Long And Low At the Hot Rod Show - with Fuji and Nikon and Metz

The great experiment conducted over the six months regarding a camera for hot rod photography has yielded results. The Fuji/Nikon/Metz lash-up does pretty near everything that the Nikon/Nikon/ Stroboframe outfit did, and it does it easily enough that an old guy can carry it round in the sun all day.

If I am prepared to carry a second Nikon SB 700 on a little Manfrotto stand I can get great illustration of the front grille and the side panel of even the long cars. Of course, if you are dealing with something white like the '59 Impala you can get a lot more value out of those flashes.

How does this help you? If you are going to go out and climb Bluff Knoll with a camera kit bouncing in your backpack, consider whether you want that camera kit to weigh 3.5 Kg or 1 Kg. It's your back going up and it's your back coming down, and it's your back sitting in the chiropractor's waiting room...And those of you who have spent a fortnight on Ibruprofen and Voltaren can back me up...

Also consider whether you need to go to a shoot with 5 lenses. I used to do just this in the dear dead Hasselblad wedding days. Everything in the HB box including the 250mm tele lens in case the bride escaped and I needed to shoot her before she got over the horizon...My assistant, Igor, used to hump the bag and the tripod and the extra flashes and the film and the bag of rocks...( I never actually told him about the bag of rocks...) and never complained. Fainted occasionally, but never complained.

Eventually I discovered that I was using two lenses for the whole wedding. An 80mm and a 50mm, and the 50 only came out of the massive case for 5 exposures. I eventually rationalised the whole thing by leaving out half of the glass and most of the fancy little accessories. It freed up a lot of space in the case...for more rocks.

That is history - the Hasselblad outfit is long retired and recently sold, and the new owners can risk their vertebrae at their leisure. Weddings still need extra gear for back-up safety, but this can be hauled in a roller bag. Lithium AA cells power all three flashes and these are light weight. Igor looks healthier, and after-shoot processing is so much faster.

I still pack a bag of rocks but these are only in case the bride proves sluggish. And I never throw rocks at hot rod shows. Some things are sacred, you know...

Moral of this tale: Buy right, pack light, allow for wind direction when throwing rocks.

The Sacred Texts

Every religion has sacred texts - some are wrapped carefully in scrolls and put into velvet cases - some are bound into heavy books. Some are carved into the stone walls of temples. In our game they are either printed into little paper books or supplied on a CD.

Instruction manuals. Love 'em or hate 'em, you are eventually going to have to fish out the one that came with your camera or flash and read it...in many cases you will do this after the equipment has stopped working and emitted a puff of blue smoke.

Had you gone into the thing prior to this momentous event, you might have discovered how to avoid it. Most modern equipment will not self-destruct - you actually have to perform a series of incorrect things to blow it up. Of course if you are using a computer this does not apply - computers will wilfully throw themselves off the electronic cliff like expensive lemmings. They mutate when they are left to their own devices. And you can be sure that in a few months NO devices will work with them.

The dedicated reader of instruction manuals will discover that there are different levels of communication skill amongst the companies. I can genuinely praise Nikon and Fuji for their manuals, and Pentax are not far behind. The paper books you get with new cameras are plodding affairs  - not a lot of plot development and no dirty pictures to look at - but if you read them you will get all the facts you need to run the cameras. Sometimes the camera designers have been drinking at lunchtime but at least their sins are accurately reported in the books.

Not so with the instruction manuals of the Metz flash company. Their products are excellent - I have a handful of their flashes that have soldiered on for nearly 40 years and they still pump out the light. But the instruction manuals have been written by someone who was in command of the German army - possibly at Stalingrad. They are incomprehensibly complex for the pre-digital era, and worse once the shift to digital began. The only thing that saves Metz is the fact that the flashes can largely be left to work by themselves while you get on with it.

We've all laughed at Japlish and Chinglish advertisements and instruction books at one time or the other. Of course none of us write in Japanese or Mandarin to have our own mistakes seen. And the people in Japan or China would probably be more polite about it. Fortunately the writers of their technical pamphlets seem to be amenable to criticism as I have seen marked improvement in brochures from one year to he next. Mistakes now are nothing more than typos and have nothing of the howling humour of the 60's.

Will it get better? I hope so, as worldwide communication becomes more direct. For myself, I took as much instruction as I needed and learned a new skill from seeing Gary Fong show his light diffusers on video clips. But I still would like to have a book to carry in my camera bag if the equipment is complex. If only to provide tinder when I set the thing on fire...

Open Wide...

In 2007, having peered down cake-holes for nigh on 40 years on a professional basis ( as opposed to doing it for a hobby...) I sold the old dental chair and retired. It was time to get rid of it - it had had three changes of stained upholstery and the armrests were deeply finger-marked.

 During the 4 decades I attended hundreds of lectures illustrated with thousands of  intra and extra oral photographs. Three of them were good. The rest were masterpieces of illustrative skill but all you could see was teeth. It was like looking at the front grilles of Buicks, but at least the Buicks flossed...Thus my general advice to anyone wanting to take dental pictures is - don't.

