Don't Let Good Light Ruin a Photo

From the e-mail conversations I have had with a few of you, I am starting to get the impression that there is a small-but-enthusiastic army of Nouveaux Flashers out there, ready to take over the world with just a (used) 60 watt-second strobe.

For example, I have to wonder what any motorists driving down a certain street in Romania a few days ago might have thought of the sight of a photographer - complete with off-camera flash on a stand - snapping away at a very well-lit tree. I am not making this up.

(I am thinking the reaction might have included whatever the Romanian word is for "drugs.")

And no, I am not making fun of the reader in question, either. Far from it. I think it is great. You get better by practicing, and I have seen an outpouring of genuine enthusiam on this site from day one that really makes me feel good about setting it up.

But since I set up this site to help people avoid many of the mistakes I made as a young photographer, you might as well consider this one: In your new-found enthusiasm for lighting, remember not to shoe-horn cool light into photos that might have been just as good (or better) shot in ambient.

Conversely, don't think you are done creatin a good photo just because you have set up nice light.

I say that because I always have a strong inclination to apply whatever trick I just learned on the next job that comes along. I doubt I am alone in this psychosis. In the photojournalism pecking order, content and moments trump cool light. If you are concentrating on light at the expense of the other two, you are short-changing yourself and your pictures.

Case in point: Yesterday, I walked into a court hearing for John Allen Muhammad, (the convicted killer in the Washington, D.C. "sniper" killings in 2002) armed with a strobe, a light stand, and umbrella and Pocket Wizards.

Granted, this is my normal set-up that I usually carry with camera gear into indoor settings. But still.

We were going to have the opportunity to shoot the major players in his second trial (Maryland jurisdiction this time) for the killings that happened in Maryland. Actually, I felt pretty smug when the light turned out to be about 1/20th of a sec at f/2.8 at ASA 1000. I just set that strobe up on a stand in the corner, put it on full manual into the white ceiling, popped on a Pocket Wizard and got ready to shoot at 1/125 at 2.8 at ASA 400.

Long story short, the lawyers became concerned at how Mr. Muhammad might react at the sudden site of nine video guys and an equal number of still shooters. It was a genuine media circus, and probably not too respectful of the jududicial process at that.

Upon sensing that the judge was a hairs breadth from kicking us all out, we quickly agreed to let the AP's Chris Gardner shoot - available light - as a single pool photog to preserve our chance of getting any photos at all.

We were lucky. It worked, and Chris and I spent the next hour burning CD's for everyone else of his whole shoot.

Back to the point, at some point during the day, Chris said, "Do you always carry a light stand around like that?"

"Well, yeah," I told him. It is nothing much to throw my little set up on my shoulder, so why not? As long as I can lug it, where's the downside?

Well, the downside is subtle and a little sneaky.

The downside is that you go in, planning to light. And because of your set-in-stone preconceptions, miss a found picture or moment. Why? Because you did not let the assignment develop more organically, for lack of a better word.

I look at light like this: The primary benefit of adding light is to raise the quality level on low-yield assignments. That's a no-brainer.

You could say the same for portraits, but it is not always the case. I try to think of strobe light as an option, along with all of the ambient sources at my disposal at the assignment. I walk in ready to use a strobe, a window, a desk light, a florescent, a sunbeam - whatever is there. Any or all of the above.

Just don't walk in with your lighting technique set in stone and ready to do. The gift of being open to serendipity is one of the best strengths a shooter can have, IMO. Be ready for cool stuff to happen. Keep your eyes open.

And if it doesn't, (or if it was never going to in the first place) think up some cool light and do it up right.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That's the trap. Don't be a hammer. Adding light is a great option.

Just don't use it as the end-all. You still have to make a good photo -- whether you add light or not. And if you think that way, your lit photos will have more life, too.

Next: Keep a Lighting File

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Hook a Pocket Wizard to Any Hot-shoe Flash

Two readers, Alan and Nick, have sent in this useful tip for anyone wanting to hook up a Pocket Wizard to a hot-shoe flash. Any hot-shoe flash. Even a Canon hot-shoe flash.

The PW-MHSF1 Miniphone to Hot Shoe Female cord connects the receiver directly to a hot-shoe on those PC-deprived Canon strobes. (You listening, Canon Honcho Chuck Westfall???)

They are $39 bucks and should get you a reliable connection. You could even make yourself a full synch cord using one, I'd expect.

Of course, if you scrounge a tad, you can probably find an SB-24 PC-enabled strobe for $39 to keep as an off-camera flash, (but I would never bring that up...)

Nick also suggested I mention Chimera strobe speedrings for softboxes, for when you wanna hook your little flash up inside a rectangular soft light. (I used softboxes so much in the 90's I have kind of turned on them. But that is just me. My left eye is starting to twitch a little just thinking about it...)

But Nick is right, and I will look into some small strobe mounting options for those light-sucking popular, versatile little light modifiers.

Thanks, Alan and Nick!

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On Assignment: Simple Wall/Snoot Portrait

The longer I play with my small strobes, the more I graduate away from soft light.

There is a time and a place for the umbrellas. But, increasingly, I find myself using hard light. More specifically, I find myself using restricted beam light.

Hard light has a bad rap, as we talked about in Lighting 101. The trick is controlling the ratio of the strobe's light to the ambient.

This quickie portrait was a Varsity cover of a state champion high school wrestler who was returning to spend another season embarrassing his would-be opponents.

The snoot-against-a-wall technique is a trick I go to frequently when I am shooting an athlete in an indoor environment. The result is basically a photo that burns its own edges down. The severity of the falloff is determined by (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) the shutter speed. The higher it is, the darker the falloff. Remember - assuming you are within the synching range for your camera - the flash only cares about the aperture. The ambient is controlled by the shutter/aperture combo. So keeping your aperture constant and decreasing the amount of time your shutter is open does nothing for the flash-lit area of the frame, but drops the value of the areas the flash is not reaching.

Why use a wall? Well, as you can see here, the wall provided a nice fill reflector for the camera left side of his face. It is amazing how much light you'll get back from a white wall at close range. Even if the wall is not in your frame, you can use it for fill light. One strobe becomes two lights that way.

So, if you have been reading the articles, the light position, modification and exposure process should be coming to you already.

I have a Nikon SB-28 on a stand about 8 feet away from the subject at camera right. I slipped a home-made, 8" cardboard snoot onto the flash to restrict the beam of light. The flash is on manual. I am purposely not going to tell you exposure info this time because the actual numbers should be getting increasingly irrelevant to you by now.

Here's the process:

I tend to start with the flash set on manual at a quarter power. I was working in sodium vapor lighting, so I greened the flash and shot on the camera's florescent white balance to get close to the ambient color temperature.

Working at a quarter power (at 400 ASA) I start with the camera on the max synch speed (1/250th with a Nikon D2.) I adjust the aperture while doing a series of test exposures until it looks good. Then, I shoot a few more test exposures, opening up the shutter speed until my falloff looks the way I want it.

(If this is confusing to you, you are probably jumping in late. Might want to go into Lighting 101 or On assignment and read some.)

This is a very quick, flash-meter-less process (hey, do you know how much cool lighting gear you can get for the price of a flash meter?)

My target was to use the beam of light to call attention to him, yet make the falloff such that you could still read "Hammond," the name of his school.

By the way, a good friend of mine always thought that Hammond High School should change their mascot to the "Hammond Eggs." (Yes, I have strange friends.)

So, there you have it. A super-quick, one-light set-up that can be used in a pinch almost anywhere. It is a bit of a gimmick, so it is not the kind of thing you want to do once a week. But it is nice to have a couple dozen "gimmicks" that you can pull out and choose from when you need them.

Oh, and while I am thinking about it, I have to remember that I now have found I have readers from (among other places) South Africa, the Philippines, Japan, Finland, England, Brazil, Romania and Alabama. So, the reference to "Bueller" is from a 1986 US movie called "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Several lines from the movie are common slang usage here in the US, but they might not make any sense to my new friend Christian from Romania.

Stick with me and I will corrupt your English in ways you never thought of.

Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8
Exposure: I am not going to tell you those anymore unless there is a good reason.
Flash: Nikon SB-28 on a stand with a snoot
Trigger: Pocket Wizard

Photo ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Make the Ambient Work For You

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On Assignment: Dealing with TV's and CRT's

A little while back I was assigned to photograph the CEO of a television network which shall remain nameless. We'll just refer to them cryptically as The "D" Channel.

I shot the CEO near a bank of TV's, and I want to take this opportunity to talk about some of the problems and solutions for dealing with the little buggars. (TV's, not CEO's.)

There are several things you have to remember when shooting TVs/CRT's, and I want to walk you through one thought process you can take when you come upon them.

The first two things you need to remember are to (a) kill the ambient, and (b) get to a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second or longer.

The ambient cannot always be controlled. But you want to get it as low as possible because the CRT's are basically light sources. The tone of the "turned off" CRT in the room's existing light is the darkest tone you will possibly be able to get for your richest black on screen when the CRT is turned on.

This is to say that, if the TV is a medium grey value in the room light, that is the deepest black you will be able to get in your lit photo of the functioning TV.

To get the ambient down, turn off the room lights if you can (duh). Also, try to shade any windows by drawing the curtains or blinds.

Once you have the TV (or computer CRT) in as dark an environment as possible, turn it on. Meter through the lens at the TV, with the picture filling the frame.

Here's where the 1/30th comes into play. Set your shutter there, because that is the fastest shutter speed that will get you a complete scan cycle of the cathode ray, which "paints" the screen about 30 times a second. That's why you get little stripes at, say, 1/125th or 1/250th. Luckily, this is not the case for most of the flat-paneled monitors we are using more and more these days. But they are dim enough where the slow shutter speed is usually gong to be used anyway.

Now that you have your shutter speed set, adjust your aperture for best exposure. If you cannot get the f/stop opened enough for a good exposure, drop to a 15th of a second. Or an 8th. You get the idea.

This full-scan, ambient light exposure will be your working exposure for the whole photo. This is why you want the turned-on TV to be the brightest thing in the room. Your subject will be darker, and you will have to adjust your flash to raise the subject to balance with the TV. Fortunately, you are not afraid of a little manual flash now and then, Right?

The last thing to remember about CRT's is that they are rounded, which means you may have to work a little creative lighting geometry to hide the flash's reflections in the screen. One tip is to stick your flash behind the monitor and shoot in profile like we did in the final shot in "Abstract Concrete," earlier.

OK, so back to The "D" Channel lady.

We got the room as dark as possible, which was "not very." This means that my blacks on the monitor were not as rich as I would have preferred. But as long as you know how to do it, that is what is important. The monitors filled the wall on the left, so I brought my Nikon SB-28 strobe (on a stand, in an umbrella) around closer to me (on the right) than I normally might have. This got rid of my flash reflections in the TV's.

The TV's were around 1/30th at 2.8 at 400 ASA, if memory serves. (This is usually about where they hit, and a good starting point for guest-imating.) The actual exposure is less important than knowing how you get there. Then I just dialed the flash down on manual, checking the TFT monitor as I went, until she looked balanced.

I know this sounds like a lot if you are new to it, but it really is not. Here it is again, in a nutshell:

1) Get the room as dark as possible.
2) Using 1/30th as your maximum shutter speed, get your exposure, based on the TV screen - right through the lens.
3) Adjust your flash to balance the subject.
4) Angle your flash to avoid TV reflections.

Computers (and TV screens) are a fact of life, and hardly a week goes by that I do not have to shoot someone in that environment.

Learn to do it well, and never worry about it again.

Photo ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Simple Wall/Snoot Portrait

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Found: Vintage Nikon Flash Heaven

Ain't the web great?

I spent a little time Googling "Nikon SB-24" and some other models, looking for a site that might have a little chart comparing them, and came across a wonderful Nikon fan site run by a guy in Malaysia. It has a full page dedicated to each of the flashes in the Nikon family tree.

It has detailed descriptions of all of the older Nikon flashes that you can use when you are cruising eBay for some bargain off-camera lumens and photons.

Below are several direct links to many of the most appropriate Nikon flashes. These all have PC connections and manual control, so far as I know.

If you are into the old Nikon scene, explore around his site a little. It's a hoot.

SB-24 | SB-25 | SB-26 | SB-27

SB-28 | SB-800 | SB-28dx | SB-80dx


More recent stuff here:

Nikon Flash Comparison Chart

And, just for fun:

A Pictorial History of Nikon Cameras

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Word Verification in Comments Set to "Off"

Believe it or not, even I have to try to read those sloppy drunken verification letters to post a comment. It is a pain, and I am turning it off to see how it goes.

(Apparently there are issues with "comment spammer bots," which raises the question of what anyone would possibly have to gain from such an activity.)

We'll see if the bots descend onto Strobist and trash the place. Or, maybe they'll raise the level of discussion. Who knows. But as for now, enjoy your commenting in a "squint-free" environment.

(And don't say I never did nuthin for you...)

EDIT: The comment bots found Strobist within a few hours of this post. Amazing. Oh, well. Word verification is back on. And, BTW, it is good to see a discussion starting to build in the comment section of many of the posts.

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Steal This Flash - The Nikon SB-24

The SB-24, a late-1980's model Nikon speedlight, can be had for as little as $35 on eBay. This is an insane deal, relatively speaking. UPDATE: The days of the $35 Sb-24 are gone forever, thanks to you guys. You can expect to spend $75-$100 now. Sorry.

UPDATE #2: (And this one is better news) You can get a manual for the flash here.
__________


Look at what you get:

• Full manual control, in whole stops, down to 1/16th power.
• An industry standard, external PC synch
• Internally power-zoomed flash head, covering 24mm to 85mm beam spreads
• A jack for an external high-power battery for one-second, full-power manual recycle times.
• Auto and TTL functions, which to us are pretty useless. But if you have a Nikon F4, or N-8008s, knock yourself out.
• High build quality - this was a $200 flash in 1985 dollars.

Dollar for dollar, this is tough to beat for <$50.

Even if you are a Canon shooter, this thing is a no-brainer to snag and make your "off-camera" light. Just keep it in a separate little bag with one of the sweet little 5-section Bogen stands, a double folding umbrella (with stand adapter) and a sych cord, and you are ready to roll.

The Nikon SB-25, -26, -28, -28dx, -800, etc., all offer those same features - and more. And they all get progressively more expensive. (If you see one of these on the cheap, grab it.) But the SB-24 does what you need on the cheap.

These are all well-built, reliable flashes. But the price makes made the Nikon SB-24 a steal.

