Joe McNally

May 7

Basic Dubai Shooting Kit: Hi Speed Sync & a Hoodman Loupe

In Lighting at 6:28am

Just back from the Middle East, Spain and Italy in reverse order. Up at 4:30. Time for lunch!

Got some blogs and bits and pieces coming from the trip. David Hobby and I threw together a desert shoot at the last minute that mixed in a bunch of SB 800 units, one lovely lady from the Czech Republic, a makeup artist from China, an assistant from India, two wild and crazy desert drivers manning Land Cruisers, a bunch of camel dung, and, when it comes to David and I, two overcooked imaginations that could only be produced by hours and hours in detention hall.

That’s David on the 50 cal! They were closing in! We were low on ammo and fuel! We went to SU-4 mode on the SB units!

Really dating myself here, of course. The Rat Patrol ran for two seasons back in the (gulp) 60’s. Funny what sticks in your head. I mean, you know, my head. Oh, well…..more tk on the adventures in the dunes.

The sun in Dubai obviously kicks your ass on a regular basis. Comes up big and nasty. It’s a good opp to explore Auto FP Hi Speed Sync. (Say that 10 times really fast.) I’m guessing (and could be real wrong, here) it’s a mode many folks don’t pay a lot of attention to, especially when trying to get acquainted with other, slightly less exotic features of the SB flash. You’ll see it come up in the back lcd panel, next to TTL and BL settings.

“FP” refers to focal plane shutter, and what happens in hi speed sync mode is the flash pulses through the slits of the shutter, and essentially stays “on” for the duration of the exposure. Thus the entire scene sees the flash as the shutter travels, and you don’t get that black slash of unexposed area that you would traditionally see when you exceeded the standard upper level of flash sync speed on the camera, which nowadays is commonly 1/250th. In the Nikon system, you can permanently enable the Auto FP feature by going into the custom menu under “bracketing/flash” and seek out the flash sync speed option. Move the camera into 1/250s(AutoFP). That’s it. You can tell it’s enabled when you look at the flash sync speed option in the menu and you can see a tiny asterisk there. Boom, you’re good to go.

So here’s the catch. (Hey, it’s photography, there’s always a catch.) You lose power. To make this hi speed sync deal work properly, you gotta move the strobes in close.

The specs on the above read out at 1/8000 sec at f4. The lights are slightly back of the subject, the ever cool Salim, giving him a hot rim of light, and skipping some angle of incidence/angle of reflection highlights off his form. Think of it as playing air hockey with the light.

Here’s the lighting rig. Turned and caught a local soccer team wandering through our set.

A closer look involves Sid, our Gulf Photo Plus assistant, doing the old make believe you’re adjusting the light deal. “Not you, henchman holding wrench. Not you, henchman arbitrarily turning knobs, making it seem like you’re doing something.”

Why multiple flashes? If you can gang ‘em, they will compensate for the loss of power. That, along with closeness of the light sources to the subject, definitely helps. You can pull more power of course by yanking off the dome diffusers, and zooming the throw on the strobes from wide angle to 105mm. That gets you some extra punch.

Of course you can do it with just one direction to the light as well.

Zied here looks like he’s levitating effortlessly. Only indicator he’s traveling upwards off a trampoline is the up kick of the tag on his swim suit. Was looking here to fly him by the sun, and would have wanted one of those Arabian sunsets we have all read about, but never got one. The dust and the haze gave this sunset all the pizzazz and energy of a turd that just dropped out of a tall cow’s ass. So I hyped it a bit in Capture NX, and pulled in a small amount of color.

And of course, wouldn’t have known what the hell I was getting without the Hoodman Loupe. Essential for blazing light conditions like this. In fact, it’s just plain essential. Goes with me everywhere now.

More tk.

20    comments

Apr 15

Hold the Phone…

In Lighting, On Location, Thoughts at 7:42pm

Or, maybe just hold the light. Or a bunch of lights. Posted last week and alleged using 53 speedlights of various types on the above. It’s a number that stuck in my head. I kept thinking on it and in the interests of veracity and accuracy and all that stashed up guilt from being raised Irish Catholic, I did some research on it and the official number came back as 47. My bad. The source here is Bill Pekala, the General Manager of NPS over at Nikon. He worked with me on it, as he has many projects in the 20 plus years we have known each other. Great guy, and a mind like a bear trap for all things photographic. A photog’s friend, in a word, who leavens his photo discourse with various down home Tennessee-isms that are part country wisdom and part Nikon manual.

