Archive for the ‘Equipment’ Category
Photographers. If somebody offered us a cool bag in lieu of a day rate, we’d probably take it. I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my career I’ve just about keeled over with the rapture at the sight and feel of some shoulder borne, web slung, wheelie driven mix of cordura and zippers. Gotta have it. Just gotta. Hence my garage is a bag graveyard, strewn with relics of cases gone by and zippers gone off the rails. Once mighty containers, with the double stitched linings and the thirteen secret zippered, waterproof compartments in the front flap alone, hang lifelessly, toting only dust and the occasional mouse turd. (Photo above by Will Foster.)
So, we’ve had a good tour of bag land, and have finally arrived at some conclusive (for us, anyway) evidence that bag science is finally delivering on the promise of a cure for the bagaholic shooter. We’ll be posting intermittently (did I have to say that, faithful readers who put up with my erratic blogging?) on bags we have experimented with and are fond of. While I stop short of saying we are in bag heaven, the mix of Kata, Thinktank, and Moose bags have really elevated the game.
Let’s start with the big guns, what we do our heaviest shipping with, the Kata line. We use their OC line, a mix of mostly 88′s and 97′s, with a couple 86′s mixed in. (Check out the website, the numbers correspond to different sizes.) I have to say that our experience across the board with these guys is pretty flawless. They are made from some type of ballistic material that can probably fend off an RPG, hence since traveling with these, I have had zero, zero damage to my stuff, despite the fact that there are certainly some airline bag handlers, disgruntled with lifting them, who have played bombadier with these puppies, dropping them out of the airplane to the tarmac without the benefit of mechanized conveyance.
The interiors, blessedly, are the color of a school bus. Makes sense. Every drop some tiny little biddy bastard screw thing, or plastic whozimawhatsis down into the hold of a standard black bag? You might as well have dropped it into a black hole. (In fact, you did.) The yellow brick road interiors of these bags simply makes sense for mostly black photo gear. They also smartly divide up the top flap into zippered compartments for the interior, and hollow spaces (2 of them) on the top of the exterior. These two pics are how we travel with speedlights. The whole nine yards fits into one bag….SB900s, SD9 battery packs, SC-29 cables, SU 800, Maha chargers, Flashpoint stuff, Lumiquest light shapers, Honl grids, Ray flash, gels, batteries, Hoodman loupes, instruction manuals, Wave tool, Swiss Army knives, gaffer tape, and spare batteries. Everything is numbered, and color coded with tape.
We throw this puppy into FedEx, or the hold of a plane. It survives admirably. The question mark is the wheels. They have hung in there, mostly, but I have busted a couple of sets over the last year or so. (They are independent of the case, thus replaceable.) But, as I hark back, I have busted the wheels on virtually every case I’ve ever owned. Ever smash a set of the built in wheels on a Pelican case? Not a happy day. The wheels turn into non-spinning lumps and the bag turns into the equivalent of an anvil. (Ever swung a heavy, hard, plastic type case, loaded with gear, out of the back of a Suburban, and before it hits the ground, the first thing it makes contact with is your shins? Oh, my. You feel like you just attached a set of jumper cables to your lower legs, the way you start hopping around.) The Kata’s are padded all around. And the zippers, the Achilles heel of most bags, have remained resolutely intact.
All in all, great bags, well thought out, and good protection for the gear. Next up, quite soon, bags for the smaller stuff. Thinktank, and how we’ve adapted them to our traveling ways, more Kata, and the Moose bag.
More tk….
Heading north. Following the, uh, light:-) Actually, it’s great weather up there now in Iceland, and heading for my first visit to a country that has been on the bucket list for a long time. You can check out the specifics here.
It’ll be fun. I’m always jazzed by a new place, and will be pushing hard to find some crazy stuff to shoot. Another cool wrinkle–I’m on the beta team for the new Pocket Wizard Mini’s and Flexes for the Nikon CLS system. This is an interesting door to open, for sure. Line of sight issues can bedevil TTL shooters, and if we can push the envelope with TTL radio, well, that envelope just got a helluva lot larger.
So we make the great Northern trek. Drew and I have our sturdy skiff loaded, have said our prayers to Odin, donned horned helmets, buckled on broadswords, and, with following winds and fair seas, we should be pulling into Reykjavik in time for Friday night’s lecture.
