Just Because You Can...

Don't mean that you should.

I was put in mind of this when  looked at an advertisement on a Facebook link ( in itself a source of nervousness...) that had a man offering to instruct us in studio lighting. I did not open the link - I never do  - but I looked at the advertising image closely.

It appears that the chap has strung four speedlights out on a metal bar and bolted this to the top of a light stand, then pointed it at a paper backdrop. He has another speedlight on a light stand and one on the camera. I can't see what sort of speedlights they are but they might be Canon or Nikon. They might even be a mixed bag.

I am wondering if he intends to use the bank of four speedlights as a flood...and the others as main and fill. Or sort of a general explosion of uncontrolled light. Or he just owns shares in Duracell and wants to sell batteries...

I hasten to add that I am a firm fan of the strobist approach to field lighting - the impromptu studio that you can drag out of the boot of a hatchback - the studio that doesn't need AC mains to run. I do it all the time - but I don't do it with four speedlights perched on the top of a telephone pole. One main, one firing into a softbox, and one if I am feeling fancy for a hair light. 12 lithium batteries - 600 shots for $ 60.

I have a feeling that the chap in the video is sitting on $ 120 of little AA's and $ 3000 of speedlights as well as three light stands.. He could have put less money into an Elinchrom D-lite monolight kit and  a Jinbei portable battery and simplified matters greatly.

Perhaps he has a secret recipe of 11 different herbs and spices  that need the speedlights...and good on him if he needs to buy more speedlights. We SELL speedlights. But remember there are other ways to do the job.

Heath Robinson vs Rube Goldberg

Or how I learned to love photography.

Old photographers will remember the sorts of things that we did in the darkroom to produce the special effects. Weeks spent gathering equipment, chemicals, containers, tanks, agitators...months spent sealing the space against the ingress of light - while letting the most aggressive of the poisonous fumes escape...hours spent trying to get the negatives to register accurately in the gate of the enlarger or he paper to register accurately on the easel. Then the clean up afterwards. Scrubbing the stains out of the bathtub before the wife discovers them...

Now we just download a plug-in app and click the mouse. All over in a second and no scrubbing. All the fun has evaporated.

Well, no, it hasn't. Not by a long way. We now have the wireless link and the WiFi and the iPhone  and the hot spot and all the other horrors of modern electronics. In the interests of saving the lives of copper miners by reducing the amount of cables that are needed, I have prepared a plan for the best selfie ever.

1. PocketWizard transmitter in pocket firing a...

2. Camera with a transmitter firing...

3. Several speedlights wirelessly, in full TTL, with frosting and sprinkles, while the camera is...

4. Recording the image on the WiFi card that sends the image off to the computer that...

5. Sends the image automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and Google who then pass it on to...

6. ASIO, NSA, the FBI, the KGB, Mossad, M.I.5, and Julian Assange while simultaneously...

7. Sending it to the Epson 3000 printer that whirs away while...

8. It goes to the cloud where it then rains down on your iPad, and iPhone.

All this within a fraction of a second. No smells, no stains. The bathtub is pristine. Your bank account has a hole in it but that is the price of progress. Cheer up - with on-line banking you don't even have to go to the local branch. You can stay at home and press the shutter release a second time.

The first shot will cost you $ 8900 but the second brings it down to $ 4450... a snip!

March To The Sound Of The Canon

You might wonder how much noise a Canon can make - in the world of motor sport, a very big noise indeed. We found out yesterday when we attended the Camera Electronic Canon workshop at Barbagallo raceway in Wanneroo.

The track is well-provided for the actual racers - we were there on a Motorcycle Club practice and tuning day. There is a function room at the start of the main straight with trackside seating - McCracken House - and we use it for a lecture theater and lunch venue.

Mark Horsburgh lectured us last year on basic race car photography but this year he added new discoveries in lighting with the Canon 600 speedlights. His work has a really new and sparkling look with these portable lights and it takes on very much of the studio illustration aspect even when taken out in the field. The ability to control three groups of flashes with radio transmissions rather than infrared is the thing...you can send the signal even in bright sunlight or around corners. My camera system uses the IR system and I am so jealous of Canon users...