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Bits and Pieces - 4/24/06

I have been trying for about a day to get a couple of articles posted. But Blogger.com, through whom I publish Strobist, is acting weird. Fortunately for me, it is not just me and my remedial-level coding skills. (I always suspect that first.) Turns out many other bloggers spent last night cursing at their computers, too.

It seems to be doing better now, but the catch-up traffic is such that it is like trying to get around in Washington, D.C. during rush hour. So I am gonna let it settle out a bit, and will be throwing more stuff up later.

In the on-deck circle, I have a full review of the ~$50 (or less) Nikon SB-24 strobe. Short version: It is an absolute steal (used, at this price.) Grab a couple while you can.

Also coming is a breakdown on the sub-$175 light kit, which is largely a compilation of a half-dozen or so posts. But this "starving student" set-up cannot be beat for dollars spent vs. picture improvement value.

And maybe most exciting, is news of this remote trigger supplied by Alert Reader Neal Vaughan:

16-Channel-Wireless-Digital-Slave -- $30.00 "Buy-it-Now" price on eBay.

(Thanks, Neal.)

Neal uses them at his paper. From what I have seen, they are not perfect, but for the money they may be a great solution for those who cannot spring for Pocket Wizards.

The verdict seems to be decent range (~150-180 feet,) and they work fine as long as the batteries are fresh. It is apparently a voltage level thing, because they do not like Ni-Cads (or Ni-MH's) which typically run at 1.2 volts each instead of 1.5 volts for the alkalines.

Note that you'd need a PC-to-PC cord if you were using them with, say, a PC-socket Nikon SB series strobe. But those are easy to find and I will have links up when I get ahold of one to review.

(Anyone who is using them, please e-mail me your experiences.)

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Money Choices: Light or More Glass

Starting out as a photographer has never been an inexpensive proposition. But things have gotten downright crazy in recent years, with pro digital cameras going for $3,000.00, flash prices that look like car payments and long glass that can cost as much as you could possibly want to spend.

It's enough to make you want to cross over to the dark side and be a reporter. What do they need, a pencil? Maybe a $500 laptop?

But then, we have way more fun than reporters, don't we? So we pay.

When I think back at how I spent my hard-earned photo-gear resources when I was starting out, it makes me cringe.

It was all about bodies and glass. Especially long, fast, expensive glass. After all, those guys who always out-shot me had 300/2.8's. So that must be the solution, right?

Well, by the time I found out that the fast glass was not what made them better than me, the financial damage was done.

Knowing what I know now, I would have approached things very differently. I would have started off with a low-end body, a cheap 50mm f/2 (or f/1.8) prime lens and a modestly priced (slower) do-everything zoom.

The 50mm would give you the speed - and a focal length worthy of exploring - for under $100. And the zoom would cheaply fill in some focal length gaps while you got your feet on the ground.

After that, I would go straight to a small light kit. For less than the price of even turning that f/4 zoom into an f/2.8 model, you could be set with a small-strobe, off-camera light.

And don't even get me started on the idea that every young shooter needs a 300/2.8. Sure, they do some things very well. But they also tend to funnel you into a certain way of shooting while they suck your wallet dry.

I recently got a chance to meet and chat with one of my long-time photo compass points, David Burnett. He shares my disdain for 300/2.8's as a God-given right for young shooters. He thinks the lenses force them into a constricted way of shooting - and not a very good one at that.

It is not that they are bad for you, per se, but that they tend to close off so many more interesting visual avenues while you are still young and impressionable.

And then there is the cost, which makes them preclude just about everything else when it comes.

So, if I can dissuade you from making the early jump to long, fast glass - even for just a little while - it will pay dividends to you which will prove useful now and in the future.

The body and some glass are an unavoidable expense. But the light is relatively cheap. I have an article I am working on detailing a ~$175 off-camera light kit: flash, stand, synch, umbrella, etc., included. Sadly, that falls into the "pocket change" category for photo gear.

And the learning-how-to-use-it part is free, now that we are digital and have no film expense. But you have to work at it while you build some techniques you feel comfortable with.

As you grow and learn (and cash some checks from assignments) you add the second body, a fast wide zoom and a fast tele zoom, and you are set. But the light kit gives you the ability to be making higher-quality photos right from day one.

Provided, of course, that you learn how to use it.

Honestly, you really didn't think I was going to suggest you go out and buy a lot of glass first, did you?

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Don't Miss: Bill Pierce's "Nuts and Bolts" Columns

Every paper's photo department has some guy who has been around since glass plate negatives were in vogue and can talk for twenty minutes on any piece of equipment ever made. Not to make him sound older than he actually is, but Bill Pierce at the Digital Journalist is one of those guys.

If you are looking for a few hours to kill reading a collection of been-there-done-that perspectives on just about anything that has to do with the equipment end of photojournalism, he's your guy.

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On Assignment: A Guy on a Boat

Every now and then at The Sun, someone from features will come up to a photog and say, "We're looking for something... conceptual."

Translation: We have thought and thought about this story, and we cannot come up with a single idea we can box you into.

What I hear: Try anything you want. We're washing our hands of it.

Which, of course, I like.

On the one hand, you are getting very little direction, which can be iffy. But on the other hand, whatever you do they can't really complain. As long as it is conceptual.

The story is on recently divorced (or separated) guys who have chosen to live on their boats in Baltimore. So I call three of them and schedule to shoot a portrait of each one.

A heads-up from the writer tells me which one will be in the story's lede, so he's the guy that will need to carry the visual weight.

I am gonna take you through the thought process a little on this one. As I said earlier in the "Taming Harsh Sunlight" entry, I like to stack the deck in my favor whenever I can. So I schedule my lede guy to be shot 30 minutes before sunset. If the light is good, I can use the golden light on him. If it is bad, I can use my small strobes easily because the ambient light level will be low.

(Either way, I can strobe him after sunset for a different look.)

Taking a little poetic license on this (hey, they wanted conceptual) I am going to do it in dark, cool tones. These guys have all been through (or are going through) the period of depression that normally follows the breakup of a marriage, so it fits.

The photo at top is done with one Nikon SB-28 strobe, on a stand, with a cardboard snoot to control the beam of the light. The cool blue color is generated by setting the camera's white balance on tungsten, and putting a CTO gel on my flash to balance the light that hits the guy.

Click on the photo up top to see it much bigger, and you will see how crisp the light is when you (a) hard-light from the side, and, (b) have built-in color contrast between your strobe and your ambient.

EDIT: Looking at the big version, it is very splotchy on the continuous tones. This is because I jpegged the heck out of it to save blog storage space on a big version. They do set a limit, and I try to keep the pix as thrifty as possible to allow more stuff to be posted. Sorry 'bout that, and I hope you get the idea anyway.

Here is basically the same photo, without the tungsten/gel scheme:

The exposure (and process to get to it without a flash meter) is my normal deal. Start with a reasonable guess on the power of the flash. (I chose manual, 1/4 power.)

Forget about the ambient exposure for a sec. Using the TFT screen as a guide, I dialed my aperture down until he looked good. This happened to be at f/6.3, which is one of those weird, "between-stops" settings. Whatever.

Now that I have a working aperture, I move the shutter speed around until I get a nice, saturated blue that is fairly close to what I think the newspaper can hold in the reproduction process. The shutter wound up being 1/200th of a second.

We had a storm coming in, so we had to work quickly. This process all happened in about ten minutes.

Squeezing a few more minutes in before the storm, I took advantage of his going in to answer the phone. I told him to stay inside, and took my light stand in there with him. I removed the snoot (but left the CTO gel on) and put a tupperware bowl on the flash head, throwing light in all directions like a bare light bulb.

Same process on the exposure. I forget where it ended up, but you know the drill. This gave the designer a second choice if she didn't like my concept for the lede.

The second guy was shot in boring daylight, all available light. Oh, well. We already had a lede. The third guy was in the same marina as the first, and I didn't really have anything that would give a sense of place, so I was going to shoot him wide.

Turns out, he did not really want to be shot. So I had to scramble for the sense-of-place shot. But it is OK, 'cause we are being conceptual...

I drug out a trick I had been saving up that has nothing to do with light, but I wanted to pass it along anyway.

My wife has what I would call a Ph.D (push here, dummy) digital camera, but it came with some really cool panorama software. It can stitch together several frames to make an ultrawide photo. Turns out, it works on my big D2h files, too.

This is a fine ethical line, IMO. You can do stuff like this (in a features environment at least) but you have an obligation to explain exactly what you did to the readers. Which is what we did.

Here is the panorama-camera-on-the-cheap scene-setter. Click to enlarge it. I like the ability, and will drag it out in the future for other assignments. Always with precise explanation, tho.

Camera: Nikon D2h, set on tungsten balance
Lens: Nikkor 17-35/2.8
Exposure: See above
Flash: Nikon SB-28, with a tungsten "CTO" gel
Trigger: Pocket Wizards

Next: Dealing with TV's and CRT's

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

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Found: Strobist's Counterpart!

OK, all of you wedding guys who have been e-mailing me with a bazillion questions:

Here is your site - Planet Neil.

He is all about learning how to better use on-camera flash. So, between the two of us, we gotcha covered, dude.

This site is built around wedding photography techniques. But the info is applicable to anyone wanting to better understand what you can do with your expensive little TTL Wonder Strobes without unhooking them from their mamas.

And besides, all of you wedding shooters can ask HIM about stuff now. :) Because I do not know Jack about shooting weddings, anyway.

Please go flood his site with traffic (and him with e-mails) and tell him he should link to Strobist. We're kind of a Yin-Yang thing, anyway. A link to his site will be archived in the links page, too.

Now, if someone would just make a site for that exact moment when you are removing the flash from the camera...

(Thanks to "Drime" for the tip. Keep 'em coming.)

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Bits and Pieces

• I will be working wall-to-wall on Friday, morning to late night. So if things look decidedly unchanged around here, you'll know why. Don't feel too bad for me. I am covering the Miss USA pageant. (Hey, somebody has gotta do it...)

• I have added the 2001 documentary, War Photographer, to the bookshelf. Check it out.

• While I am slaving away shooting Miss USA, please take a moment to add your John Hancock as a comment on the guest book/reader links page. You can find it here, and it will be a permanent link on the links page.

• Turns out, I am not the original Strobist. There is some guy in the Russian medical field (check here) who keeps popping up. It is in his e-mail name, too. Cool. (And I thought I made up the word.) Maybe I should send him a T-shirt or something...

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New Source for 5-Section Mini Light Stand Found

Several people saw and noted yesterday (thanks) that Amazon's photo affiliate had stopped carrying the Bogen 6' Retractable 5-Section Light Stand, which is the Best Little Stand in the World, IMHO.

The above link points now you to a new source, Midwest Photo Exchange, who has them.

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On Assignment: Add Light to Reveal Detail

Yeah, I know it's just a rock.

This is a quick little On Assignment example that I am going to throw in because it illustrates a good reason to throw that little light stand over your shoulder whenever you grab your gear out of your trunk.

One of our enterprising reporters at The Sun was doing a little research and found out that, due to a surveying error about 250 years ago, the county line between Baltimore County and neighbor Carroll County (in Maryland) was not where it should be. It was off by about 100 yards.

As a result, some people who thought they lived in Baltimore County really lived in Carroll County.

Big deal? Well, yeah, if you are the tax collector. Or if your kid is gonna get yanked out of school to be transferred to another county.

So, I go out with the modern surveyors (who know exactly where they are, to the inch, using fancy GPS interpolating surveying equipment) to shoot the evidence: a 250-year-old misplaced rock.

Well, much like with David Lee Roth, the ravages of time have not been kind to said rock, and the colonial surveyor's marks were weathered and very difficult to see. Especially in the overcast light of the deep woods.

The photo at left is shot using ambient light, which would not reveal any rock detail that would possibly survive The Sun's photo torture reproduction process. (The carving is on the other side of the rock, but it was very difficult to see in soft light.)

So to visually prove the point of the story I quickly set a Nikon SB-28 on a stand at a very hard angle to the rock. I moved it around until my TFT screen showed me that the detail if the early surveyor's mark (an "N 6") was very pronounced. (See photo at top.)

This is something you simply cannot do with any type of on-camera flash. Much like the paper detail shots we did in Lighting 101, the hard angle light is what brings out detail and hidden texture.

As a bonus, the strobe really made the colors pop and brought out the texture of the surrounding plants.

The rock close-up photo ran as the lead. Which either said they liked the result, or they thought the rest of my shoot was crap. (I didn't ask...)

If you have been visiting Strobist awhile, you can probably guess my metering technique, which can charitably be described as "Kentucky Windage and Elevation."

Once I got the flash (which was nuking the rock on about 1/4 power from three feet away) at the right angle, the rest was simple.

I adjusted the aperture until the flash-lit highlights looked good, which gave me a working aperture of about f/16. (I cannot remember exactly.) Then, I simply started opening up the shutter speed until the shadows were where I wanted them.

The idea was to get them dark enough to keep the detail in the rock carving, but light enough to have a little detail in the surrounding leaf shadows.

You already have your flash with you when on an outdoor assignment. Just having Pocket Wizards (or a synch cord) in the waistpack and a light stand slung over your shoulder gives you the ability to up the quality level on a simple photo like this.

Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: Nikon 80-200
Exposure: Unrecorded, see above for details
Flash: Nikon SB-28 on a light stand
Trigger: Pocket Wizards

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Guy on a Boat

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Comments, Tips and Questions

I kept up the one-to-one email thing as long as I could, but it just got too crazy. At this point, I could not possibly ever have enough time to write everyone back.

Therefore, I am no longer able to respond to gear, lighting, career, portfolio review, business propositions, etc. questions via email.

I wish I could, but I can't. There is just not enough time, and I work very long days as it is. So please, please, please do not send them directly to me.

If you have any kind of a lighting gear, lighting technique, career, portfolio, etc., question, much better to ask it in the Strobist Flickr discussion group. Signing up is fast, free and easy, and there are over 25,000 photographers involved in a lively, ongoing discussion. You will find your answers -- and a lot of nice people who are all into off-camera lighting -- there.

If you have a tip or comment, or if something is seriously borked on the site, just leave a comment under any post which has comments enabled. (This post does not have comments enabled, but most do.) I promise you I will see it. If a comment is not for publication, please begin the comment with the phrase, "Do Not Publish".

