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Category Archives: Equipment
Project Noir part II
This time we concentrated on one shot – a backlit interior concept with volumetric light (i.e. light given volume by some medium – in this case, an even fog). Caspar reprised his previous outfit, now complete with a nice black Fedora. I found some 20 year-old Gauloise Caporal white cigarettes when we moved house last year that really looked the part in a soft blue case. We also had a crystal decanter, glass, and the airgun we used on the last shoot. All of these went onto a nice period desk from another room in the old manor house.
Headshots
From a session for stage and screen actor, Stacey Lynne Crowe. Actor’s headshots need to be pretty simple, and must show what they really look like – so no editing allowed. I process these in Lightroom and they have contrast and exposure adjustments made to lift the shadows, knock the highlights down just a bit and then I set the white and black points. On the skin I reduce contrast a bit , and put a tenth of a top into the eyes. Then sharpen the eyes, lips, and nose and I’m done.
Chocolates
Just playing around with the scrim I made a while back. It’s roughly 1.5x2m with a frame made from 21mm plastic waste pipe (B&Q sell this along with all the corners, T pieces, 45 degree corners etc. to make any kind of frame you want). The surface is Translum plastic which is made by Savage. You can buy it on a roll 1.5m wide. The idea is to project light onto the scrim so that it drops to nothing before it reaches the edge of the scrim – and so there’s no edge visible. You can also try projecting patterns using something like the Lightblaster however on this occasion I just wanted a classic ball of light with a nice gradual drop-off towards the edges.
More GoBO options for your Lightblaster
If you love the Light Blaster from Spiffy Gear, but want more GoBOs (“GOes Before Optics” – the little masks that go in front of the light, but before the focusing lens on the front of any spot projector), then you have a number of options: use 35mm slides, mount Rosco size E circular gobos on card or the little plastic adapter you can download and print, or just make your own.  Whilst there are companies that will print digital images onto 35mm transparency film, I’m not looking at that option here – I nearly always want a simple, graphical shape for my work, and metal gobos are the way to go for the best results – as they always block all the light where there is no hole cut in them, and have crisper edges.
Light Patterns
If you’ve been making shots in a studio for a while, you’ve probably collected a number of light “modifiers” – that is, reflectors, softboxes, umberellas and other bits of metal, plastic, foil and fabric to control, block, reflect and otherwise guide the light to where you want it. But do you know what they actually do?   Neil Van Niekerk tested some of his light modifiers and you can the results of Neil’s tests on his excellent blog Tangents <<- click.    I thought I had better test mine. I found some interesting and one or two unexpected results.
Safari II Tail sync–real world tests
(no this is not a tailsync shot – but it is pretty cool 🙂  1/160th f/22 ISO 32 – Brian Sanger.    Read on for wide apertures, high shutter speeds and blurry clouds 🙂
Lightblaster Tests
I’ve had my Lightblaster for a while now and used it on several occasions to project a background, a screened image, directly onto the model, or on to fog. It works – but the one big problem is the insane amount of light it eats. This shot on the left for example I needed to shoot at ISO400 and f/6.3 to get enough light out of the 600 Watt-second flash at full power. At those settings, the fill light (an identical light with a 30x120cm strip box and a grid) was on minimum power.
I bought the studio adapter for it that allows me to mount the Lightblaster onto a standard 7” reflector in an attempt to get more light, but wasn’t convinced this was better. I decided to do some tests.
Lencarta Safari II Tail-Sync
A while ago, I tested my old Coreflash CF-D300 flashes with the YN622N-TX “SuperSync” (tail sync) mode and you can see the results here. They worked well, however in order to use these on location I have to cart around a Godox LP800X battery and inverter to give me a 240 volt power supply. The Safari’s power supply and battery is
optimised for the job at hand, and is therefore much smaller – despite giving roughly the same amount of full power flashes.
I tested it out in much the same way. The camera settings for this test are 1/2000th of a second, f/4.0 at ISO 64. 1/2000th of a second gives useful freezing power for any ambient light – say if you’re photographing a model on a beach with waves crashing on the rocks, or with fabric blowing about. It probably won’t freeze it completely, but you will avoid those awful shadows around a moving subject where they blocked the ambient light from, say, the sky, for a part of the exposure. Aperture and ISO: you can of course trade these and shoot ISO 250 at f/8. The Safari is on half power.
Here’s the results with the dialled in delay number. Numerically, its the reverse of what it should be (a larger delay between the light firing and the shutter firing, should result in the rear curtain being lower in the frame, as it travels bottom to top of frame on my Nikon D810). It’s 3.0 -X <some unit>. Alternatively, you can think of smaller numbers meaning the flash fires earlier – and at 1.0 the flash light is present before the rear curtain starts to travel. We get more fall off at the top as the front curtain was only half way up when the flash light began.
That black bar you can see is the rear or second curtain. In normal operation and first curtain sync, the flash fires when the first curtain reaches the the fully open position (top of frame). Not when the shutter begins to open. The shutter “speed” we set on our cameras is the time between the first curtain and the second curtain passing the same point. So at a shutter speed of 1/2000th of second, its pretty far up the frame when the first curtain reaches the top and the flash is triggered. Tail sync works by delaying the whole shutter operation , so the flash output is already in full swing by the time the first curtain starts it’s journey. With the right amount of delay, the flash is already burning before the second curtain starts it’s journey.
This does mean, of course, that its getting dimmer as the curtains get to the top of the frame. The rate at which this fall-off occurs is a function of the flash duration. Shorter flash durations: steeper fall-off. The Safari II, although a conventional voltage regulated flash, is actually quite fast. This is great for beating back the sun within normal flash sync speeds as it gets all of its light out in a short time. However, for tail sync, this is not so good.
However, as long as you are aware of this, you can work with it. For example, if you are shooting a model on a beach, the flash will only affect things within range. It has no effect on the sky anyway, so put the sky in a part of the frame that doesn’t get any flash. For my Nikon, that simply means shooting with the camera upside down. Now the black bar is at the top. Alternatively, you can aim the flash at the top of the frame, so the fall of from the light pattern, compensates for the fall off of light over time (and the frame).
One Light
You can do so much with just one light. One £30 YN460-II for example. There really is no excuse for not having at least one flash 🙂
Robert Harrington gave a great presentation at the B&H theatre on getting many looks out of one light – and you can watch it here. I thought this would make a great live demo for the camera club I belong to and worked out 10 or so looks to present within a 2 hour slot.  I ran through them in a practice session with some fellow photographers and we got it done in 1:45. It was going to take longer on the night as I’d be waffling on about the light as we went – and hopefully, there would be questions!
Here’s my pick of the looks we did on the night with model Paris Spencer, who always does a great job on these shoots. For all of these shots, the camera is in manual exposure at 1/160th at F/8 and ISO 64 to 640. The flash is in manual, and when off the camera, is triggered by using the pop-up in commander mode.  The popup does not fire during the exposure, it’s just used to send data and commands to the remote SB900.
We started with the flash on the camera – left, and the first shot is direct flash. When should you use this? Well, probably never unless it’s a bit of fill but as a main light, it sucks. I wanted to show just how bad flash lighting could be, so we took the mugshot, on the left. Paris looks like she just got arrested…