; so I was able to help restore the files – his work is safe.

So please – please – spend time today to make backups and to set a backup schedule that includes:

  1. Regular backups
  2. Off-site backups (what if you get burgled: you think they’ll leave your backup disk for you?)
  3. Non-proprietary backup methods (disk arrays that use proprietary encryption are, I think, a bad idea).
  4. In-app settings (like the setting in Lightroom that creates XML files: that should be a standard setting!)

 

If you do all that, your work will be reasonably safe. Also, you will sleep at night. And I will not get disaster calls.

We keep all our work in one place nowadays, so we are more vulnerable than ever to loss of… well, everything. Be safe out there!

 

More Modifiers

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Today, another look at flash modifiers for you.

Here’s a smaller snoot (again, I am using the excellent range of Honl Photo modifiers):

This also makes a small well-delineated light area, but it is larger then the one from the large snoot.

A small reflector. This allows me to direct the light somewhat; it also softens the light a little:

And a large reflector:

Observant readers will notice this is the same device as the long snoot – just not rolled up. This particular one is a CTO version – “colour temperature orange”, giving it a warm, tungsten-like bounce.

And finally a small portable softbox (this is the Honl “Traveller 8” – there is also a larger version):

This creates wonderful, soft light.

Without a softbox, this would have looked like this:

See that annoying side shadow? The softbox would have taken care of that.

___

As you know by now, my Photography “recipe” book is out: this 108-page (non-DRM!) eBook is available for purchase right now for just $19.95 –  see www.speedlighter.ca/photography-cookbook/

 

Modification Good

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You hear me talk about flash modifiers a lot here: today I thought I might show you what some of them actually look like. In particular, some of the ones that let me direct or colour the light (tomorrow, I’ll mention more, and talk about softening the light).

A grid restricts the spread of the light from your flash. Here’s a grid (a Honl Photo grid: I use Dave Honl’s excellent small flash modifiers constantly. They attach using simple velcro and are small, sturdy, light, and affordable: a pretty good combo):

The grid is my most often used modifier. After all:

I want to direct where the light goes, which clearly implies that I also want to direct where the light does not go.

The grid helps me do that. You can even see it in the picture: the flash is firing but it’s not blinding us. I can light a subject without also lighting up the wall.

Next, the snoot. Here’s a snoot (another Honl device: the reflector rolled into a tube is a snoot):

See? Even more directional than the grid. Great for very selective lighting.

One more modifier today: the gel. Here’s a gel:

Now we have a purple flash!

Another device is the Gobo (“Go Between Objects”):

That is in fact a bounce card with the dark side used. Here’s the bounce card with the light side used:

You can see both keep light from certain areas; one also reflects to the opposite side.

Finally today, here’s a photo taken with a gel and a snoot. Can you tell?

Tomorrow, more modifiers for you!

___

My Photography “recipe” book is out: this 108-page (non-DRM!) eBook is available for purchase right now for just $19.95 –  see www.speedlighter.ca/photography-cookbook/

 

OCF!

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OCF? Yes, “Off-Camera Flash”.

The worst place for your flash is on your camera, near the lens. Taking the flash off camera is one of the best things you can do. And so why are you not yet doing it?

Look at a shot like this:

Took a long time to set up? No – student Jeff and I did this in a few minutes earlier this evening, right on my kitchen counter.

This needed off-camera flash. Here’s what we used:

  • One small flash (a speedlight) on our right, shooting though an umbrella.
  • With that, the shot looked OK but a little bland, so Jeff suggested a red light behind. Good idea: another flash behind the skull.
  • This second flash was fitted with a Honl Photo 1/4″ grid, to stop the light from going “everywhere” and spoiling the shot.
  • It was also fitted with a Honl Photo red gel, as you can see, for great effect.

All this setup looked like this:

A few other notable points:

  • I am firing the flashes using Pocketwizards, so that Jeff (who shoots Nikon) and I (who shoot Canon) can both make the same images.
  • This means I used a light meter to measure the light, and hence to set the flashes’ power.
  • The umbrella is close to the skull in order to be able to be at low power. This in order to not light up the rest of the room. (This is the “inverse square law”).
  • I am not using lens filters… they would add ruinously more flare.

You can do this too. And even simpler: use remote TTL. A Nikon or modern Canon camera, two flashes (SB600/700; 430EX) and a few affordable stands, some ditto modifiers (I use the excellent Honl range of modifiers), a few ditto brackets: this stuff is NOT complicated or expensive. It’s simple once you know.

Like brain surgery.

Ah. But the difference between this and brain surgery is that brain surgery takes years to learn, and this takes.. well, hours. I recommend you learn to take your flash off-camera… today. And you will never look back.

 

Simple Does It

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Quite often, you can keep sthings simpler than you might think.

Like this demo of a product setup. All I used is a couple of cheap old strobes; an old table; a reflector; and a piece of paper. Like so:

And that gives me images: like this:

This is just one way of shooting products. The points is that you can often use simple means to shoot professional looking shots.

 

New Camera?

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Did you receive a new camera for Christmas?

In that case, I suggest you now learn to use it. Learn, first and foremost, to operate it in manual exposure mode – this is the same on all cameras. Learn all the menus – this is camera-specific. Also learn all the extra functions that make your camera great.

It’s what I teach (for all cameras), and as the new year approaches, if you would like to try coaching, portfolio review, or any other type of private training, give me a call or drop me a line. I have special offers for the start of the year.

Learn also to avoid common misconceptions. Misconceptions like “flash pictures get warmer backgrounds if you use second (or ‘rear’) curtain sync”. This is nonsense.

Normally, a flash picture, with your camera in its default setting of First Curtain Sync, works like this:

  1. The shutter opens
  2. The flash immediately fires
  3. The shutter stays open for the set time
  4. The shutter closes

This is fine, but if your subject moves forward during a slow exposure, and that subject has light other then the flash this happens:

The subject appears to be moving backward!

If we select Second Curtain Sync (or Rear Curtain Sync), now the sequence becomes:

  1. The shutter opens
  2. The shutter stays open for the set time
  3. Just before the end of this time, the flash fires
  4. The shutter closes

Now we get this:

…which at least looks like the phone leaves a natural light trail.

Other than that, “front/rear curtain” has no effects on anything else. Myth dispelled, I hope.

 

Lens Caps, Hoods, Filters, and Bags.

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For all my new readers, here’s my quick take on those items:

  • Lens caps are not needed except when a lens is packed away. They are great picture-preventers. Amateur shooters always nervously replace their lens caps after every shot; pros never use them. ‘Nuff said?
  • Lens hoods: definitely, and always. Indoors, outdoors, day, night. The lens hood protects from damaga, sticky fingers, and flare. Do make sure it is the right hood for the lens you are using, and do make sure it is on fully, until the click (else, vignetted corners will result).
  • Filters: nope. Except when it is snowing, raining, etc. As you know if you are a frequent reader here, filters can give you more flare. They are only needed if the lens could otherwise get dirty, wet, etc.
  • Camera bag: Nope. A picture preventer also. A lens and accessory bag, sure, but the camera is better off not hidden in a bag.

So. All these are useful items to own, but you should use them judiciously. Which often means, “not now”.