If you have a question about a current post, ask it in a comment on that post. You'll likely get an answer from another reader in short order. For questions relating to older posts, ask in the Flickr group as your comment/question will almost certainly fall upon deaf ears on the archived post here.


Thanks much,
David Hobby

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On Assignment: Designing a Backdrop

The Baltimore Sun's Christopher T. Assaf leads a bit of a double life, working both as a photojournalist for the paper and an art photographer during his free time.

His ethic as an art photographer frequently shows up in his newspaper work. He is known for producing photos which combine elegant composition with nuanced light.

This photograph of a local prep track star for The Sun's Varsity section is a good example.

He showed up to photograph the long jumper at practice only to find out that she was nursing an hamstring injury and would not be practicing that day. So he pulled out his shoe-mount flash and light stand and produced a series of portraits, one of which was used on the cover and another for an inside lead.

The photo above combines strong, 45-degree light with a carefully chosen background. The ambient is coming from the opposite direction, as seen by the shoulder highlight and fence pattern on the leg at camera left.

Chris used a Nikon SB-800 flash (at 1/2 power on the 105mm zoom setting) on a small light stand to light against the ambient sunlight at 1/250th at f/16. The light was aimed at the upper half of her body to allow it to fall off towards the bottom of the frame.

What brings the composition together was choosing the shooting position to use the hill as a background behind the fence. This could also have been done without the light, of course. But adding strong, directional light gives the photo two different planes - front and rear - which can be controlled separately by altering the aperture and/or shutter speed.

Chris stood on a stool to get the height needed to line her up with the better background.

Using light gave him the ability to quickly create three strong portraits (this one, and two others) in a short time. The one shown here was his favorite of the three he turned in, but did not run.

Chris said that he made a mental note to consider only giving them his strongest cover prospect next time.

I think he's on to something there.

Camera: Nikon D2h
Flash: Nikon SB-800, 1/2 power, 105mm zoom setting, on stand
Exposure: 1/250th at f/16 ASA 200
Lens Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8
Trigger: Pocket Wizard

Photo ©Christopher T. Assaf / Baltimore Sun

Next: Lighting for Detail

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New Links Added: Some Great Shooters' Sites

I noticed a lot of traffic coming my way from Sports Shooter yesterday, and stopped by to check out why. Turns out someone had included Strobist in a collection of favorite photo links. (Thanks, Paul!)

I cruised through many of the other links that had been suggested by others there and put some of the best photog's sites up on the links page. Some of these are stunning examples of both quality of work and how to showcase it.

Warning: DO NOT visit the link page now if it is getting near your bedtime. You could have a couple hours of compulsive clicking waiting for you. But if your S.O. is already asleep, what the heck. You can rest later.

The link is at the right, on the sidebar. Or just click here to head straight there. (Hit "refresh" if the new stuff does not come up for you.)

Enjoy.

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The DIY Flash Synch Cord Tutorial is Up.

Finally got around to buying the stuff to make a zip-cord PC synch cord just to show how to do it. It is really easy, and should hold you until you hit the lottery and can buy Pocket Wizards.

It is in two parts, and sequenced in the Lighting 101 section, so click here to go there in a new window.

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A Note to Strobist Readers

I launched Strobist on April 5th with what I thought would be a "soft start." And I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the feedback I have gotten from you guys so far.

I have been so busy cranking out pages for the site - it's up to 53 articles and growing - that I haven't had time to send out a blanket "thank you" for all of the very kind e-mails, comments and suggestions you have sent thus far. I feel like we are all at the start of something that could grow into a pretty cool journey.

I keep a very busy schedule shooting (not to mention being a dad) but I have no intention of slowing this thing down any time soon. There is a lot more stuff to come, and I look forward to implementing many of your suggestions into the information flow.

Doing this has also re-energized my approach to location lighting. That is the best by-product of teaching. And for that, I thank you.

I have long suspected that a structured course in off-camera flash use was a big hole in most young photographers' education. It is very gratifying to know that many of you think Strobist is starting to fill that void.

That said, I have a small favor to ask of you. If you enjoy and value the site, please start to spread the word. I have no - as in zero - marketing budget. Strobist is strictly a word-of-mouth thing. And my goal is to reach as many young shooters as possible with a free and informative site. The more, the merrier.

So if you could pass the word along to your colleagues/fellow students or on your photo message boards/list serves, I would be very grateful. And feel free to post a comment detailing how you did it, if you like. (I'd love to know.)

Thanks again. And keep those comments coming.

Sincerely,
David

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On Assignment: Thinking Outside the Box

Sometimes there seems to be no place to stick your light where it won't create more problems than it will solve.

A good example is this martial arts-themed exercise class at a senior center.

It was a typical dance rehearsal style room, with one of the long walls covered in mirrors. Sure, you can do cool things with the reflections, but you have to hide yourself while you do it. You can either work at an oblique angle to the mirror, or hide behind an object or person in the frame.

But including a light in the equation adds another variable/limitation/problem/opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

Now you need to find an angle where there is good composition, you are hidden, your light is hidden and the light is doing worthwhile things to your subject.

This is easier than it sounds. The solution is to light the scene from outside of the room.

In this room, assuming you are standing at center, the wall of mirrors is the long wall in front of you. At the upper right corner of the room there is a door. There are also a couple of windows along the wall to your right.

I stuck the flash about 8 feet outside of the door and aimed it back into the room to hit the instructor and spill over onto the front row of people. The open door and one window created two broad shafts of light.

The light is coming from slightly in front of the instructor and I am behind him. This is not a problem because I can shoot his reflection in the mirror. Problem solved.

The mirror also gives me access to the cool shadows being created along the back and left side walls of the classroom, too.

My light will affect the whole room without popping up in a shot (either directly or as a reflection.)

The light was set to a 70mm zoom angle, and on 1/2 power. I wanted some depth of field and enough light to create some dark shadows by cranking up my shutter speed if I wanted.

When using hard, direct strobe in a room you will get shadows that you do not see unless you either chimp your TFT screen or carefully scan for them as you test pop your flash. I do one or the other regularly as I work.

These can work for you, as is the case in the close-up (above) of the lady working with the wooden sword. Keep an eye out for those opportunities.

Or they can work against you, as in this photo just below.

Can you see my problem yet? Look on the lower right. I may be hidden, but the tell-tale shadow of a camera with a Pocket Wizard attached to the hot shoe is clearly visible.

Just be aware of both possibilities.

Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: Nikkor 17-35mm
Flash: Nikon SB-28, on a stand at 1/2 power, outside of the room
Exposure: F/5.6 at various shutter speeds to control the depth of the shadows.
Trigger: Pocket Wizard

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Designing a Backdrop

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On Assignment: Light the Little Stuff

The other morning I had an assignment to photograph 8-year-old Peter Schultz, who won the "best handwriting" contest (second grade division) for the state of Maryland.

The kid is a living font. And he is left-handed, no less. Which doesn't make things any easier, I'm told.

The story, slated to run in one of the zoned editions of The Sun, is a good example of the kind of assignment we all get most every day. Nothing earth shattering. Just go shoot a photo of someone who did something special.

This is a no-glamour, no-adrenaline, no-pressure type of assignment. And it is exactly the type of assignment you should be lighting.

Hey, they can't all be assignments to shoot mothers tossing babies out of burning buildings into the arms of firefighters, right? Those kinds of assignments shoot themselves. They will always produce good photos. They'd better, anyway.

But the daily stuff - boring stuff, some would say - is where you show your professionalism. It is not about how hot of a photo you can occasionally get. It is about where your daily minimum quality level is.

This is the kind of assignment you want to light - for a number of reasons.

First, you'll up the quality level. Good lighting does that.

Second, there's absolutely no pressure at all. That is a good place to practice without fear of failure.

Third, no one is pressing you on time. Heck, Peter the Human Typewriter is getting out of math class for this. He'd be happy if you soaked up an hour or two of his morning.

So I am sticking this up as an example in a couple of areas. We already mentioned the low-pressure assignment as a good practice time. But I also wanted you to see the versatility that sticking one little flash in an umbrella can give you.

So, the light is exactly as you see it in the first photo, at top. After setting it up, I did not move it at all during the assignment.

Lotta work, huh? Maybe a minute. For those keeping score, the flash was on 1/4 power manual. The camera was at 1/250 @ f/5.6 at ASA 400. Florescent balance, with a green gel on the flash.

So, the kid starts writing what he had to write in the contest just to show me his stuff. To say this kid is deliberate would not do him justice. He is not gonna win any races. He is all about quality. And if a letter bothers him - at all - he will erase it and do it over.

This sentence is clearly going to take 15 minutes. So I have time to do whatever I want.

I start out with a close up shot of him writing, shown here. My preference is to kind of keep a running conversation with someone as I am shooting. (Yeah, I'm a gabber. Sue me.) So I point out how he reminds me of Michael Jordan with the tongue-sticking-out-thing.

He thinks that is cool.

While I am talking, I zoom out a little and include the windows. All same shooting and light position, same exposure.

The light is at about a 90-degree angle to the kid, so it is defining him well against the darkened back wall. Next, I walk around to the far side of him and get a detail shot.

The light gives me enough aperture to keep his hand and his excruciatingly perfect letters in focus. It looks much more crisp than without the light, I would think.

After he finishes up his sentence, I turn him to where the light is now hitting him on a 45-degree angle and shoot him with his handiwork.

Then, on a whim, I shoot a couple of frames with his face mostly obscured by the paper. In the end, I liked this shot best. And again, the light gave me the depth of field to hold focus on both planes.

No, it's not a killer story or assignment. But the page designer has five crisp photos that will reproduce well and hold at any size. This gives them the option to run it small, large, or even to do a two- or three-picture package.

Sure, he is most likely page three fodder. But if they need him out on the zone front, he'll hold because of the technical quality of the photos, if nothing else.

Look, they can't all be Pulitzer winners. But you can use these assignments to raise the bar on you minimum quality levels while you practice your lighting for the more important assignments that are yet to come.

And doing well on the daily grind is how you get the better assignments anyway.

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: 17-35/2.8; 55/2.8 micro for hand shot
Exposure: 1/250 at f/5.6
Flash: Nikon SB-28, greened, 1/4 power in umbrella/lightstand
Trigger: Pocket Wizard

Next: Thinking Outside of The Box

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Link Page Expanded

Just added quite a few new sites on the Page-a-Links. Added more blogs, more PJ sites and the beginnings of list of college PJ programs. I am collecting URLs of other professional and student photojournalist's blogs, too. Those are coming soon.

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On Assignment: Big Gym, Little Lights

Building a little on the basketball lighting technique we talked about earlier (open "Lighting Prep Basketball" in a new window) I wanted to explore another example of using one small light to illuminate a large, long-throw area - and adding a second to improve it.

All of the heavy lifting in the top photo is being done with one Nikon SB-28. It is on full power, and placed in the top center of the bleachers at half court on camera left.

The flash zoom setting is on 85mm. This not only gives me increased efficiency, but also serves to help to "feather" the light on the left side of the photo.

What is feathering? The left area of the photo is closer to the flash and should have been brighter. But the area was also starting to fall outside of the "beam spread" of the light, which was aimed at the basket. This helped me to balance the exposure across the background very easily.

Getting back to the light setup, we have one strobe lighting the whole scene. That's asking a lot for a small strobe at this distance - even at full power. And the ASA still had to be pushed to 800. But the quality of the light will fool you and make you think it was shot at a lower ASA. (In my opinion at least.)

The look is helped by two little tricks which finesse the light a bit.

First, the dunker's shadow is far enough to the right to be out of the frame. This disguises the fact that it is being lit by one hard, long-throw light. He's pretty close to the back wall, so his shadow would have been distracting.

Second, and more important, there is another strobe on a stand at camera right (just outside of the frame, close to the subject) set to 1/32 power. This strobe is cross lighting him, which erases much of the tell-tale "hard light shadow side" of the dunker. At the same time it gives him a nice highlight on the right side, creating a more three-dimensional shape.

This is basically one-half of the basketball lighting technique posted earlier, with the second strobe now being used as a low-power, cross-light kicker instead of second light at 45 degrees from the other side's bleachers.

The dunk photo was the inside lead for The Sun's "Varsity" section, which highlights standout prep athletes from different suburbs around Baltimore. (The photographers love this new section because it gives us guaranteed good play and a chance to play.) The second, vertical photo was used as the cover. Both were shot in a total of about 15 minutes.

Now, before I explain the light on the cover photo, try to reverse engineer it. I will tell you that the bleacher light (lighting what is now the background) is unchanged. And, by now you should know I am pretty lazy when it comes to setting (and re-setting) a bunch of gear.

The cover shot was an easy switch, lighting-wise. I just walked the 1/32 power light stand on the right and stuck it close to mid court on the left. I had to bump it up two stops, to 1/8 power, to light the basketball player as he dribbled. The light stand was set to camera left and in front of the player. So, both the background light and the main light (for the player) are now coming from camera left.

I was so grateful to the people who had painted the whole gym wall "Scorpion Orange" that I got down on my belly to give thanks.

This, if course, made the polished wood floor reflect the wall. Which made the player almost seem to float on a background of orange. You'll need to put the camera directly on the floor to maximize this effect.

Two small lights. One big area. Two setups. Fifteen minutes.

Easy as pie.

When you get used to doing this small-flash lighting thing, you will be amazed at (a) how quickly an lighting idea will come together, and (b) how fast you can set up and execute it.


Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: 80-200mm zoom.
Strobe: (2) Nikon SB-28's
Exposure: (both) 1/250th at f/2.8, ASA 800
Trigger: Pocket Wizards

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Light the Little Stuff

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On Assignment: Taming Harsh Sunlight

Whenever I am setting up an assignment to go photograph someone, I like to give myself as many advantages as possible.

I am always aware of when sunset (and, less enthusiastically, sunrise) will occur, and plan shoots around that time if there is some flexibility.

Sadly, we can't always plan our shoots to start a few minutes before "golden light" and finish up shooting strobe into a sunset. Ah, would that it were always thus.

But getting back to reality, take Morris Martick, above, who is an 83-year-old chef/owner of a funky, bohemian little French restaurant in a, uh, "not very trendy" part of Baltimore.

There is no handle on the door, and it stays locked. You ring the bell and Morris lets you in. When you take a cab to this place at night, the driver will usually look at you and ask, "are you sure this is the place?"

Anyway, we had shot a restaurant review but had nothing good of Martick, so I went back to make a quick portrait that could run with the review.

I knew I was going to shoot him out by his funky, hand-painted, South-of-France-looking sign, so I asked when he would be free.