If things don’t go well, and we are engulfed by the seas, I figure it’s okay, cause we got TTL radio. Instead of Mayday! Mayday! we’ll be signalling, “Minus Three! Minus Three!” I’m sure the Coast Guard will be intrigued enough to figure it out.
I’ve got a bunch of them, so figure the class will help me sort it out as well. I’ll be doing demos and see where this new signal takes us. As always, experimenting.
We’ve certainly come a long ways since Nikon introduced on board slave eyes back in the SB-26.
More tk…
Man, does Donald have a face made for a D3X….
Shot at 1/4 at f8, D3X and the new Nikkor 50mm 1.4. Long time since I used a 50, and this thing is sharp, sharp. SB900 off to camera right, Tri-grip diffuser, 5 minute portrait session. Aperture priority at minus 2 EV, no comp dialed into the flash. The 900 has the dome diffuser off, and is zoomed to 200mm, which gives it a little punch and gets it under the brim of cowboy hat. Donald remains one of my favorite people. We were talking about women yesterday (What else is there to talk about, except photo gear, and then only for a couple of minutes. Then we go back to discussing women.) He and his honey spin on the dance floor every Friday night in downtown Santa Fe. I have a standing invite for dinner over at their place, and I’m gonna take him up on it this summer.
We were talking about how much our women mean to us, and how having one special woman in your life makes it all worth it. Though he did say, his eyes twinkling, “Joe, if the Lord ever invents anything better than women, I’ll take a dozen.”
Speaking of women, let’s talk women with cameras for a moment. (Now here’s a great discussion, right? Women and gear in the same sentence. Yikes! My wife works for Nikon and is a terrific shooter, and knows the gear and tech side of things as well as anybody. I always tell Annie I knew she was the right woman for me the first time I ever went into her refrigerator and the butter compartment had no butter but was filled with AA batteries. That’s the girl for me!)
Stacy Pearsall is a truly talented shooter who was military photographer of the year twice (first woman ever to do it) and is being featured now on Oprah. She is retired from active duty, and has taken over the directorship of the Charleston Center for Photography.
She is married to another great shooter, combat cameraman Andy Dunaway. Check out their work and their site. Between the two of them, they have, I think, about 5 or 6 Iraq tours, in addition to previous conflicts. As is common with military shooters, they are versatile, adaptable, and come back with coherent, story telling, beautiful imagery out of situations most of us wouldn’t even lift our heads up to look at. (If we did, we’d be looking for an exit.) Speaking of versatility, a few years ago Andy, went from combat camera to Washington DC for a stint as Rumsfeld’s photog, where he applied his skills tailing the former Defense Sec.
Annie and I are working on teaching together down at the Center this spring. It’ll be good to see them both. More tk….
Remember in Jurassic Park, when there would be the distant thud of the stalking T-Rex, and the water glass in the jeep would tremor? Or in Saving Private Ryan, when they felt the earth shake well before they saw the tank?
That’s kind of the way I feel about the D3X. It’s out there. You can hear the distant rumble. A monster of a camera.
I can’t really comment on the camera intelligently (regular readers of this blog are saying to themselves, “Uh, Joe, tell us something we don’t already know.”) cause I’ve had it in my hands for precisely one shoot. I can say a couple of things….
It feels and acts exactly like a D3, except slower, due to the size of the files it is pushing. My D3’s are buffer upgraded, and even shooting NEFs on consecutive high, they rock and roll. The D3X is, well, more suited to a waltz.
The files are eye popping. I was looking at them on my bedraggled Macbook Pro, and I felt like an extra in a horror movie. You know the ones, where the mirror in the bathroom starts morphing and making eerie, groaning sounds? Mr. Movie Extra gets ridiculously quizzical, and like a curious cat, cocks his head to the side and stares at the wacked out mirror, which is obviously not supposed to be moving or muttering guttural, satanic curses. Instead of running, he stays rooted in front of his reflection, eyes getting wide, his jaw going slack, and then little slurpy things with yellow eyes and seventeen rows of razor sharp teeth explode outta the mirror and bore through both his eyeball sockets like evil little wood chippers and feast noisily on his brain matter. Of course, they don’t find much to chew on ‘cause anybody stupid enough to stare at the mirror instead of running hasn’t got much of a meal up there in the first place.