Dunno why 53 stuck with me. It might have come from chewing the fat with Bill, over a couple of beers, and doing the old, “Remember when we lit up that KC-135 with like 50 or so flashes….” type of thing. I’m sure some day in the home, on the porch, in my wheelychair, it’ll be up to 103, and somehow the entire mission would have mysteriously acquired an element of danger. “Remember all those flashes? They ran on steam, remember?! Damn dangerous! Had to wear a bomb suit just to handle ‘em!” This conversation would of course be attended to by the rolled eyes of those who can hear me say anything, the odd cackle or two, and the more than occasional fart.

Light doesn’t have to be hard, or a lot. True, every once in a while you get confronted with something, you know, like Everest, and you just climb it cause it’s there. It ain’t fun, I tell ya. One of the first stories I ever did for the National Geographic was about the then soon to be re-opened Ellis Island. The first part of the coverage was a blast. Just me, Kodachrome 25 and rising morning light. I would get onto the island in total darkness, roughly 4 am (it was Nov-Dec) and start walking the halls of the deserted section of the island.

It was kind of creepy. Lots of folks died out there. They have the remnants of the medical area and the old crematorium. I’d have my tripod and just to keep myself company, I would push open a door with it and stir up a flurry of pidgeons. Then I would call out, “Freddy? Jason? You in there?”

Too many movies.

It was a revelation. No PR people hovering (they flutter just like pidgeons, by the way, so I felt right at home). No plug ugly subjects, no light hearted bullshit banter at the camera, no real timetable except the sun striking an object.

Came up with some of my favorite photos. No people, just rust and ghosts.

Of course I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Geographic gave me this wondrous job to wander around abandoned hallways in rising light. Lots of folks better than I am at that. No, no. The job had a wrinkle, as they often do. At one point in the coverage, I was gonna have to light Ellis Island.

Not the whole damn thing, just the museum portion, which is a biggggggg building. At the time it was a construction site with very limited electric power. Had to drag my own genny truck out there. Quick $1000 under the table to the union rep (I love NY!) and voila, I got my own power on the island.

Next, the lights. Woe to a shooter trying to rent strobes that week in NY. The shot below is done with about 50-60 power packs (2400ws, some 48’s) plugged into roughly 100-120 flash heads. We spent 4 days or so wiring and testing and shooting this rig. Killer sked. Shoot sunrise, run the film to the lab. See all the mistakes, run back to the island. Make adjustments. Shoot sunset. Run the film to the lab. See the mistakes. Back to the island. Make adjustments. Sleep in the car for a couple hours. Shoot sunrise. Go on another mistake finding lab run. This went on for 4 days.

Crew of 4, I believe, and they were all ready to tie some Speedotrons around my neck and dump me in the harbor. “Where’s Joe?” Splash. “Dunno. Haven’t seen him.” (One member of the crew came by the studio personally to pick up his check and assure me that lighting Ellis Island had been the worst experience of his life.)

Triggered the system from 3 vantage points on the ground, and tried some stuff from the air, with line of sight flash triggering. (Clamped Hensel Porty heads to the open door of the chopper and flew that baby in close to rooftops where we had slave eyes on light stands. (Sounds antediluvian but it was, you know, like 1989 or so.)

We got a pic, and the flash pop was easily viewable from Brooklyn or New Jersey. Got on the WINS traffic report on the last day cause the reporter and his chopper pilot were drawn to the explosion of light in the harbor. Never forget his opening line for the traffic report: “And there’s lightning over Ellis Island this morning as National Geographic lights up the island for a story!”

My day rate at the time was $250 per day, which made me far cheaper to rent than the strobe system. But it was there, you know? I had to climb it. More tk.

29    comments

Apr 11

Nigel and Me….

In Advice, Lighting, Thoughts at 7:19am

When Nigel gets hungry, he won’t let me work. He’ll just come up to my laptop and rumble and purr and generally get all sorts of adorable. If that doesn’t work he just starts walking back and forth in front of my computer screen, stepping on random keys. Last week he sent an email to 7 people at the National Geographic. Had to finish that one quick and follow up, lest the venerable editors there thought I had resorted to incomplete sentences with no sign off.