Eleven o'clock a.m.? Great. 'Bye.

(yuck.)

So, there's not a cloud in the sky and the light is just as harsh (and from just as bad of an angle) as you would expect. Coming in high at ~45 degrees from camera right (see inset photo.)

When working fast in a situation like this, I sometimes like to co-opt the sun as my second light in a 2-light, 45-degree setup. Can't cross light him because there is no room behind him. Doesn't matter if the sun cannot get up under the guy's brow. Just make sure your flash is able to get up under there and light his eyes.

The setup for this could not be simpler, and yields a "1960's" kind of two-hard-light look.

I set the shutter to the highest synch speed, which for a Nikon D2h is 1/250th. Zero out the ambient exposure with the aperture. Flash goes up on a stand at camera left (45 degrees) at ~1/4 power, zoomed to 85mm for maximum efficiency. (Make sure the flash is high enough to look good on him, but not too high to get up under his brow.)

At 1/4 power, the strobe (about 5 feet away) was too hot. So it was just a matter of opening up the shutter speed and closing down the aperture until I got a ratio that I liked. That way the ambient exposure remains the same and the flash exposure lessens becaused of the increasing aperture.

If the strobe had been too weak, I would have cranked the power to bring it up some. Quick and easy either way. And no flash meter is needed, thanks to the TFT screen on the back of the digital camera. (Hey, if you want to buy a flash meter anyway, be my guest. I have one I'll sell you.)

As you can see from the third photo, I use my hand to quickly nail down my light, usually before the subject is even there. Quick, accurate and easy. Only downside is the fact that you can get some strange looks from people on the city streets if you are walking around photographing your own hand.

You get a crispness and three-dimensionality from this quickie setup that you just cannot get using on-camera fill. And it takes maybe a minute to set up.

The important thing to remember is that doing something like this should quickly grow to be a default setting for you as a photographer. This should be a bare minimum strobe technique, the way many people now view on-camera fill flash.

If you are doing stuff like this by rote for quickie, everyday assignments, when you decide to stretch you will have a comfort level that allows you to push your light and do something really cool.

On-camera fill flash should be an absolute last resort, used only when nothing else is practical.


Camera: Nikon D2h
Exposure 1/160 @f/22 at ASA 200
Flash: Nikon SB28, on manual 1/4 power, on a stand
Trigger: Pocket Wizard

Photos ©David Hobby / Baltimore Sun

Next: Big Gym, Little Lights

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I know you're out there...

... unless it is my mom who is clicking on the site nearly 5,000 times a day.

So, like, ya know, if you guys would start to use the comment section and stuff, we could, like, well, you know, actually benefit from having an ongoing discussion about some of this lighting stuff, too. Howzabout a little diversity of thought around here?

Or you could just continue to sit back and just read everything I post as if it were The Gospel or something. Which is a really scary thought.

In fact, if there is a subject in particular that you would like to see explored (lighting wise) or something Strobist is already doing that you would like to see more of, just wail away on the comment link right below this post.

Muchas gracias, y'all.

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Lighting 101: Build a Pro PC Cord, Pt. 2

Repeating the important note from part one: There are those who believe that using household-style sync cords poses an inherent risk in that they could be mistakenly plugged into an AC outlet. That said, building a sync cord based on HH plugs is inexpensive, reliable and convenient. Which is why many pro's use them as primary (or backup) synching systems.

The cord I have designed uses two very short, male-PC-to-male-household, store-bought cords and a main cord composed of a FEMALE HOUSEHOLD TO FEMALE HOUSEHOLD main body. As such, the extension cord itself is quite impossible to plug into the wall.

In twenty-plus years as a pro, I have never met a photographer who was involved in the kind of an accident as described above. But if this is the kind of thing that just keeps you awake at night, simply gaffer tape up the plugs where they join. If you are worried that someone is going to dive for your PC cord, untape it, rip it apart and plug the little 6" part into the wall, I can't help you. Buy some Pocket Wizards.

Alternatively, you may wish to substitute a 1/4 mono plug or 1/8 mono-mini plug in place of the respective HH plugs. But you'll peobably have to do some soldering.

This is also an alternative if US-style HH plugs are not available in your country.

_________________


First of all, here are the sources for the parts.

(2) Short, PC Male-to-Household cord (where to get it): Varies - as little as $10 for a short one
(2) Female plug adapters from Home Depot: $2.98 each, or $5.96
(2) Ball-bungees (Home Depot, WalMart, etc:) Less that $1.00
16 gauge zip cord at $0.24 a foot at Home Depot: $4.80 for 20 feet

The process for each end is the same, so you will do this twice. You'll need a knife, scissors, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers (or your teeth.) Very easy stuff, even for the not-so-handy types.

Using scissors, cut about one inch down the notch between the two parts of the wire, as shown.

Make sure you stay inside the notch on your cut.

Using a sharp knife at about 1/2 inch from the end, cut through the rubber insulation to the metal wire. Do not cut the wire. If in doubt about where you are, stop, bend the wire and check. Flip the wire over and do the same thing.



Next, grasp the insulation on the tips of each of the two wires, twist it and pull it off. You may wish to grasp it with pliers. I used my teeth. Please do not tell my wife. Now, twist the wires (individually) to make the easier to bend and connect later. Your wire ends will now look like this, with two stripped wires.

Bend the little stripped ends into a "U," as shown. Repeat the same process for the other end of the wire. (This is the extent of the cutting/stripping/pliers grasping part.)

Get your female plug end and open it up with a screwdriver. This plug shown is the one from Home Depot. (If yours is different, figure it out. Should be really easy.)

Your wire should have labeling of some kind that runs along one of the two sides. Almost all wire does now. If not, grasp one end of the wire and make a mark on one half of it. Now pull it through your hands and get to the other end so you can make a similar mark on the same half of the wire.

(You wire will almost certainly have markings already on it, if you look closely.)

Next, take your little bent wires and connect them as shown. The plug ends will be "polarized," which means one slot will be a little longer than the other. This is why we are keeping track of which wire is which. You'll want to connect the same wire half to the long slot at each end of the wire, and vice versa. It is easy, and it will help to protect your camera.

Now, prepare to close the plug. Make sure the wire will not be pierced by the screw, as shown. Close it up. The plug should clamp the wire firmly. If not, open it back up and wrap a little black electrical tape around it. But most plugs clamp automatically.

Repeat the process at the other end, and your work is pretty much done. I hope this was as easy for you as it seemed to me. If you just follow the steps carefully, you should be fine. I tested it on my five-year-old, and he assembled a half just fine. :) (And yes, I tested it it well. The point is, you can do this even if you do not normally do handi-man stuff.)

Now, just plug the PC cords into each end and attach whatever you are using for strain relief.

There you are.

Here is an example of how I hang it on my flash when I am using it. I usually stick the other ball bungee around my lens at the other end of the cord. The important thing is not to have that PC connection carrying the weight and/or wiggling around.













Next: Soft Light: Umbrellas

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Lighting 101: Build a Pro Synch Cord, Pt. 1

Important note: There are those who believe that using household-style sync cords poses an inherent risk in that they could be mistakenly plugged into an AC outlet. That said, building a sync cord based on HH plugs is inexpensive, reliable and convenient. Which is why many pro's use them as primary (or backup) synching systems.

The cord I have designed uses two very short, male-PC-to-male-household, store-bought cords and a main cord composed of a FEMALE HOUSEHOLD TO FEMALE HOUSEHOLD main body. As such, the extension cord itself is quite impossible to plug into the wall.

In twenty-plus years as a pro, I have never met a photographer who was involved in the kind of an accident as described above. But if this is the kind of thing that just keeps you awake at night, simply gaffer tape up the plugs where they join. If you are worried that someone is going to dive for your PC cord, untape it, rip it apart and plug the little 6" part into the wall, I can't help you. Buy some Pocket Wizards.

Alternatively, you may wish to substitute a 1/4 mono plug or 1/8 mono-mini plug in place of the respective HH plugs. But you'll peobably have to do some soldering.

This is also an alternative if US-style HH plugs are not available in your country.

_________________

In retrospect, I was pretty hard on synch cords. I made the jump to wireless about ten years ago. The Pocket Wizards have been a Godsend.

But I also remember what it was like to try to cobble together a lighting bag on almost no budget. Wireless remotes to not fit into that bill at all. And the very last thing I want to do is to have those mui-expensivo Pocket Wizards scare someone out of learning how to light off camera. So here goes.

The last synch cord I was using before I went wireless is the synch cord I am going to show you how to make. It is designed to be cheaper, more durable and more reliable than the one-piece, store-bought cords. And it can be made very long - I have used 75-foot versions with good results - for very little extra money.

It is made with two Household-to-PC cords, one at each end. The middle is basically an extension cord with "female" fittings at each end.

(If you do not know what the "female" part means, I am not going to be the one to tell you. Think about it.)

At each end is a short household male-to-PC cord (where to get it.) This will plug into your camera or one of those PC tips on the cheap Nikon SB-24's (or any other PC-equipped Nikon strobe.)

If you are going with another flash brand (with a different connector) I will leave it to you to figure out how you'll connect it. Please put your comments at the end of this post to share with others if you do. No secrets here.

You will also place a 6- or 8-inch ball bungee at each end, for strain relief. The tips on PC cords are vulnerable, and also the expensive part. You want the PC connection to stay still. You also want the cord to be supported by something, and not hanging by the PC connection at either end. This is how your cord will last a very long time.

The middle of the cord is 16-gauge "zip" cord, or lamp cord as some people call it. You can buy it in bulk. Why? It is durable as heck. Wiggle it all you want. No problem.

It is also easily replaced or repaired. Say you made a 20-foot synch cord and now you need a 35-foot one. You could just replace the cheapo lamp cord in the middle in about 5 minutes (if that) with a 35-foot section, for less that $7 at Home Depot (which is my favorite photo store, because I am a certified cheapskate!) The stuff is only 24 cents a foot. Schwing.

So, what you're going to make is basically a 20 foot extension cord with female fittings at each end. Then you'll plug the PC-to-household male 6" cords into each end, put on the ball-bungee strain relief, and, as they say in the cool Guy Ritchie movies, Bob's your uncle. (That mean's, "you're done.")

Why female at each end of the main cord? Because females are smarter than males. No, no, no. Because this will make it impossible for some "helpful" bystander to plug your synch cord into an AC outlet that way. (Which will do very interesting smelly, smoky things to your digital camera...)

Also, keeping the cord the same at both ends means that you can elect to get a third PC cord to keep as a backup, and it'll work at either end. And you can make it longer in a pinch by adding a normal extension cord.

So, let's run the numbers before we get into the how-to's.

(2) Short, PC Male to Household cord (where to get it): Varies - as little as $10 for a short one
(2) Female plug adapters from Home Depot: $2.98 each, or $5.96
(2) Ball-bungees (Home Depot, WalMart, etc:) Less that $1.00
16 gauge zip cord at $0.24 a foot at Home Depot: $4.80 for 20 feet

You are more than welcome to buy an all-in-one cord, but the long ones get expensive. The zip-cord way allows you durability, length-flexibility and cost savings over the long, one-piece models.

If your flash does not have a PC jack, you can add a "household" synch terminal to it by getting a Household to Hotshoe adapter (where to get it) which is a great idea, as it means you only need to get one small PC cord to connect the zip-cord-based PC cord to your camera. Everything else - even multiple flashes - can be done with cheap household connectors.

Whichever you choose, make sure to use the strain relief at the PC connections (bungee, rubber band, string, whatever.) That is the big secret to making a cord last for a long time.

Next: Building a Pro PC Cord, Pt. 2

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On Assignment: Prep Basketball

There are lots of ways to use strobe to improve high school sports. And typically, nothing needs improving more than dimly lit high school hoops.

The gyms are often black holes, with ambient levels as bad as 1/125 at f/2 at 1600 ASA. Not even a speed lens and a hard ASA push is gonna help much there.

On top of that, there are hot spots and cold spots. And the sadistic architects seem to like to keep it nice and dark right over the rim for some reason.

I have evolved from shooting (un)available light, to direct strobe (ugh) to nuking the ceilings with White Lightning Ultras (find an outliet and hope no one knocks over your strobes.) I have even shot at 250 at f/2.8 at ASA 1600 and bounced a Vivitar 283 (at full power manual) off of the high ceiling (!) which has gotten me out of some dark situations.

But what I have been doing for the last few years is to cross light with a pair of shoe-mount strobes stuck up in the bleachers.

Lighting half of a gym is a lot to ask from a pair of SB's. So I am not overpowering the ambient, so much as finessing it.

This is not a bare-bones lighting setup, as far as cost is concerned. I use two shoe-mount strobes on Bogen Superclamps, high voltage Lumedyne external battery packs (because I am shooting lots of frames at half power) and trigger them with Pocket Wizards. Synch cords would be completely impractical in this situation. The point is to show you what you can do with a pair of SB's.

Here is the technique.

I am lighting half of the court with the two strobes. I can light the other half with two more - very easily - for a full-gym lighting setup with four shoe-mount strobes. (I will get to the front-court half of the four-light setup in a subsequent OA article.) But I typically shoot opposite end hoops with prep basketball. Typically, you need coverage at both ends for college and pro, when you need the picture. Prep, you usually need a picture, so long as it reasonably fits the outcome of the game.

This is a good example of both the "cross light" and "long-throw hard light" techniques we talked about in Lighting 101. It works because we are not working too much above the ambient, which is now providing the fill.

The lights are going to be placed (with Superclamps) above the middle of the bleachers, one on each side. There is something to clamp to above the center of the bleachers about 95% of the time. Railing, metal pipe - something. Even conduit, in a pinch. If there is nothing there, you will have to improvise (and tell me how you did it.) And don't clamp too tightly on electrical conduit, by the way. Use common sense on any clamping support.

The flashes are going to be set on manual at about half power. If the lights are typical sodium vapors or florescent (it'll almost certainly be one of the two) set your camera on florescent and green your flashes. It'll get you pretty close in either case. And besides, the ambient is only acting as fill.

Set the flashes to the 50mm zoom setting. You want a balance of coverage angle and ability to throw the light. You may be able to get away with a 70mm flash zoom setting for more efficiency. But you will have to experiment.

Aim the lights to a point about ten feet in the air above the top of the key.
The strobes should give you a pretty honest f/2.8 at your highest synch speed at ASA 640. If they are hot, turn down your ASA. If dark, vice versa.
This will be at about 2-3 stops above the ambient, but you are working at (pretty close to) the right light color anyway. So no worries - it's all fill. The light will be crisp, but you will be able to read the shadows just fine.