That didn’t happen to me. Though I have to admit, when a D3X NEF finally boiled to the surface of the screen, I cocked my head, my eyes got wide and my jaw slack, just like in the movies. My standard for detail has always been Kodachrome 25, and the D3 zoomed past that pretty handily, and now this thing gives you a file that is like frikkin’ Stargate. Who knows what’s on the other side of this?
Hadda give the camera back. Probably a good thing, cause lawdy, lawdy, the files positively gave me the vapors, and I don’t wanna like my pictures that much. I never wanna be seduced by all those pixels to the point that I confuse a detailed picture with a good picture. All this technology (which is fantastic, and I love it) is like the Sirens on the rocky shore–come closer, wayfaring photographer, we will drown you with more pixels.
We got pixels aplenty. What we need at the camera is a beating heart and an ability to see. In terms of being a shooter, I’ve always figured I’m like the frikkin’ plumber—when the valves are popping and the waters are rising, sometimes I get the call cause I’m a halfway decent problem solver. But you know, how fancy a wrench do I need? As Magnum shooter Donald McCullin once said, “I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.”
Here’s where I see this camera playing huge. Most of the covers of LIFE, Sports Illustrated, Time, or Newsweek— what I would call the newsstand magazines— I’ve shot over the years were shot 6×7 medium format. As opposed to the Geographic, which has historically let a cover evolve naturally out of a coverage, those magazines often specifically assign a cover, either the subject or the theme. For those kind of jobs, portraits, illustrations, what have you, it was time to drag out my Mamiya RZ Pro II system. (Which I sold a year or so ago, before it turned into rust. Thank you Equipment Lady!)
The detail of the D3X for me, obviates the need for a medium format approach to just about anything I would tackle. (Note I said, “I would tackle.” I’m not out there shooting DeBeers campaigns, much to my chagrin. The studio, still life, beauty, car shooting crowd are most likely very intrigued by this camera. It opens new DSLR doors. Shoot huge files, and couple this monster machine to Nikkor glass. Schweeeet!) And, here’s where the technology gives us a gift we didn’t even know we wanted—the D3X, just like its cousin, the D3, has a 4×5 aspect ratio you can click in. That’s not too far off from my old 6×7 cover comfort zone. For the cover job, the job needing excruciating detail, the set of pictures that needs to leap off the page, this camera will be an astounding tool. Maybe, just maybe, if I ever get another crack at one of those pictures inside a yellow border, I just might use this camera.
Can I say a word or two about my aforementioned “bedraggled” Macbook Pro? This poor computer has been through it. It’s been in deserts, the woods of Northern Spain, knocked around in production vehicles from Istanbul to Berlin to Rome to God knows where. When I have tethered to it, at least twice I have yanked it off its platform and seen it fall to the floor. It has dents galore, and the CD drive slot has been pried back open with a Wave tool, and it keeps working. At this point, when I turn it on, it screams, “Yo, Adrian!!!!”
But it still turns on and works. An amazing machine.
Lighting, Roberto, the Pain Chisel…..okay. (As fearsome as he looks, he’s real easygoing.) The background is chrome diamond plate flooring, two 4×8 sheets butted together. Had a bear of a time lighting it, cause my first idea of lighting the wall behind it and having that light wrap around and grace the chrome with blue highlights didn’t work out at all. I mean at all. Nada. Zilch. Bad idea. Brain glitch. All the little photons collectively said, “You zink we will do zeese for yuuu? Hah! We fart in your general direction!”
Plan B. I just lit the diamond plate like I would light a regular background, and instead of getting specular highlights, which I feared, I got a reasonable spread of color, pretty even across the board. Live and learn.
Did 4 SB800 units for the background, and then winged two more units, left and right, behind and to the sides of him, continuing the edge of blue around his body. The diamond plate flashes were Group A, and the wing lights were Group B. Right about at Group B position is two Lowell Omni lites, barn doored so that just a sliver of directional, hot light gets to the chains. That gave us some rattle and motion. The camera was set at 1/6th at f/11. All pix made on Lexar 8 gigger UDMA cards.