SOME RESPONSES….FIRST OFF TO KEN…..

Joe
I am using the pop up on the D300 in commander mode.
HELP
Leaving the USA on Sunday.
I have (3) SB 800’s, D300 and I am lost….
What I know.
1. Can set them up to all fire wireless using the pop up flash on the D300
THATS IT
What I don’t know or what is the step by step (SB 800 for dummies) how to set up one to use as fill, add power to one less power to one,etc…
I see in the D300 to do this, ok. But to navigate thru the SB800 back and the manual. I just don’t get it……..I write this after 10 t o 12 hours and $20 in batteries. I read the strobist,etc,,,,,,,.
Do anyone know of a blog, book, web site that can give a picture and tell or plain simple (remember SB 800 for dummies) to help me??
A quick response is most welcomed.
Simple in Kentucky

Okay….here we go, as best help as I can be. First off, on the SB 800, if you ever get totally lost, simultaneously depress the mode, and the on/off button and keep ‘em depressed for like 3 seconds. The unit factory defaults back to a straight up TTL setting. Can’t tell you how many times that has saved my butt.

The key to the SB800 programming is the SEL dial in the middle of the back of the unit. Depress that for 3 seconds and you’ll get a 4 box grid. (Don’t do this with gloves on. You’ll just mash away and the unit will do nothing. Get your digit square onto that puppy and push.) Toggle right to the upper right box with squiggle lines and flash symbols. Very artful.

Tap SEL again for a split second and the up/down cursor arrow goes live. You can go through options here, and the ones you are concerned with are MASTER and REMOTE, presumably the latter cause you have the pop up in the D300. Toggle down and highlight REMOTE. Depress SEL again for 3 seconds and the REMOTE info panel comes up in the lcd. It says REMOTE in capital letters. You know when you are there. Upper left is channels–double check this against your setting in the pop up. You gotta be on the same channel. Hit SEL again and you highlight the groups box in lower right. A-B-C. You got three flashes, so choice of group is up to you and where you position them. (Note!!!! Just got this straight from Pete Wilkinson below–no C group with the D300!)

Now check your pop up menu. Go to custom option for built in flash…comes up usually as active in the TTL mode. Toggle down to Commander mode. Toggle right. Commander mode comes up, and the pop up is active as a flash, which I will presume you don’t want. (Why would you go to all this trouble and still have the damn pop up active, which is the size of a dime and gives out just as cheap a quality of light? Dunno, except as maybe you put it to minus 3 EV and use is as a wink light fill type deal.)

I digress. Highlight the little box that says TTL. Then toggle downwards ( I believe it is downwards, I don’t own a D300.) You will run through the options, including auto mode, and manual, and then you get to a flat cursor. Ta Da! The pop up is now off as a flash. Will still act as a commander, and still flash. But the flash is a monitor pre-flash, an informational burst of light that occurs milliseconds before the real exposure. Don’t sweat it. It is not gonna register in your real exposure.

Then just zip through with the toggles to A , B or C groups, making sure they are reading TTL. The box to the right is the plus/minus EV area, with you can dial in to your desire. That will drive the power rating of the SB800 remote strobe you just programmed. YOU DON’T HAVE TO PROGRAM A VALUE INTO THE 800 UNIT ITSELF. IT GETS IT’S COMMANDS FROM THE POP UP PROGRAMMING YOU HAVE JUST SET UP! You don’t have to do anything else to the SB800 except make sure the receptor dish is unobstructed. that is the little recessed circular area about the size of an M&M right near the battery chamber. If you use the 5th battery add on chamber, be aware you are cutting the angle of reception this sensor has access to, and therefore may occasionally have trouble tripping it. If I am ever feeling like the remote is in a tough spot to receive the master signal from the pop up, I take the 5th battery chamber off so the sensor’s field of view is clearer.

Make sure when you program the pop up commander menu, you hit OK on the back of the camera. If you don’t, when you close out the menu option, all the settings you just programmed will disappear. Sucks. So remember to hit OK.