The light will cover about half of the court. If you are following both teams, stay at one end for the whole game and shoot cross court with an 80-200 or a 300. If you want, you can shoot from the sideline about a third of the way up-court, too. If you are following one team, just go up and re-aim the lights from the same positions at half time.

With a little practice, setup is less than 10 mins and teardown less than 5 mins. If I have 10 minutes to shoot a game on early deadline, I will absolutely use the lights. Even though I will only get 5 mins of shooting time (and the other 5 mins as teardown time) I will have more quality choices to choose from with the lights vs shooting all 10 mins available or on-camera.

Experiment with your power settings and angles. Use the warmup time to shoot and test.

You will be very happy with the quality of the light compared to anyting you can do on-camera.

©David Hobby / The Baltimore Sun

Next: Taming Harsh Sunlight

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New Area: The Strobist Bookshelf

I have more "On Assignments" coming soon, but I wanted to complete the education and resources section first.

To that end, you'll notice that the sidebar now has a "bookshelf" link. It is a tight-but-good list, and there are additions coming. You will always be able to reach it there, or you can click here now. I will post notes whenever it is updated.

The bookshelf link will also be folded into the Lighting 101 linked series.

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Lighting 101: Be the Flash

One of my (and, I suspect, many others') biggest gripes with using small, battery powered flash used to be the lack of modeling lights.

The fact is that modeling lights need lots of juice. And juice wither comes from the wall - as in AC - or from big, heavy batteries. And stop-gap measure modeling lights, designed not to use much juice, usually do not put out that much light anyway.

So, if you want extreme portability, lose the idea of modeling lights. You do not need them anyway.

You know what hard light looks like. You know what soft light looks like. So, no need for a modeling light for previewing on that front.

What you want to know is (a) where will the light fall, and (b) will there be reflections?

Reflections are pretty easy. Light works like a pool shot. Light will reflect off of a subject at the same angle (but in opposite direction) that it struck.

That is why we learned to light eyeglass wearers at an oblique angle. The reflections are still there. They are just angled to go harmlessly away from the camera angle.

You can also pop the flash and "eyeball" the scene - especially shiny or glass areas - to check for reflections, too. Just make sure you are looking from the same position from which you will be shooting.

It is easier than you think. Try it.

Now, where will the light fall? That one is different, and is the main reason most people use modeling lights.

This is another really easy workaround.

You are already used to walking around a looking at your scene from a few different points of view to choose your camera angle. (You should be, anyway.)

You need to get in the habit of doing this with your light, too. A good time to do it is while you are setting up your lights.

The difference between your camera angle and your lighting angle will determine much of the quality of your photo, so consciously considering both angles is a good habit to get into.

But, more importantly, when you are looking at the scene from your lighting angle, you see exactly what the light will see. Which, with a little practice, will eliminate your need for a modeling light.

Last I checked, (and absent your working near a black hole) light travels in a straight line. If you are looking at the scene from the same perspective that your light will see it, you become your own modeling light.

With a little practice, it is a very fast procedure. Especially if you are folding the process into that of setting up the lights.

I know it may sound a little kooky.

Just try it.

Next: Don't Let Good Light Ruin a Photo

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Humble Beginnings: Links Page

Strobist's Link page is now up. In it's beginning form, anyway.

Now that I have the template up, adding to it should be pretty quick and easy. There are more links I would like to post this morning, but I am still behind on moving some of last week's photos to the paper, so work-work comes before play-work.

The link on the sidebar at right will get you there whenever you want. Or you can click here right now.

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Gear Articles and Reviews

Welcome to the attic of my mind.

Here is where you will find many of the previous Strobist articles, loosely categorized. If you want everything, you have to wade through the archives, where you'll find them in reverse chronological order.

I tend to archive about twice a month, so this page will not be completely up-to-date. If you saw my room, my closet and the inside of my car, you would not only understand - you might even be a little impressed with the relative organization level of this page.

If you see something listed twice, it is because it fit into two different categories.

Please do not tell my wife I cleaned up this page first.


DIY

Yeah. We're cheap frugal. You wanna make something of it? Actually, that's kind of the whole point: If we can make it instead of buying it, that's just more money we can spend on store-bought gear and Diet Mountain Dew.

DIY $10 Macro Studio
DIY: Macro Strip Lights
DIY: Digital EOS/Holga
DIY Heaven: The "Make" Photo Blog
How-To: One Synch Cord Fires Two Flashes
Get Your "Tinker Tubes" Plans!
Cool Site: DIYPhotography.net
REALLY Cheap Light: IFakedIt.com
Super-Cheap Softbox
DIY Macro Strobe Tube Thingie
$10 DIY Softbox Grid Panel
DIY Ring Flash
Another DIY Ring Flash
DIY Collapsible Softbox
Easy and Free: DIY Grid Spots
Easy, DIY Lighting Diagrams
For Tech-Heads: DIY Safe Voltage Circuit
Free, Coroplast Grid Material
Low-End Theory: One-Gallon Modifier
Modding the "eBay Remotes"
Use Your Noodle: Easy Snoots
DIY Flash Mod Collection
You Can Do It: Clean Your DSLR's CCD


Essays

These may be about lighting, photo, life in general, or nothing at all. It's pure stream of consciousness. Enter at your own risk.

Kick-In-The-Pants Rant: When Are You Gonna Learn?
General Theory: Strive for Layers of Interest
Photography's Vanishing Middle Class
Channel Your Hostorical Mentors
So, You Wanna Turn Pro...
Photojournalism's Next Frontier
The Lighting Journey: Where are You?


Gear

The goal: Keep the gear to a minimum and splurge on your brain instead. But some gear is necessary, and we can point you in the right direction. Just remember - you do not have to spend a ton of money for good light.

A Rational Approach to Buying Gear
Money Choices: Light or More Glass?
Steal This Flash: The Nikon SB-24
Online SB-24 Manual
For a Few Dollars More: The Nikon SB-26
Great Link: Nikon Vintage Flash Heaven
Pocket Wizard to Hot Shoe Adapter
It's Easy, Being Green...
External Power Sources
MAHA 2700 MaH NiMH Rechargeable Batteries
The $160.00 Starving Student Off-Camera Lighting Kit
The Great Flash and Glass Garage Sale
No PC Jack? No Problem
How-To: Connect a Pocket Wizard to Any Strobe
Don't Fry Your Camera
Monsterpod! (With a Strobist Mod)
External Sync for Canon Speedlight
Nifty Flash/Umbrella Mount
Pocket Wizard vs. Nikon CLS: Which One is Best for You?
Strobe On A Rope-Rope-Rope
Flash Bulbs. Yes, Flash Bulbs.
PC Synch Any Hot Shoe Flash: Wein HSH Adapter
Warm Your Pop-Up Flash
A Good Place to Get Gear, and Why
Return of a Classic: The Vivitar 285HV
Westcott Double-Fold Convertible Umbrella

Cool Finds

Hey, we can't write everything ourselves! There's tons of good stuff on the web, and we'll keep tabs on it here.

Paging Doc Edgerton...
Portrait Lighting Video
Collins-Inspired Portrait Lighting Tutorial
Cool Beans! Animated Time Exposures!
Tip Us To Cool Stuff
Nikon CLS Tutorial
Lotsa Good Stuff: Rangefinder Magazine Online
Portrait Tips
AmericanPhotojournalist.com's 'Analyzed' Section
What The Duck?!? (A Photo Comic Strip)
Commercial Photo: A Japanese Strobist Magazine
More on Commercial Photo
Get This Book: Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait
Time-Lapse Movie of Michael Grecco Shoot
DVD: Lighting Essentials 1
The Better Beamer
Check Out: Lost America
Web Portfolio w/Lighting Diagrams
You Should Know This: Chiarascuro Tutorial


Podcasts, Seminars and Guest Appearances

Mama always said I had a good face for radio. Don't worry. I promise not to sing.

Guest PODCAST: Guest on StudioLighting.net
Guest PODCAST: Tips From the Top Floor
Photocast Network Debuts
Strobist, Run Through the Wringer at Performancing.com
Strobist on Your iPod/Palm
Grecco Invterviewed on Lightsource
Inaugural Workshop Follow-Up

Full Reviews

First things first: If it stinks I just won't write about it. I mean, why waste our time?

Book Review: Light, Science and Magic
Full Review: "Best of Dean Collins" DVDs
You Should Subscribe to Photo District News
Buy This Book: Best Business Practices for Photographers
Full Review: Light and the Dramatic Portrait
Return of a Classic: The Vivitar 285HV


Odds and Ends

The Latest Hot List: January '07
Flashy Clothes: Strobist Wear
A STROBIST Button for Your Site
Bit and Pieces, August 9th, 2006
Battery University: Learn About Rechargeables
Announcing Strobist's First Workshop
Brainstorming a Book
Link to Strobist!
Skin and Retouching


The Business End of Things

Thinking of turning pro? Arm yourself with knowledge first. It's your only chance to succeed.

Info Request: Web-Enabled Biz Models
So, You Wanna Turn Pro
Buy This Book: Best Business Practices for Photographers
John Harrington Launches a Blog


Our Future: Multimedia on the Web

We will not be getting our news on dead trees in 50 years. Embrace this wonderful opportunity early. Change is good.

Producing Flash A/V Galleries for the Web
Photojournalism's New Frontier
Multimedia Bits and Pieces - 11/6/06
My Autumn Multimedia Project: Fall, For the Moment
Mediastorm Debuts Iraqi Kurdistan
More on Iraqi Kurdistan


(Last Update - Gen: 03/04/07 - OA: 11/30/06)

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Lighting 101: See the Flash

As we said earlier, the incredibly brief burst of light from a strobe can be very difficult to visualize. Sure, you can see it. But what I mean is that it is hard to understand the way it is going to look when you are first learning to light.

At least it was for me.

I had this instructor in the photojournalism program at the University of Florida, (former Miami Herald photographer John Walther) who would tell me to just pop the flash and look at the effect on the subject/wall/whatever.

I can still hear him.

"Did you see that, Dave?" He would say. "That looks like about 5.6 at 400 to me..."

Uh-huh. Sure it does, Mr. Walther. If you say so.

I was never completely sure when the guy was kidding or serious. He was a legend as far as black and white technical quality was concerned. I swear, the guy could look at a tray of crystal clear fixer and tell you how many more good prints it had left in it.

I'll never really know if he was pulling my leg. But the guy sure could light.

And he got me thinking, which might have been what he was trying to do in the first place.

Rewinding a little, I had a couple of heaters Lowel Tota-Lights (quartz lights) at the time. And I could use those just fine, because I could see the effect right there. But flash? No way.

Then one day, it occurs to me that I could previsualize what the quartz lights were gonna give me before I turned them on. Why? Because I had seen the effect so many times.

This is really nuts, if you think about it. I could previsualize the quartz lights before I had even turned them on, but I could not previsualize my flashes? (C'mon, Dave.)

Anyone knows what effect a flashlight will have when we turn it on. But a flash? Try to previsualize that and we suddenly turn dumb as a sack of nails.

Which is when it hit me. If I just imagined my little Vivitar (at the time) as a very powerful continuous light, I could previsualize what the effect of the light would be.

This was an epiphany for a dumb, green college shooter. And it worked. I could not judge the quantity of the light. That was what meters were for, before TFT sceens. But I could now prejudge the quality of the light. To some extent, I have been doing that ever since.

My mind applies a convenient little automatic dimmer to my mental Nikon Speed Light/Continuous Light. I'll take care of the exposure in a minute anyway. What is important to see is what the light is going to do, not how bright it will be.

Try it. Start out with hard light at first, because it is easier to visualize the effect. Then learn to think how restricted-beam (snooted) light will act. Then soft light.

Bouncing flash against a wall? Imagine a window right there. You'd be surprised how you brain will start to register how the light will look.

And getting back to Mr. Walther, I think he was onto something.

When you choose the zoom/lens coverage setting on your flash, for instance, it will affect the size your light source. (The light source is now the bounce surface.) Pop the flash while looking at the wall. Sure, it only happens in a 10,000th of a sec, but you can see it because it burns a momentary image into the rods and cones in your eye.

Where does the light hit? How big is it?

What would the light from a window that size and location look like on your subject?

Starting to get the idea?



Next: Why you don't need a modeling light - Be The Flash

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Reader Tip: Foiled Again

Thanks to James Dyrek, who sent in one of his favorite lighting ideas:

Aluminum foil.

He puts it on computer monitors to make an efficient bounce surface for a low power flash, like a Vivitar 285 on (partial) manual power.

Foil is cheap, light and takes up almost no space in the bag. Triple aces on the Strobist scale.

You can use the stuff for mold-able GoBo material in a pinch, too. Or if you are using optical slaves that are being finicky about firing, you can make a little "scrunchy light reflector" just to catch and kick a little light into them.

For not weighing anything, that's some heavy metal.

Click here open James' website in a new window.


Thanks, James!

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Strobist Guest Book and Reader Links

If you would, please take a moment to add a comment with your name and personal info to our book. I have been getting e-mails from many different parts of the globe, and I thought it might be interesting to see just how diverse a group we are becoming.

Nothing fancy - just your name, location, what kind of photography you do and a link for your website or blog if you have one.

I will try to migrate the links up to the actual post (the part you are reading now), unless we get so many that it becomes impossible to keep up.

Thanks, y'all!

Readers' Links:

Shane Porter - The "SP" in EssPea...
Kirk Tuck
Erez Avraham
Hub Pacheco
Alan Ackoff - New Mexico Photo
I Shoot People - New gear blog with a forum
Pete Millson
EOS Pro - Daniel Kasaj's EOS gear blog
Movin' to Seattle - Matt Swann's blog
Hassel Weems - AKA World Wide Weems
David H Photography (A different David H.)
Mike Sebastian
Josh Wand - Digital workflow; Post Production
Steve Mermelstein - Commercial, Weddings, Portraits, and Landscape
Nick Wright - Community photojournalist's blog
Patrick Wellever - Michigan State University PJ student
Bob Samuelson - Photographer, retired engineer, DIY guy.
Marcus Hartel - Street photographer
Morgan Petroski - Photojournalist and a 'Gator. Double threat.
A Pentax Fan Blog - from a guy with no name...

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Lighting 101: Know the Flash.

At the risk of sounding like I have gone off of the deep end, I want to talk about experimentation and, for lack of a better term, "flash anxiety."