Up front, I lit Roberto overhead with the Lastolite Ezybox, with an SB900. This thing has become a favorite solution. It just rocks as a hot shoe flash delivery system. Bango, directional, contained, soft light. What a nice gift of a piece of equipment to make location life easier. “Candygram for Mongo!”
The low fill is an SB800 with a warm gel, and a Honl 1/4″ grid spot on it. Kim Weber did the makeup and the uh, hair. She was great chatting with Roberto (turns out they had mutual friends) and getting him camera ready.
Some oil for sheen, chains for good measure. Tattoos like crazy. Tough guy. Big. Powerful. A subject to match the camera.
Yes, indeed, the Dobbs Ferry Workshops are alive once again. I’ve gotten pinged a bunch over time about reviving them, so we contacted our old studio building back on the Hudson and they said come on back. We will have a classroom/studio room, and the run of this old funky factory building down by the train tracks and the river. Great setting. Lots of peeling paint. Dingy hallways. Loading docks. Photog’s dream.
They will run Jan. 19, 20, 21, 22 and 24. We will have breakfast and lunch, snacks, free parking and multiple models, all days. Class size is limited to 12. Fee is $350 for a 10-11 hour day. We will go hard all day, showing examples, shooting demos, working big flash and small flash. Participants get time behind the camera as well as time gripping for shoots and moving gear. We will talk about light all day.
Bogen Imaging and Adorama have stepped up big time to help us out, and we will have toys galore, from big AC power packs to Elinchrom Rangers, Octas, beauty dishes, umbrellas, soft boxes, flats, panels, long throw reflectors, Skyports, c-stands. The whole deal.
We will use SB800 and 900 units, and craft i-TTL solutions that will rival the big flash solutions, and show how to move fluidly between big flash and small flash, and mix the two.
Beauty of working in Dobbs is how close it is to NYC, either a 35 minute train ride (we will pick you up at the Dobbs station, and drop you at end of day) or 45 by car from mid-town Manhattan. And the building is big. And we can move around, and move fast. We had a great time when we did these a few years back, and then we kinda let ‘em go when we moved the studio a bit north to CT.
But they’re back and they’re alive. Hit Lynn with an email at lynn@joemcnally.com, or phoner at 203-438-4750. She’s got details and class lists going.
You can also view the workshop announcment here, or download a PDF version here.
THE LKE! (LIGHTING KIT FOR THE ELDERLY)
I thought Jeff (jsnyder@adorama.com) was gonna shoot me when I posted all this stuff and told the world to give him a shout. (But then he wouldn’t wanna hurt an old person.) Typical Jeff, though, he scrambled all the below together, so now you can go individual and get the pieces, or the entire kit, and save $25 and get free shipping. Bob Krist is also very relieved, cause he thought he’d have to start staffing up at home and putting all this together to ship out, and that would interfere with him watching Oprah every afternoon.
The entire kit listed below is SKU# JMLKE, in Adorama’s system (Though, it’s so new that it isn’t yet on their website- So if you’d like the entire kit, please contact Jeff Snyder directly at jsnyder@adorama.com; the same goes for the Westcott umbrella and Morris bracket).
FREE SHIPPING AND a $25 SAVINGS if purchased as the “kit”, vs individually
GTBHMI GIOTTOS MH1004 MINI BALL HEAD -- 1 $12.95
SB300405 STROBO ACCESSORY SHOE- 1 $10.95
BG3373 BOGEN 6′ RTRCTBL 5-SCTION STND-BL -- 1 $58.50
WEUMB43WSC WESTCOTT 43″ WHITE SATIN UMBRELLA -- 1 $19.99
STCIM2500BK HARDIGG STORM IM2500 CS -- BLK -- 1 $120.95
FAHSG18 HONLPHOTO 1/8 SPEED GRID F/POTAB -- 1 $24.95
FAHSG14 HONLPHOTO 1/4 SPEED GRID F/POTAB -- 1 $24.95
FAHSN HONLPHOTO SPEED SNOOT 8″ REGULAR -- 1 $24.95
FAHSNS HONLPHOTO SPEED SNOOT 5″ SHORTY -- 1 $19.95
FAHSS HONLPHOTO SPEED STRAP F/SHOE MT -- 2 $9.95
FAHGK HONLPHOTO ROSCO GEL KIT F/SPEED -- 1 $24.95