OK? Helpful on any level?

As far as arraying the units, and then dialing them in for power settings, I can’t say cause I ain’t there with you. I can say it is a game of ratios, or levels, and it all works depending on your eye. There is no right or wrong answer. Just a couple things to remember. Light has a logic. If the unit looks like it is too far to the side, your subject will be side lit. Try not to open up everything with light. Leave room for shadows. Try to reflect the units off of or through something. Remember, these are small flashes, and the game is to get them to behave like big flashes.

FOR CHARLES:

The Nikkor 200 f2 is maybe the sharpest telephoto I have ever used. That’s basically it. And, at f2, the DOF drop off is occasionally really pleasing for portraiture.

Kino Flow Lights….Drug a pair of them out to location the other day. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about, as they are very popular lights indeed right about now. Had a good time, but nothing magical happened. You can see the light, and the quality, to be sure, and that is handy. Kind of missed the pop of a strobe, and the little bird chirp of the recycle though. Small things keep me happy, I guess. Used one 4 tube kino flow on Rick here. Didn’t use both of them cause one didn’t work. Welcome to location shooting. My subject was Rick, who has just an amazing face, and an amazing history.

20    comments

Apr 10

Maddie at the Piano…

In Equipment, Lighting, On Location at 7:43am

Or, maybe, Little House on the Prairie? Dunno. Doesn’t really matter, cause I just like the picture. One of those things about being a photog, is that you can occasionally make a notion a reality by making a picture of it.

Let me explain. I teach a bit at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, and during the lighting classes, we often go to pretty cool locations, with some models, who are also pretty cool, and try some portraiture and some lighting solutions. We use everything—big strobes, small flashes, reflectors, Octas, strip lights, beauty dishes, and even, when one presents, a lace curtain.

Maddie here is Mawgie’s daughter. Mawgie is one of the loveliest, liveliest people I have ever met, and she brought along Maddie to a class we had recently. Everybody had a ball with her, and being a bit of a ham, Maddie didn’t mind all the photographic attention.

You know how faces stick in your head sometimes? You just see a face, and it hangs around in your photo imagination. When I saw Maddie, I thought, you know, one of these days I might try to get a picture of that kid.

So we were doing one of the Kelby Online Training videos on lighting, and we were pretty determined to get out on location and away from Tampa, where we had shot the first four. Hello Santa Fe! Phone call to Mawgie. Whadddaya think?
Next thing we know, we found ourselves at Eaves Movie Ranch, run by Thomas Wingate, a dear friend and possessor of one of the great all time American faces. Thomas has been the subject of more photos than Carter’s got pills and he deserves every one of ‘em. He honors the lens with an instantaneous combination of grit and dignity that you just don’t run across every day of the week.

At Eaves they have this old ramshackle (actually, everything out there is pretty ramshackle) saloon that always gives up a good crack at a photo. I’ve wanted to do a couple of simple shots in there over time, and never really had a chance, till Maddie sat down at this dust laden piano, which stands by a lace curtain, yellowed with age and dirt. Pulled the curtain over the window, and she dressed in frontier wardrobe, courtesy of another great cowboy subject, Thadd Turner, who’s got this terrific stash of cowboy and cowgirl duds.

Put an Elinchrom Ranger out in the street with a long throw reflector, and just pointed it at the window from about ten feet away. Ran it on the B port of the Ranger, which gives only 30% of whatever power setting you have programmed, hence the light was real minimal, just a small pop through the curtain. That enabled me to shoot it with my favorite telephoto, the Nikkor 200mm f2, wide open at f2, at 250th of a second.

And of course Donald came along. Already blogged a bit about his decency, wit, and presence in front of a camera. Told him I did that, and he was quite pleased, though he hasn’t seen it. He admitted he’s been having a problem figuring out how to turn his damn computer on. He tries to keep things simple. Doesn’t have a cell phone. He did tell me he and his honey complicated their lives a bit this year, though. “We learned a new dance step,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

The pix of Donald and Thomas were shot, by the way, with one light. Again, an Elinchrom Ranger, stuck outsided the building and bouncing down into a white sheet, mimicking and amplifying the hard sunlight that was bouncing around out there.

I always say a bad day in the field beats a good day at the office, anytime. Gotta figure out what a great day in the field compares to, cause Tuesday was one of those days.

