Category Archives: Equipment

Beauty Shoot

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It’s been a while since I did any classic beauty style shots in he studio, and I’ve learnt a lot since the last one.   Mainly I’ve been influenced by Joel Grimes in recent months for this sort of look – joelgrimes.com   Go check out Joel’s work – he’s been working as a photographer for over 25 years and has honed his craft to a fine level of detail, and that’s what his style is all about – the lighting, shooting distances and angles are very finely tuned.  That doesn’t mean he gets a tape measure out, in fact one of the hallmarks of Joel’s approach to his work is that nothing matters except the result – he’s not interested in meter readings, modelling lights, histograms, ratios or any of that stuff – if it looks good on the back of the camera  – it’s right.  Having studied his work both via his website, YouTube, and a couple of his videos on KelbyOne – http://kelbyone.com/members/joelgrimes/ I booked into my friend John Gannon’s studio http://www.studio-de-lumiere.co.uk/ with model Jessica-Jane Taylor and Make-Up and Hair stylist Emily Rose Connor to put what I had learned to use 🙂

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Questions

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Cassie Wrightson, a photography student from Hertfordshire in the UK wrote to me to ask about the pictures in my Dance Gallery for her written piece on the theme of ‘Time’.  Here’s what she asked, and I sincerely hope the resulting babble I sent back was in some way helpful 🙂

  • My first question is what is the context behind the photos?
  • How did you take the photographs?
  • Which camera did you use and what setting did you have your camera on?
  • How did you get the image so crisp?
  • Why did you choose the colours of what the dancers wear?
  • Is there any hidden messages that link to the photos?
  • And finally why did you choose these 22 photos in particular?

 

Dancer: Gabrielle Dams Crew: Suzy Clifford, Chris Steel, Lorraine Barnard, Clara Barnard. Time lapse BTS shoot: Clara Barnard Theatre technician: Paul Edwards Make-up: Gabrielle Dams Model Ageny: Becky Hampson, Body Couture Location: Grange Theatre, Hartford Special thanks to The Grange School.

 

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Flour Again

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As I had so much flour left over, another shoot with it was, well inevitable.  However, before inevitability could strike, James Wall, marketing director of Lencarta lighting wrote to me and asked if I’d be interested in doing it again at their studio in Bradford, to promote the SuperFast lights I had been using for the last few shoots.  Well – I’d be doing this sort of thing anyway, so this was not a hard decision, and wouldn’t need to sell anything – these lights are genuinely fantastic.

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YN622N SuperSync

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Ok, so if you want to freeze action outside using both sunlight and flash, you’ll need to use a high shutter speed to freeze those parts of the subject that are lit by the sun – as its a continuous source.  Sure you may be able to light the subject in such a way that they are dominated by flash, and use a regular x-sync compatible shutter speed to freeze your subject with fast flash, however to get them completely frozen, you’ll need to freeze all the light with a high speed shutter – say 1/4000th of a second.  We know we can use compatible Speedlights for this with High Speed Sync (HSS pulses the light to share it out over the entire shutter operation – to act like a bright continuous light) however this is only possible with certain Speedlights.  If you need more power, you can always tape more Speedlights together, however sometimes its more convenient to use one big light:  you can configure it quicker and use all manner of modifiers on big lights.

 

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Dancing Again

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_OHL4260I keep coming back to this dance theme.  There are a number of reasons.  Dancers, especially classically trained dancers hold themselves with a certain grace and poise.  (well “duh” I hear the rest of the world say, but well, yes it is obvious, however it is a reason why I’m attracted to dancers as subjects).  Next is the movement element – showing movement in a still photograph, whether it be a dancer frozen in mid-leap –where it’s obvious they are moving as they had to be to get up there, to showing multiple positions or a constant motion blur in the image to show the path they have taken.  I had shot with Gabby before, to produce a multiple flash image showing her path from stage right to stage left.  This time I wanted to explore motion freezing, and getting some blur on.

Gabrielle Dams, my subject for this shoot is only 18 years of age, and yet she dances, she sings and teaches a dance class of12-13 year old girls – who all adore her.  She’s very hard-working and always turns in a great performance.

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Oh yes :) – and they work too.

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IMG_0764The Nikon CLS/AWS  (Creative Lighting System/Advanced Wireless System) flash system does many amazing things, with off-camera flash from strobing, full TTL metering with up to 3 groups of flash at independent power settings to just simple manual control of power output from camera.  However, it has one big weakness:  it send the data from the camera to the flashes with light pulses from either the on-board pop-up flash, or a Speedlight/SU800 infrared trigger attached to the camera hotshoe.  This means there must be a way for the light to get from the camera flash to the little sensor on the side of the Speedlight.  Some people call this “line of sight”.  It’s not quite that bad – you can bounce it off walls and ceilings etc as long as it reaches the sensor it will work.

But what if I put the flashes in a softbox?  Or outside/in another room?  If you’ve read Joe McNally’s “The Hot Shoe Diaries” you’ll know just how much of the setup on his shoots is spent getting the lights to trigger, with daisy-chained SC29 cords from the hotshoe to the master flash pointing out of a window and bouncing off a satellite…Well anyway, you get the idea – it’s frigging unreliable outside, and unworkable if the light is out of sight.

So, what if we could do the same over radio?  Pocket Wizard came up with the FlexTT5 and MiniTT1 system that does just that, however many reported it to be unreliable and there was no display on the trigger – the closest you could get was to buy a 3rd thing – the “AC3 Zone controller” that supplied the missing controls on the FlexTT5 to adjust up to 3 groups of flashes with thumbwheels.  Still no display mind you, and the whole thing cost a Gazillion pounds.  Radio poppers captured the light data and re-transmitted over the wire to a device that than re-emitted the light signals into the flash sensor.  Again, very expensive, but they did work perfectly.  Dave Black has used these to excellent effect over the years.  In later months Phottix launched the Odins which seemed to work well, but again, very very expensive at £150 per receiver.  Pixel had the Kings and again no display…

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Flash!

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Aaaahhhh.  Saviour of-my-photograph!_OHL5720

Ahem.  Sorry.  Won’t happen again.  Okay as promised this is the write up of the quick overview on flash I did recently for Holmes Chapel CC.  We talked about why we use flash guns – i.e. why do they flash, why are they not just on all the time so you can see what the light will look like?  There are couple of reasons, however the main one is the power of the light.  In daylight, even a 500watt work lamp would  struggle to make much impact.  We need a way to get a lot of light out in a very short space of time, so we can use a reasonable shutter speed (~1/160th) to control the ambient light.

Often, in a studio situation, we want to remove the ambient light altogether by stopping the lens down to a small aperture – say f/8 to f/16.  We then need a really powerful light to have it show up at all on the image – and deliver most of it within the window of time that the shutter is fully open.

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Shutter speed effect on slow studio lights

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The website for some very interesting new flashguns from MagneFlash mentions more than once that it outputs more light at faster shutter speeds than regular studio lights.  Now, conventional wisdom is that a run of the mill studio strobe takes about 1/900th of a second to output its light which is a lot quicker than the length of time the shutter is open below max sync speed (lets say this is 1/200th of s second which will work for most modern SLR cameras), and so as long as the shutter speed is longer than this, you should get all the light right?  I posted comment to this effect on LightingRumours.    This measurement is to “t.01” or the point at which the output is 1/10th of the peak output.  You need some sort of agreed point to make the measurement to compare lights. Continue reading →