Of course each year from Canon brings new lenses and bodies. The Canon reps bring some along and the troops get to fire them off out on the track. Mark mentioned trying something new each year himself - even to using tilt/shift and fisheye lenses in his work. Most of the motorcycle shots were taken using different types of telephotos but I did get some good views using a wide angle.

On the subject of the business of motorsport photography, Mark was quite candid about the time pressures and stress that are put on the shooters by the event organisers and the editors of various publications. It would appear to be a fertile field for experimentation but don't expect to eat regular...

Anyway, I took some views of the activities, including a very lovely model and an almost equally lovely set of photographers wearing fluoro vests. It was a great day and the results that the photographers got from the Canon lenses means that a number of them will be coming to talk to us over the shop counter.

Coil and Recoil

The modern speedlight flash is a marvel. Gone are the days of a complex guide-number chart on the back or a dial that has four different circles in four different colours. The new flash may have nothing more than an on-off switch. It is nevertheless capable of full TTL operation with the computer in your camera and the resulting exposure can be balanced far better than ever we did when we were pacing off the distance between ourselves and the subjects.

The trick is the dedicated contacts in the hot shoe - 3 for Nikon and 4 for Canon. They pass the coded signals back and forth at the speed of light. It is perfectly feasible to take flash pictures all day and not touch any of the controls. Yay.

But when you need the direction of the flash to be different than stuck on the top of the camera you need to get that same control at a distance. Here is where Promaster comes in. They make double-ended TTL cords for both the Canon and Nikon systems - you can get them as short as 150 cm and as long as 10 metres in either coiled or straight form. Attach one end to the hot shoe, put the flash in the other end and shoot macros, street shots, product shots, and Hollywood portraits.

In-store right now.

Standard Of the Industry...Again

They are getting clever there at Pocket Wizard. They have long BEEN clever, and exercised it to the max with their Mini TT and Flex TT, but now they have improved their basic transmitter and receiver unit - by simplifying it.

It is a dumb transmitter - ie. it does not do a TTL signal - but it does fire in any direction so you can feed out to a flash or back to the camera as a camera trigger with equal ease. They have catered to photographers in a multiple-worker situation by putting a 10-position switch on the side above the firing button. No need to go into the guts of it to fiddle tiny switches into harmony - just turn the side control on transmitter and receiver and away you go.

Turn it over - the battery compartment has been made as a hinged unit - no more losing it in the heat of the moment. And it works on two plain old cooking-variety AA cells. Get them anywhere.

We have a box full of output leads so you can connect it to almost any flash and you can get dedicated cables for the camera end too.

Throw away your old Radio Slave and go with this new unit.

What Does That Look Like To You?

That flash head up there in the boom arm - is that an Elinchrom?

By golly, yes it is. It's one of the new Elinchrom D-Lite RX One heads. Looks like someone finally made a good system flash head that can go on the end of an arm - 'course you could always put things on the ends of boom arms, but with heavy flashes, the boom arm started to get heavier and the the support stand started to get heavier, and pretty soon you had the sort of thing that Cammel Laird used to put turrets on battleships...

No, the new RX One looks like the go. It seems to throttle down fairly low - 6 W/sec and can go up to 100 W/sec in 1/10 steps. That's enough power to shoot portraits in a small studio no problems - and what a great light source for the light cube style of product work.

Okay, it takes all the standard Elinchrom light shapers and whatever you can invent in addition*. You get a couple of shoot-through umbrellas in the two-head kit and a hard wide reflector. I'd opt for an additional 18cm wide reflector with the recessed rim and a couple of 18cm honeycomb grids. Great face and hair shots. Standard Super-Leuci modelling globes as well.

Looks like it comes equipped in each head for hard wire, infra-red, and radio triggering. They include one of the Skyport transmitters in the package.

Two stands, two travel bags. This is a good deal - about twice the power of the average portable speed light flash and lots of ready-made shapers for that light.

* Students - the best light shapers are made with gaffer tape and matt boards, with the occasional addition of a washed-out baked bean tin. If you have an Elinchrom speed ring you can make a light shaper out of a wheelie bin...