Now that we have gone through a lot of technique and gear, it is time to upgrade the most basic piece of equipment: The space between your ears.

Most young photojournalists are guilty of what a tennis player might call "running around his backhand" when it comes to using flash. But in my own case (and, I suspect, in many others') it had to do more with flash anxiety.

The problem is two-fold.

First, flash happens in an extraordinarily brief amount of time. One ten thousandth of a second is typical for a low-power manual shot, or kissing a little light at the subject in TTL mode.

That is a really difficult thing to comprehend, much less visualize, let alone learn to control.

Second, our journalistic forefathers were of the "Tri-X, f/8 and be there" variety. Available light was the only "pure, ethical" choice.

Gregory Heisler, who has long been one of my very favorite lighting photographers, actually jokes that the only way to shoot truly ethically is to stick yourself out in space, shooting back at Earth with a 50mm lens on a very quiet Leica, using Tri-X.

I mean, if you really do not want to influence the situation at all, why not go all of the way?

Our early forefathers (sadly, there were very few foremothers but I am not taking away from their accomplishments) didn't have to worry about how the sodium vapor lights were going to come across in color in the next day's paper, for example.

Times have changed. And so has journalism. But that available light crutch argument works so well at keeping us from learning to light when we are young.

Does that mean it is cool to throw a hot, magenta 1980's gel look on the hair of every environmental portrait subject this week?

Probably not.

But light is a tool. You have to know how to use it and how to make it when you need to. So do not fall for the "putting-yourself-on-the-available-light-pedestal" excuse. You can always choose to use available light when you know how to use flash.

Heck, it is always available.

So drop the excuse and learn your craft.

I am going to say something here that will likely get me more than a little ridicule from some of my co-workers at The Sun. Especially the sports shooters - and we have some good ones.

Here goes.

I used to sit in on my couch, in front of my TV, during pro football games and "shoot" the game with a motor-driven Nikon F2 and a 180mm lens.

...

You still here? OK.

The reason I did such a doofus-head thing like that was (a) I liked to pretend I was at the game, shooting it (hey - I was very young) and (b) it was the best way I knew to work on the timing of my sports shooting between Friday night prep football assignments.

Goofy? Sure.

Did it help my timing? I really think so.

What did I do if my college roommate walked in on me? Why, I pretended I was checking my camera's shutter speeds, of course...

I told you that to tell you this. There is no substitute for experience, however you can get it. Whatever you need to learn, you need to practice. And if you cannot practice on assignment (for fear you will screw up) the only other way to do it is to experiment.

I have been using light for the better part of 20 years. But within the very past month, I have spent an evening, in my room, playing with a flash and trying a new lighting technique on an inanimate object. (The cat knows to run and hide by now.)

That particular evening, I was playing with the idea of a daylight-balanced flash, with a snoot, in a tungsten-ambient environment. I made several hundred really stupid-looking dismal failures. And three or four images that I really liked.

Which is three or four more than I would have, had not played around.

Digital is great for this.

Try out a new technique. Make some make huge mistakes.

Look at the TFT screen.

Make a few less-huge mistakes as you fine-tune the idea or technique.

Look at the TFT screen.

Start to understand the technique.

Now try the technique, as you now understand it, in a variety of different environments in your house, outside, whatever.

If your significant other asks why you have two lights set up and you are taking a photo of your tennis shoe, just tell her that one of your flashes is, uh, malfunctioning (which is technically is, due to temporary operator incompetence) and you are checking it out.

Ditto on the process of setting up your lights. Get to where you can do it in about a minute or two while you are carrying on a conversation to build rapport with your subject.

The last thing you want to be doing is fumbling sweatily around while you try to set up lights in your limited time frame with a big-shot CEO for a mag cover.

The Army Rangers have a saying when it comes to practice: "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

Only by repetitive practice will you be able to quickly set up the light that will give you a much better photo without blowing your one chance of building the good interaction with your subject you'll also need to get the photo.

You get the idea. Keep practicing.



Next: See The Flash

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On Location: Computer Server Guy

©Bill Adams

Thanks to Bill Adams who sends in the above photo, lit with two Nikon SB-28's.

Says Bill:

The walkway was only 3 feet wide and enclosed in chain link fencing, as you can see on the left. I lit him with 2 Nikon SB28 speedlights, one clamped behind him to the fencing (you can see the mount behind his neck) and another into a 12x16 mini softbox (just outside of the frame) to control the light spill from hitting the fence or servers.

I stood on a bucket and photographed him with a FUJI Finepix S1 camera and a 14mm lens, trying not to give his head the "Gumby" look. I had 30 minutes of his time to make the shot and completed it with 10 minutes left to spare.

I gelled the servers so they wouldn't take away from him, brightness wise. (The fronts were silver.)

Overall it didn't turn out to badly. And yes I bit the bullet a couple of years back and bought a set of Pocket Wizards, which were used to fire the strobes.

I'm guessing that Bill might have stuck a Sto-Fen or something on that back flash, maybe?

(Looks like a very wide throw on the light.)

Any questions? Ask 'em to him in the comments section.


Camera: Fuji Finepix S1
Lens: 14mm f2/8
Flashes: (2) Nikon SB-28's
Trigger: Pocket Wizards

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Starting Now: Post Your Comments

Commenting is a bit more cumbersome on a blog than on a message board, so I went both ways on it before deciding to open the thing up to discussion.

But I am getting a lot of feedback via e-mail that would be more appropriate in a comments section, so everyone could benefit from peoples' reactions.

To get a commenting name, you will have to sign up with Blogger. I know, I know, but it is easy, free, and only takes a couple of minutes. And it you do, you'll also be ready to blog if you have ever toyed with the idea. If you choose not to register, your entry will simply be logged as being from "Anonymous." You can ID yourself in the text field, of course, but anyone could say they were anyone.

First, a couple of easy rules.

Strobist is about two things: Learning to light, and sharing what you have learned with others who could benefit from your experience.

Please keep that in mind when commenting.

There is no reason for discussion here to generate into sniping, lighting elitism, or, worst, politics. The US is a very polarized place right now, and I want the people who voted Nikon to be comfy with the people who voted Canon, ya know? And be supportive of less experienced shooters and help them the same way someone helped you.

Inappropriate comments will be deleted. Not saying you have to be perfectly PC and all. Just don't attack people or their work in a mean-spirited way.

Commenting will be turned on all the way back to the first post. You may use this feature to start a more in-depth discussion on any of the Lighting 101 lessons, for example.

If you disagree with any of my premises, you will be banned (kidding) that's just fine. I am confident in my far-from-perfect views. (Just ask my wife...)

Just do not be mean about it.

Also, the envelope at the bottom of each post will allow you to e-mail the post to anyone you wish.

Let's see how this experiment works, folks. And I am curious to see how long the first comment takes (and where it lands!)

Go.

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Canon: A Very "Un-PC" Company?

Thanks to Strobist Sean M., I now know that the Canon EZ flashes apparently do not have PC terminals on them as do the Nikon ones.

(What were they possibly thinking?)

They were thinking they would sell you expensive, proprietary cords, is what they were thinking. Which is not cool as far as I am concerned. Why you Canon shooters aren't out in front of HQ with pitchforks and torches, I'll never know.

Fortunately, there are always work-arounds.

Shortly, I will put a page of flashes that either have (a) full manual control and a PC terminal, or, (b) just full manual control.

There are many of the former type out there, and the "no-PC connection" thing is an easy work-around. For a Pocket Wizard hook-up for instance, the cord is a "PW-MHSF1 Miniphone to Hot Shoe Female."

But Canon is still a doofus for not putting in such a basic, dirt-cheap connection. Especially considering what new model strobes tend to cost these days.

I know the Nikon stuff pretty well, but I would be happy to hear from you guys about models from other brands (Vivitar, Sunpak, etc.,) that you may know of. Just e-mail them to me at strobist@yahoo.com. (The e-mail is back up, BTW.)

I will compile them on a page with links for the current stuff and eBay search links for the discontinued stuff.

As with many problems, I think this could turn out to be a blessing in disguise. The Nikon SB-24, which offers full-stop manual control and a PC connection, for instance, can be had used on eBay for $30-$50.

That price, plus the fact that I am waiting on parts to post a tutorial (with-pix) on how to build a 25-foot, very reliable PC cord for about $20, could get the cost of entry into this off-camera stuff to under $150.00, total.

And that includes the flash, stand, umbrella adapter, umbrella and triggering cord. Schwing. (Cardboard snoots and Frosted Flakes box GoBo's sold separately.)

Also coming soon (after I wrap up my crunch-week-from-heck) is a big Strobist links page which will grow as we all find cool new stuff to throw in. I have already had some unsolicited submissions, which is great. I'll keep you posted on that, after the flash page goes up.

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On Assignment: Conference Room Quickie

Dontcha just love five-assignment days?

They are sometimes unavoidable, as in this case when I was heading back to the paper at mid-afternoon with four in the can. (Should we even say "in the can" any more, with digital?)

Anyhow, they beeped me to go to a suburb of Baltimore, where some hi-tech company was designing a prototype set of futuristic BDUs for soldiers to wear in the field. I get there and they show me the clothes, laying in a pile on a table in the conference room.

Yee-ha. Pretty exciting.

But the story was interesting, and it would be a shame to bury it with a cruddy photo. So I asked if I could use one of the engineers as a mannequin to make it a bit more, uh, lifelike.

While she suited up (which was no small task) I looked for a good place to shoot her. Nothing. It was a typically boring, florescent-lit office park.

But I did have my two Viivitar 283 flashes with "VP-1" modules, which converts them into manual flashes that you can seemlessly dial down 5 stops. So we decided to whip up a temporary studio in the the conference room.

Here are your problems:

Low, suspended ceilings, with florescent fixtures. Conference table. Not a lot of room.

There was one clean wall, though. Which is all you really need.

First step (after flipping the table up on its side to buy some space) was to control the ambient. Even if we gel the strobes, the fixtures will make hotspots on the cool-looking helmet, which I did not want. So we turned off the lights for the shoot and opened a hall door for just enough spillover ambient to see by.

The lighting was an easy, classic studio two-light setup -with a little improvisation.

Since I wanted a smoother light on the right than an umbrella would have given me, I bounced a 283 (on a stand, on full power) off of the right wall. Bingo. Nice big, smooth highlights.

Putting her close to the wall controlled the ratio of the light hitting the back wall, just as in the head shot lesson. (But this time, the right side wall is the light source.)

Then I put my other 283 on a stand and stuck it in the back left, aimed back at the soldier (and me, unfortunately.) So I slapped a GoBo (as back in Lighting 101) on the camera side of the flash in the back to block the light from flaring me. That one was set at about 1/8 power. The VP-1 has an analog dial to set the power, so you never know for sure where you really are...

The result is a smooth, soft-light/hard-rim look put together in just a couple of minutes in a conference room.

I left space on the left side in case they wanted to lay type in (it is that kind of a photo) and there was more space up top if they needed it. You could make it a mag cover, with the title running behind her head, if you had to.

We were door-to-door in about 15 minutes. They were not time crunched - I was. It was mid-afternoon and there were now five jobs to turn.

This photo is a little ironic in that it looks much like a studio shot.

I really dislike the idea of "studio lighting," because it starts to get you thinking that studios are the only place you should be using serious light.

That's dumb. Just think "lighting." A studio is just a room. And you cannot drag it around with you, anyway.

Twenty years ago, I thought of studios as some magic place where cool light could be made. Now, I think of them as big, boring rooms where some other photographer has left the heavy, clunky lights I have to rely on in some state of disrepair.

Locations are generally much more interesting than studios. Learn to light anywhere.

Camera: Nikon D1
Exposure: 1/250th @ f/5.6 ASA 400
Lens: Nikkor 85 f/2.0
Flashes: Vivitar 283's with VP-1 Manual Adapters
Trigger: Pocket Wizards

©David Hobby / The Baltimore Sun

Next: Lighting Prep Basketball

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Strobist's Page-a-Links

This resouce links page will quickly grow, I hope. Coming soon, Strobist's Lighting Gear links. We'll post a note out front whenever new sites are added. All external links will open in new window.



Other Photo/Lighting Sites

dpreview.com - All things digital camera. As in everything.
dg28.com - British shooter Neil Turner's wonderful lighting diary
Dave Black's site - Required reading if you use SB-800's
A Photographer's Sketchbook - Notes on lighting and gear
Planet Neil - A different Neil. Learn how to use on-camera flash.
EOS Flash Information - Exhaustive, three-part tutorial.
Nikon SB-800 Page - Good resource page for the Rolls Royce of Nikon Fla$he$.



Photographer's Sites

Gregory Heisler - IMO, the best there is at designing elegant (and appropriate) light for a photograph. Not to be missed.
Joe McNally uses Nikon SB's on many of his high-end shoots.
Ami Vitale - Wonderful website by an elegant and sensitive photojournalist
David Burnett - Gets the photos no one else does
Steve Liss - Frequent Time Magazine shooter
Walter Iooss, Jr. - Legendary sports photographer
Mark Seliger - Iconic Rolling Stone Magazine portraitist
Damon Winter - Stunning editorial portraiture
Dan Eldon - A journey inside the mind of a Reuters shooter. Not to be missed.
James Nachtwey - The world's premier war and conflict shooter
Vincent Laforet - A one-man force of nature
Clint Clemens - Journalistic-style, high-end commercial shooter


Agencies

Magnum - The much-storied photog-run agency
VII - This generation's answer to Magnum


Art/Misc Photo Blogs

Chromasia - British photographer's elegant showcase
A Walk Through Durham Township - Absolutely lovely
The Online Photographer - Eclectic, high quality photo blog
Daily Dose of Imagery
Daily Photography
Eggplant
Groundglass
John Washington
Blue Hour
Photoblogs.org - Need more? 16,000 and counting, here.


Photojournalism Sites

Digital Journalist - Great stuff. Don't miss Bill Pierce's columns.
Sports Shooter - Where sports pro's (and wannabes) hang out.
Rob Galbraith - Pro site for digital camera discussion
World Press Photos - International yearly competition site
Reportage - The online magazine of photojournalism


New! Reader Guest Book and Links Page

Guest Book and Reader Links - Let us know who you are!