If you insist on it, however, the best way I know is to use a digital SLR or mirrorless camera. I used to advise people to use ring-flash units for the illumination but that has stopped with the advent of the white LED light. Nowadays you can get a decent ring-shaped LED set that runs on AAA batteries or a mains adapter and mount it on the front of nearly any decent camera. If you then set the ISO of the camera to 400-800 ( or higher if it is a modern camera ) you can put the mode to "A" and set an aperture of f:8 to f:16. If you put your lens on manual and at the shortest focusing distance you can generally make a rather decent extra-oral shot. An excess of decency.

If you need a closer shot or one that goes far back in the arch, the true macro lens may be necessary. Costly, but close-focussing, and it lets you stand back a bit from the customer as you work... Some of the customers have breath that makes this a relief.

If you need to have more light - really - you can use the ring flash systems. Nikon, Sigma, Canon, and Metz make them. They are in various sizes and degrees of sophistication, and some of them are automatic enough to work most of the time. But there is an almighty pop as they go off that might spook the patient. Plus they generally are more complex so you end up with a system that your staff might not find as easy to use. If you consistently get overexposure or out of focus results it is advisable to beat the nurse with a stick.

What you do with the results is different than the old days. The Carousel slide tray full of VMK preps is long gone. Slide shows on Powerpoint and Show Off can be integrated with text, sound, and music. There is no way to describe the experience of a professional presentation on gingival recession when it is accompanied by John Cage.

Please note that the above notes also apply to dermatology illustration, but with knobs on. Pulsating multi-coloured knobs...

Batter Up - Increasing Your Hits

Those of you who have been following my other blog - Here All Week at  hrhoa.wordpress.com will have read of my efforts to lighten the load when I go out and shoot motor car shows. I mentioned it here as well, when I ran afoul of Western Australia's harsh mid-day sunshine.

Well, a little thinking and a determination to keep my pocket money for beer, books, and toy cars has paid off. I rustled through the Hazel Leaf Studio cassette de junque and found a metal Metz 45 flash bar, a Stroboframe 300-405 locking accessory shoe, and a Nikon SB 700 flash. The Nikon goes on remote SU-4 and manual setting, and the Fuji X10 on the Metz bar fires it off - even in the strongest direct sunlight. Powerful fill flash results, and as the Fuji synchs at all speeds. you can leave it on M and play all up and  down the keyboard.

Children - TTL flash is wonderful for weddings, kids in the park, and infantry assaults when you really have no time to think out your settings. But you never learn to light with TTL. Go manual and shoot and look and think and shoot again.

So is it lighter than an equivalent DSLR rig? Yes, by a factor of several tonnes. Does it do the job? For web publication, brilliantly well. It is the answer for the Automotive Jimmy Olsen who wants to fly but doesn't want to have to do it in the bomb bay of a B-36.

Note to photos: the local team lost woefully at the baseball last night but the Fuji was a winner. Also, note the sticker on the back of the '60 Lincoln. I didn't know whether to be delighted or appalled...

The Best Tool For The Job

The best tool for the job - is frequently a debated point. One practitioner points to one item, another holds up something different, and the argument is on. If the job is a technical one the rest of the populace stands baffled.

Suppose you are a dentist who wants to take pictures of teeth and jaws - or a skin specialist who wants to illustrate surface lesions for lectures or books. Or a mechanical engineer who wants to show tiny little parts and mechanisms. You reach for a digital camera with a good close-focus setting and try your luck.

If you have the light just right, and the white balance just right, and the auto focus on and you don't shake too much, you might succeed. Equally you might be too much in the shade, or too blue, or too wobbly.

Rethink. Get yourself a decent DSLR or mirror-less camera. C, N, P, S, or O come to mind...clap on a decent macro lens that will allow you to stand back about a foot from your subject. Put the Metz Mecablitz 15 MS-1 digital macro flash onto the lens, set the flash to take orders from the camera and go for your life.

Note: experienced clinical and macro workers do not try to use the auto-focus on the lens. They set the thing to manual and lean into the subject until they see it in focus.

The Metz people have been making flash units for decades - I have my original Mecablitz 45-CT1 from 1975 and it is still producing saleable pictures - and I've added three more of them from garage sales...Suffice it to say that Metz is the standard of the small flash industry when it comes to reliability.

The 15 MS-1digital fastens to the front of the lens with threaded rings - rather like some of the filter systems these days. There is a quick-release for the flash if you need to do something else with the camera straight away. Metz also supply a funny little clip - rather like a hair clip - that you can see in the main illustration. It is used when your DSLR has a pop-up flash.

The idea of the 15 MS-1 digital is that it can take TTL synchronising information from your DSLR in the same way that remote flashes do. The clip goes over the pop-up flash to prevent visible light flooding the subject while the IR information that instructs the flash goes out the side.

In addition, there is a standard PC socket at the side of the flash to take firing instruction from cameras that do not have a commander flash.

The two tubes mounted either side of the lens are movable - they can toe-in to illuminate subjects at very short range. There is an integral diffuser that you can rotate into position to reduce the intensity of the light.

The GN for this unit is 15 in the metric system - 49 for the imperial. More than enough for intra-oral and full-face shots. It runs on AAA batteries and will poot out 140 to 200 shots at full power.

In short, Doctor, the 15 MS-1 and the C,N,P,S, and O will be OK at TTL for IO and FF.

But that is just my initial diagnosis...