Photojournalism College Programs

University of Florida
Western Kentucky
Missouri

Non-Photo Blogs

TreeHugger - If you are not already green, this site will turn you.
Gizmodo - Uber Gadget Blog
Orbitcast - All things satellite radio (XM Satellite Radio rocks)
Lifehacker - Just like it sounds: How to do stuff


My Paper

The Baltimore Sun - A fresh batch of 1's and 0's for the web every day

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E-Mail Update II

Sigh. The "strobist@yahoo" email is still fritzing. And nothing I have tried, not even yelling really loudly at my laptop, will fix it. But, maddeningly, I can see a nice stack of headers of peoples' unreadable e-mails. Sheesh.

So, I am gonna break my cardinal no-spam rule and put my personal e-mail up. If you are a spammer, I will hunt you down like a dog and shoot you from a low angle with a 20mm lens. And I will light you from a very, very unflattering angle. With cooling gels. And don't think I won't do it.

That said, try here. That Yahoo addy is working.

Feel free to dupe any as-yet unresponded emails to the strobist address.

Thanks, y'all. And I 'preciate the kind words.

EDIT: I have phased out the "strobist@yahoo" email. Please use the "hobbydavid@yahoo" email. Thanks.

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How You Can Help

First, and most important, Strobist will always be available for free. It is a labor of love, and I have always enjoyed teaching people. Especially about light.

And besides, Lord knows photo gear costs enough as it is. And I do not want to know some photojournalism student is out there eating cat food and Ramen noodles because he or she had to spend $5 "be a member" of Strobist. Heck, I remember selling a 55 f/2.8 micro lens in college to get the power back on.

Either it'll work or it will crash and burn. But there won't ever be a cover charge.

If you enjoy Strobist and feel that you learn from it, you can contribute to the site in any one of a few different ways.

First, you can spread the word. Strobist's large marketing staff could best be described as "imaginary," with a budget to match. Every time you post a link on some photo message board (or anywhere) about Strobist, that helps the site to reach more people. And you earn my undying gratitude. And if you are the editor of some big, mass-market photo magazine, well, we should talk...

Second, my sincere hope is that I will cover the expenses I incur in running the site. (The expenses consist of case upon case of bought-on-sale, caffeine-rich Diet Mountain Dew for late-night "On Assignment" articles.)

When you make purchases on Amazon, Strobist gets some crumbs. Basically, Jeff Bezos coughs up some loose change so you can continue to learn how to light for free.

Ditto if you click through from Strobist via a link to either site and buy whatever other stuff you were gonna get there anyway. This costs you nothin extra, and it will serve to offset Strobist's expenses. Which hopefully will remain minor. At least that's what Mrs. Strobist has dictated.

So, if you feel the urge to set off on a massive, drunken spending spree at Amazon, please spend your last coherent thought remembering to click through to there via one of the links on this site.

Or, you can just click here.



Many thanks,
David

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On Assignment: Blind Snoot Portrait

One of the things I like best about shooting with cardboard snoots on my strobes is the ability to control the light levels in the rest of the frame.

You can keep your strobe from contaminating a projection screen, as we did with Abstract Concrete earlier, or you can just snoot to let other areas in the frame go dark.

This can be useful when you have a busy background, as is often the case. Or you can have a specific reason to control the background or foreground, as was the case in this portrait of a data networking company CEO.

I am always looking for a subtle (or even subconscious) visual hook. Among this company's specialties is fiber-optic networking. And I happened to notice that the grey blinds in the CEO's office had tiny little holes in them, which looked kind of like those splayed-out fiber optics photos you see in the annual reports.

So I wanted to use those dots to connote light-as-information.

Problem is, when I lit the guy with an umbrella, (in this photo) the blinds showed up as the grey they were, and no shutter speed combo would make the dots pop well enough to come through our photograph torture reproduction process intact. So I had to restrict the strobe light from falling on the blinds in the foreground.

If you have gone through your Lighting 101 pages, you know we have several ways to to that, the most restrictive being the snoot. Which is exactly what I used here.

So, my guy is lit by the direct flash, which is harder light than when I used the umbrella. But he's a good looking guy, so he can handle hard light. (Not every face can. Be reasonably kind to your subjects.)

So now, looking at the top photo (which is the one the designer chose as lede) we see a darkened background and a foreground that is dark enough to help the daylight sing as it comes through the holes. You can see the natural grey of the blinds just behind the guy's head in the snooted photo, too. I did not record the exposure, but the aperture was set to expose for the guy's face. Then I opened up the shutter speed until I got enough daylight coming through to make the effect.

Two more things:

First, I used plenty of flash power in the shot. Probably between a quarter and half power, which is a lot of light from the 4-5 feet flash distance. Reason was to base my exposure on a stopped-down aperture - say, f/11 - so I could start with nice, dark foreground blinds to build the effect.

Second, where the heck are the guy's reflections in his glasses? He is facing toward to light in both frames, which usually yields glare in the lenses.

Well, as it happens, this guy has what are called "low-reflection" glasses. I am not kidding. People in TV (or people like this guy, who appears on TV pretty frequently) tend to have these wonderful glasses. Light them however you want. No reflections.

I think everyone in the world who wears glasses should, by law, be required to wear these wonderful, photog-friendly, expensive as heck, low-reflection glasses. Under penalty of death.

But I digress.

Here are the specifics. My shoe-mount strobe was on a small Bogen 5-section compact stand. Light is coming from my left, and up about 40 degrees or so. Direction should be obvious from the shadows on the guy's face.

I gave the flash plenty of power, probably at 1/4 power or so. This gave me a very stopped down working aperture, which at my fastest synch speed, which pretty much made everything else black except for the dots. Then I simply opened up my shutter speed until I liked the look of the (backlit-by-the-sun) dots.

Bottom line on this kind of light is, it's a fairly dramatic look that you can get with just one small flash (and some cardboard) to save you from the terminal boredom of one more person-in-a-boring-office shot.

Editor's note: Did you just stumble onto this page from Photojojo? This is what Strobist is about.


Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: Nikkor 17-35 f/2.8, close to its widest setting
Flash: Nikon SP-28dx, on a stand with a cardboard snoot
Trigger: Pocket Wizard remotes

©David Hobby / The Baltimore Sun

Next: Conference Room Quickie

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Quick Note: E-Mail and Traffic

While checking Strobist's traffic after the first day of launch, I was amazed to see that we got over 5,000 hits! Geez, I had no idea. Thanks, and I hope you are enjoying it. Please spread the word.

Many of you also left some very nice notes in the e-mail box and they are very much appreciated. I got back to several of you. But, unfortunately, my e-mail account is somehow crashed. There are still some of you that I have not yet gotten back to. I am working on it and will respond ASAP-est.

FYI, I will be posting another "On Assignment" (possibly two) later today after I finish my assignments. So check back. Shot something pretty cool last night at mix light, too. But I'll have to wait until it is published by my paper before I can use it for the site. Fair enuf, I suppose.


-David

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Thank You For Your Donation

FYI, I have two primary goals with this site:

• The first is to teach people everything I can about lighting in an fun and accessible format.

• Second is to keep the main body of content free so that those who have more desire to learn than they have money can benefit, too.

So, your contribution is important on two different levels. First, it means that you feel like you are getting something tangible out of the site, which is important to me. And second, it helps to support the site for those people who are still in the "starving artist" phase.

Thank you very much, both from me and from the other readers who you are helping.

Our goal is better photos - for everyone.

Sincerely,
David

Back to Strobist Home Page

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On Assignment: Abstract Concrete

As an editorial photographer in Baltimore, I get to see some amazing things. But this particular day was not starting out as very promising.

Roughly, the assignment said:

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are borrowing time on a NASA supercomputer to find out how to better mix the ingredients in concrete to make it stronger.

We need a lede-quality photo for the science section.

I was going in with my sights set pretty low. I mean, concrete? That's 18-percent grey powder, right? Fortunately, I would have 45 minutes total with the guys to make a centerpiece photo and an inside secondary. Not a luxurious amount of time, but sometimes you do much worse.

When I arrived, I quickly realized two things:

(a) There was a cool photo to be had, and
(b) There were also significant technical problems to solve.

The scientists are able to visualize 3-D, computer-drawn renditions of the concrete at a microscopic level by using a three-screen projection system and synchronized goggles. The system totally rocks.

I put on the goggles and immediately wanted to play XBox on this system. (Maybe I would be better at it...)

But as it was, my task was to shoot an image to try to convey the idea of being immersed in the supercomputer's rendition.

First off, I knew the (rear-projection) screens would collect my strobe light like a magnet. Which would raise the base density (I wanted that at black) of the screen and ruin the photo.

So I knew I would be using my little homemade Frosted Flakes cardboard snoots.

But first I had to work out the ambient exposure for the screen. I knew to shoot at 1/30th or below to get a full-screen scan. So I tried shooting just the screen at a 30th at f/2.8 to see what happened. It was too bright. Yay. That's good.

1/30th at f/4 was very close, so then I went to work on lighting my guy in front of the screen. He was wearing all black and looked like the biology teacher from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Cool.

The screen(s) were "L" shaped, with room to play on the sides. That was another good thing. There was a hallway going back on the right of the background screen on the right. This just kept getting better.

So, I walked back into the hall with my snooted Nikon SB-28 on a stand and aimed it to where it would hit a space in the ground in front of the screen, but not hit the side screen.

Then I basically did the same thing on the other side.

I now had a "cross-light" zone out in front of the screen where the scientist was lit but the screen was not. You could not have done this without some kind of snoot or grid. Spend a buck and make several. Really.

Then it was just a matter of sticking the scientist in the zone and adjusting the strobe output to cross light him tp the right level. Both strobes were between 1/8th and 1/16th power. Room lights (other than the screen) were off.

This was one of those times where the room geometry actually worked for me (knock wood) by giving me the space around/behind the screens.
I still had to get a secondary quickly, but I shook the camera for a few exposures first to see if I could get lucky with the flashblur effect. I was trying to recreate the 3-D motion.

Nope. Not really. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.
With about 3 minutes to go, I shot the the other scientist in the (thankfully) dark room with an SB-28 stuck behind the more traditional monitor. I do this a lot when I need a quick, stylized shot at a computer. Computer shots can be terminally boring. Gotta do what you can.

Exposure for the small computer shot was 1/30th at f/2.8, with the strobe set to 1/32nd power behind the monitor.

Quick and dirty? Yup.

OK for a secondary inside on short time? Yup.



Camera: Nikon D2h
Lens: Nikon 17-35/2.8
Strobes: SB-28's on small Bogen stands
Light modifier: Cardboard snoots to keep the strobe light away from the screens.
Sync: Pocket Wizard remotes

All three photos ©David Hobby / The Baltimore Sun

Next: Archeologists

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The Strobist Bookshelf

Listed below are what I consider to be the best books about photography in general and/or lighting in specific. You will not find any "bad" reviews here, because I am not gonna waste our time telling you about something that sucks.

I have brief descriptions here, but most of the still-in-print books have full reviews posted elsewhere on the site. Those are noted in the text. Some are easy to find, and some are obscure or out of print. Fortunately, with the internet, everyone now has the biggest bookstore in the world within easy reach. So the links go to Amazon.

The ones that are out of print will be noted by an "OOP." But Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is The Man, 'cause he can hook you up with OOP books through used sellers on Amazon, too. So links to there you will help you start your search.


Books and DVDs on Lighting

Joe McNally's book, The Moment it Clicks, is the best photo/lighting book I have seen in a long time. And by a "long time" I mean, well, ever.

He has completely opened up his photographer brain for your inspection. The photos are great, and the stories are even better. If you can only afford to get one book as you are cruising through this book faves page, get this one.



Here's a Nikon promotional video about the book. And seriously, I can't say enough good things about it. Full review is here.
____________________


A contemporary, tell-all lighting and portraiture book by one of the hottest A-list pros, Michael Grecco's Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait is more of a book suited to those who want to learn about what it takes to be working at the cutting edge of high-end portraiture today.

Grecco's book does not have as much heart and pure knowledge exchange as does McNally's. But I found it a very good read for those interested in learning his techniques, which are all centered on shooting people and thinking outside of the box.

Grecco brings a unique thought process and a willing-to-try-anything approach that yields fresh, non-dirivative portraiture. You can read a full review here. But it is important to note that that review was written before McNally's book (which I prefer) arrived.
____________________


Hunter, Biver and Fuqua's "Light - Science & Magic, 3rd Edition" is a full-color, updated version of the underground classic. This book is where you get the foundation you need before you step off into your own creative lighting style. It is literally about the physices of light, and will help you to understand the mechaniz of lighting. But do not look to here for creative inspiration.

You need to learn the rules before you can break them. And L-S&M is full of core knowledge. Highly recommended.
____________________


Matters of Light and Depth, by Ross Lowell, is the old-school classic. It was written for motion picture photographers, but has been adopted by the still crowd, too.

All the more relevant as we progress into the age of multimedia, still photogs looking to enhance their video lighting skills will find this book to be a double bonus.
____________________



It took over a year to pull it together, but I finally put my entire, day-long lighting seminar on DVD. We did not stop there, either, adding an hour-long discussion on basic lighting gear and a series of nine video'd "On Assignment" sessions.

All told, it weighs in at 8 DVD's and the price is $139.00.

The full post on the set is here.
____________________



Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography is a new book by Austin-based commercial photographer (and long-time Strobist reader) Kirk Tuck.

This one is 100% small flash, and spends plenty of time of gear, synching and light mods. It is more of an introductory book than the titles above, and better suited for less experienced shooters who want a good look at how to gear up with small flash and how to start using it.

Full review here.



Photojournalism Books

Shooter, by David Hume Kennerly (OOP)

This book is a little dangerous, actually. It may make you quit your real job and pursue a profession in which you have almost no chance of succeeding. That is what it did to me. And I read it any time I need a recharge.

You'll follow Pulitzer Prize winner David Hume Kennerly from his humble-but-eager beginnings (chasing brush fires) through his war coverage in Vietnam and his stint as personal photographer to President Ford.

Don't pay top dollar for this -- even thought it is worth it. With a little patience, you can pick it up for a couple of bucks. Click on the book to search on Amazon, or here to search for it on ebay.
____________________

Associated Press Guide to Photojournalism

If there is such a thing as a professional's textbook for photojournalism, this is it. If you are going to do it "by the book," do it by this book. The AP guide covers all aspects of photojournalism, using some of AP's best shooters (and their work) as examples. It includes information on lighting, along with just about anything else you would want to know as a photojournalist.
____________________


Photojournalism: The Professional's Approach (5th ed), by Kenneth Kobré

If you were in PJ school, this was probably one of your textbooks. If you weren't, it's a good and comprehensive read.

The book covers all-things-photojournalism, starting from square one. If you are toying with the idea of becoming a PJ, Kobre's book will give you a good idea of what you are in for along the college route.
____________________


Photo Portfolio Success, by John Kaplan

Photo Portfolio Success is photojournalist John Kaplan's inside track on the whole, mysterious process. It is this generation's version of "The Perfect Portfolio," which was the old school bible on the subject. Kaplan is a Pulitzer Prize winner, so he knows what a good photo is. He is also a professor at the University of Florida's top-notch photojournalism program. If your goal is to craft a great portfolio, this book will show you the way.



On the Business of Pro Photography


John Harrington's "Best Business Practices for Photographers," is the book, if you want to learn about the business side of being a professional photographer. If you are a pro, or are considering turning pro, you'd be nuts to do it without this book.

Harrington is a business guru in the pro photo world. Shooters attend his seminars, keep his handouts and read them until the pages are dog-eared and falling apart.

And you can have access to all of his distilled knowledge for less than $20. That's like what you'd spend for just another compact flash card. A small one.

Give yourself a chance to make it by following a good road map. And Harrington's is the best. Full review here.



Photojournalism Movies

War Photographer, (DVD - nonfiction) Directed by Christian Frei

This isn't even a book. But as I told you, I am throwing the best stuff up here on the bookshelf and War Photographer has to be included.

This Academy Award-nominated documentary film from 2001 allows us to tag along with James Nachtwey, one of the world's greatest photojournalists, while he works. They filmed him at close range, and even mounted a tiny camera on his camera to capture his point of view while he was shooting.

Plenty of "back story" is given, too.

Nachtwey covers war and conflict, and he is widely seen as the best there is within that genre.

But the film gives us a rare look into the motivations, technique and work ethic of a truly great photojournalist.

Watching this movie will re-set your internal compass, no matter what you cover as a photojournalist. It bears repeated viewing, and should be in any serious PJ's library. Keep it in your computer bag and watch it on your laptop.

Two excerpts, via YouTube:






____________________


Under Fire, (DVD - fiction) starring Nick Nolte, is set in Nicaragua just before the fall of Samosa.

This is my favorite of Hollywood's looks at photojournalism, and was reviewed inside of a long, rambling rant, here.

More>>

Reverse Engineering Other Shooters' Light

Alright, if you have been paying attention so far (and you are not a potted plant) you should have some idea of what kind of light produces what kind of effect. So let's run with that a little.

You cannot hide how you lit something. Everything about the light - style, color, direction, size, beam spread, etc., - is on display for any shooter with something between his or her ears to figure out.

You should be able to deconstruct the light used by others.

Here are some starters.

Q: Where did the light come from?
A: The shadows will tell you.

Q: Were there multiple sources?
A: If the light appears to be coming from multiple directions (assuming no mirrors) probably. Also check for inconsistent shadows.

Q: Was the strobe light balanced?
A: Well, do the florescents look, say, white? There you go. Ditto tungsten, etc.

Q: Is the light falling over a small, restricted area?
A: Snoot or grid.

Q: What is the easiest way to check the style of the front light in a portrait?
A: Eyes make good mirrors to see the light sources. If they are wearing sunglasses, you are golden. Unless they Photoshopped it. And no, you cannot do that if you are a journalist. And if you are a Strobist, you shouldn't have to.

Q: Was the light nearby?
A: Check how fast it falls off as it travels across the subject. Fast? Yes. Slow or none? No.

Q: Was the light source large?
A: Depends on how close it is. A small, shoe-mount flash head looks like a softbox from 2" away on a macro shot. The sun, which is the largest light source you'll likely be using, is pretty hard because of the 93,000,000 mile thing. It is all about how big the light appears to the subject.

Q: Is that light strobe or continuous?
A: That can be a toughie. You can use available light effectively enough to fool people.

Q: How did they get that overcast sky so neon blue?
A: Set the camera balance to tungsten, which renders the formerly neutral clouds blue. Underexpose the sky (to, say, a stop below medium grey) for more of an effect. Then, CTO-gel the flash lighting your subject to render the light hitting it as white and you have the effect.

Q: This is starting to sound random and incoherent. Are you OK?
A: Yes, it is. And no, I am not. I am home sick from work today, feeling like I got runover by a train. I will add more to it later when I am more lucid.

But I hope you are starting to get the idea that there are no secrets when it comes to light.

Only physics.


Next: Know Your Flash

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Lighting 101: Long-Throw Hard Light

One more lighting technique example before we move on to your learning how to "reverse engineer" others' light.

And to get you started thinking that way, I am going to guide you through reverse engineering this photo.

For lack of a better term, I am going to call this technique "long-throw hard light." This photo, like the backlit kids taking a bow onstage, is a good example of just what kind of a working distance you can acheive with a small shoe-mount flash.

The light in this case was a Nikon SB-28 on a stand, at full power, 85mm throw, about a 80-100 feet from the budding gymnasts.

I was probably working at ASA 800 (exposure was unrecorded) but the light makes the photo crisp and gives the illusion of a lower ASA, in my opinion at least. This was also shot with an early Nikon D1, which did not do nearly as well with high ASA's as do today's bodies.

OK, let's break down the light as we explain the technique.

Look at the picture. Was the light on the right or the left?

It was to my left, as the shadow of the obscurred, back center gymnast on the right side of the background should show you.

Was the light hard or soft? Well, you already know that. Hard. As it darn well had better be if you are throwing a shoe-mount flash 100 feet.

What was my lighting ratio? The density (tone) of the shadows compared to the wall should clue you into the fact that I was working my ambient about 1 1/2 stops below the strobe.

"So, gyms are not daylight-lit," you say.

No, they are not. Not where I live, anyway. They are usually icky sodium vapor color. The closest I could get my flash was to gel for florescents on the flash, dial it in on the camera, and dial the white balance compensation down to -1 (a bit warmer) to try to "spackle over" the inconsistencies a bit.

If I had missed it badly, where would you see it?

If you said the color of the (ambient-lit) shadows on the walls, brownie points for you. But the gymnasts would have looked a little bit hinky on the shadow side, too.

What about the gymnasts in the foreground? They are closer to the flash, yet they are not as brightly lit. What gives?

Here's where the tight beam spread of the 85mm setting on the SB-28 pays off for a second time. Because it has a controlled beam spread, I was able to "feather" the light, or aim it a few degrees high. This put the kids on the balance beam in the main path of the light and the kids in front in the fall-off, bottom portion of the beam.

Why did I do it? Purely sobjective choice. I wanted to emphasize the kids on the beam, instead of the ones in the foreground. They would have been brighter than the beam kids had I not feathered.

The success of this photo is not the final product (I like it, but it is not the end all) but rather the difference in what the photo would have looked like - really bad - if I had shot available light in the dark, cavernous gym.

No on-camera lighting technique could have helped much, either.

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Lighting 101: Lighting for Glasses

This one is gonna be quick and dirty. If you already know how to do a portrait without having to worry about reflections in peoples' glasses, just scroll down to the bottom and move on.

But if glasses have been giving you a Devil of a time, this is gonna be one of those Homer Simpson "D'Oh!" moments. And if you are having trouble with it, don't feel bad. I did, too.

The problem is that if you are going to the trouble to light someone, you are naturally inclined to have them face toward the light. Which is fine.

Unless they are wearing glasses.

To avoid refections in glasses, simply light from one side and have the person face the other. There is no need to be shooting all of the way in profile, either. A flattering, 3/4 angle (subject to camera) will work just fine.

Think of the light hitting the glasses as a pool ball. It's going to reflect off of the glasses, no matter what. The thing is to position the glasses so that the angle is such that the light reflects harmlessly off into space. Doesn't really matter where. Just not towards your camera.

If the subject is looking away from the light, that's a piece of cake. That's all there is to it.

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Lighting 101: Headshot in a Corner

As newspaper photographers, we shoot a lot of headshots.

That's just the way it is. It has always been thus. While you can look at it as a mental vacation (a trained monkey could shoot a headshot) they can also be an opportunity to practice with light.

As previously mentioned, your subject probably does not know you could bang it off in about 30 seconds in some shade.

So why not use the assignment as a low-pressure chance to work on your lighting skills?

To that end, I offer the quick and easy, one-light corner headshot.

The concept is simple, but it allows you the chance to play with ratios to see how they affect your photo.

Exhibit "A" is my dear old mother, Griselda Strobist (OK, actually actor Bruce Vilanch, in drag, prepping for his role as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray.)

All you need for a headshot that is crisp and detailed enough to get bigger play is an umbrella'd strobe, a stand and a neutral corner. Not the boxing-type of neutral corner, but one with white or grey walls. If they are tan or some other warmer color, you can get away with that, too.

Now, back to the ratios. There are two at play in this photo.

The first will control how bright the background is. The ratio at question is the flash-subject-distance:flash-background-distance.

That is to say that if your strobe is much closer to the subject than it is to the background wall, you background will be darker.

The fill light for the headshot comes from a reflection off of the other wall of the corner. In this example, the strobe is at camera left, at a nice, safe, boring 45 degrees. At camera right is a wall. (The other wall that comprises the corner becomes our clean background.)

So, the second ratio at play is that of flash-subject-distance:flash-reflecting-wall-distance. In other words, the further your reflector wall is from the flash/subject combo, the darker the shadow side will be.

How does this work in practice? Simple.

For openers, you are shooting at the high synch speed, with enough power on your flash to get f/5.6 or f/8. This will give you sharpness and keep room ambient from screwing you up. If you cannot kill the florescents (sigh, there are always florescents) you'll have to gel green and balance for them.

Say that you start with the subject two feet from the side wall, with the flash three feet away (in an umbrella) and the background wall four feet behind him. Pop a test frame. Or better yet use your hand (placed where his head would be) to quicky get into the ballpark before your subject sits in his spot. I shoot my left hand a lot when testing light.

Wanna make the background lighter? Move the whole shootin match (subject and light) toward the back wall. Wanna make it darker? Move it away from the background wall.

Same idea applies to the fill light. Move subject/strobe combo towards the side wall for lighter. Away for darker.

As Velvet Jones would say, "It's as simple as that."

But your headshots (as opposed to mugshots) will look good.

And you will be gaining speed and confidence in your lighting skills.

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Lighting 101: Back Light as Main Light

When you are deciding how you are going to add light to a scene, don't forget to consider the idea of adding only back light.

And try not to think of it as such. Learn to think "separation" light.

Those of us in the newspaper biz need all of the help we can get when it comes to repro. And using a separation light can really make a photo pop.

Additionally, if the light is strong it will create shadows that will create leading lines into the direction of your light source.

One caveat is that you have to hide your light from your camera. As mentioned before, one good techniques (especially in a darkened room) is to mount the flash backwards and turn the head around. This will let you use the recycle light as a guide to help keep some item in your frame between you and your flash.

The shadows should tell you which performer I am using as a GoBo.

One other thing you should notice with this photo. This small, shoe-mount flash is about a hundred feet away from the kids rehearsing their post-musical bow.

These little strobes put out a lot more power than you might think. And you can work at great distances, especially when shooting in low light.

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Lighting 101: Cross Lighting

Cross lighting is nothing more than using two light sources that oppose each other in their direction.

I say light sources, instead of strobes, because It is important to remember that if you are photographing outdoors with one strobe, you really have two lights. Rather than just trying to do damage control on what the sun is doing to your subject, start to think in terms of using the sunlight as your main (or secondary) light.

The photo above is of a fifth grader who, using herself as a human shield, saved this tree at her school when construction workers building a nearby parking lot were about to mistakenly bulldoze it.

She was a hero in the story. And I wanted to visualize her that way in the photo, so I shot up at her from a low angle. To get a clean background, the sun had to be coming from the upper-back-camera-right direction.

I could have very easily fill flashed her if I was just trying to undo bad sunlight. But if you are working with a small stand, it is just as easy to use your strobe more effectively.

I placed the strobe on manual (at 1/2 power) up on a stand coming from the upper-camera-left, and had her face the strobe. Exposure was 1/250th, of course, to make life easier on the flash, with the corresponding aperture to properly expose the sky.

Now, the strobe becomes the main light, and the sun becomes the rim light. Waaay better than on-camera fill flashing.

This cross lighting scheme is pretty forgiving with respect to subject movement, too. As long as you are working on the quarter angles (roughly splitting the difference between the two light sources) you are going to be fine.
When I shoot high school basketball I like to cross light, too. I use two SB's, one at the top center of each set of bleachers, aimed in a cross pattern at the top of the key. Using them at 1/2 power with a 50mm throw will usually get you an honest, crisp-looking f/2.8 at ASA 800 from the mid-court line to the other basket.

It is helpful to use (sadly, expensive) external battery packs for these strobes, as you are gonna be firing off a lot of half-power frames. AA's get eaten up pretty quickly this way.

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Lighting 101: Textural Lighting for Detail Shots

This is one technique I like to use when I am looking for one or two more photos to glean from an assignment.

Designers appreciate the flexibility of being able to use a well-done detail shot in a layout, and you will sometimes be surprised by how well they are used. This is especially the case when they have strong relevance to the story or are executed particularly well.

The key is adding depth and texture to what may be a boring, two-dimensional object. To do this, you'll be placing the item somewhere so that you can get the strobe to exectly the same height to let the hard light rake across your object. You can use a table, or you can simply set the item on a floor and place the flash on the floor a few feet away.

I used to do this quick and dirty with a TTL cord when I shot film. But I do not completely trust TTL and digital yet. And besides, I have a TFT screen on the back of my camera to adjust the results very quickly while shooting on manual.

By far, your biggest variable will be the height of the flash to your object. Nail this variable down first. Little moves make big differences. That is why I like to use a table to get the object offf of the ground (and the flash on a nearby stand) for flexibility.

You'll be surprised at how much texture you can bring out in a "2-D" object this way.

Move the flash away a little. You have power to burn - you are shooting with direct, hard light - so there is no sense in getting llight fall-off if you do not want it.

Use a warming gel to mimic late-day light if you wish. Place books strategically between your light and the objects to create interesting shadows.

(If you do this, consider having the light come in from the direction of on of the corners of your frame. That makes for more interesting compositional lines.)

This is a technique that can quickly quickly boost a freelancer's income. Most assignments are billed on a day-rate-against-space basis. Designers love adding detail shots to layouts. You'll be surprised how often spending 5 minutes on making a nice one can net you another hundred bucks on the day.

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