21    comments

Apr 8

Sketchy…

In Lighting at 7:58am

Some folks have asked for a couple of lighting diagrams of stuff that has been up on the blog, so here goes.

Shaft o’ lite…..black wall, no context.

Wall Color…..2 SB 800s on the floor open up detail and color. Only shot a couple frames here, and moved the EV dial around a lot, but I think we were at plus one or so. The units are literally just laying on the junk pile on the floor in front of camera. Nothing fancy, just a little blow of light, pushing it at the wall from a low angle.

Cowboy Phil…..this is shot right after Phil realized his pickup was missing, hence the mildly mournful look.

As you can see, the SB unit is high and camera left, basically in profile light position. Ran it through a hand held one stop Lastolite tri-grip diffuser, and got the diffuser just off the camera frame, as close as I could get it. The two SB units to camera right are on floor stands, on the tarmac, hitting him from low and slightly behind him. Gelled with red, running at a pretty seriously minus EV, as I recall. Kinda fun. Again, only shot a few frames and moved on. If I stuck with it and finished it, I might have brought the red lights higher and maybe used only one. Right now I got a bit of light wrapping around his shoulder and clipping his ear.Think that’s okay. If the camera side of his face was completely dead, dunno if I would like that. But, if on assignment for a mag, I surely would have pursued a couple of options for different looks. Come to think of it, keeping that light off Phil’s ear might have been a job and a half. I mean, Phil’s a great guy, but he’s got ears that belong on a basset hound.

KC-135……

Mentioned the other day we had a bunch of our DLWS buds in group A mode with SB800 strobes. Think it was twelve, which is pretty substantial for one of the groups, and I joshed about how it might be a record. No way, of course. You can push this stuff, though. The plane shot above was done in the era of SB80, SB50, SB30 technology, with some SB26 units thrown in for good measure. I believe we used 53 units. Lit the plane, the pilot, the cockpit, the maintenance cart, the cargo hold, the engines, and the background hangar. Brought in the fire truck for a nice wet runway, and kept my fingers crossed.

Damned if it didn’t work. No radio triggers. Everything is line of sight internal slave eye trip. Here’s the diagram:-)

20    comments

Mar 26

Flash in the Canyon

In Lighting, On Location, Seminars & Workshops at 1:13am

Maybe we set a record last night. Dunno. Probably not. But we had fun, and once again, proved that trying to get photographers to read and then abide by the dictums in the instruction manuals is roughly akin to the New York Knicks going on a substantial winning streak. Just ain’t gonna happen.

There are 33 participants this time around at DLWS Moab, and 12 of ‘em are out there in this photo holding Nikon SB800 flash units. We started off with splitting the VALs into the three groups of A, B, and C, and that worked well, but then we decided to stress the system and put all dozen units into A group, which the manual does not recommend. I have no idea what the max is, or what the manual actually says, but even if we had known we would have blown it off anyway in the interests of experimentation and devil may care, laugh in the face of danger shenanigans.

Son of a gun, it worked. I mean, it worked after I got all the guys alerted to the fact that it wasn’t gonna work if they had their big hairy thumbs covering the receptor on the flash unit they were holding. That minor issue resolved, all twelve fired off of my little friend, the SU800, hot shoed to the camera. Overall exposure was about 1/6 second or so and maybe kind of 5.6 with EV minus two dialed in on aperture priority. All flashes have zero compensations dialed in.

The key to the coloration is pushing the white balance into tungsten, and covering the daylight flashes with 2 full cuts of CTO (color temp orange) which brings the units to the temperature of your average bedroom lamp. The minus 2 stop overall exposure gives the moody blue color to the fading daylight, and then the gents all light themselves up.

We’ve been working pretty hard out here.

Josh Bradley and Brad Moore are just about done in. Some of the participants are a bit pooped, too. But, as I always tell the assistants, don’t limp. If they get sick, or tired, they get left by the side of the road. We’re really gonna miss those guys.

10    comments

Mar 19

Fun With Lights…..

In Lighting, Seminars & Workshops at 3:34pm

In Santa Fe, and started my location photography and lighting workshop. It’s a good class, and we pretty much take a whole bunch of lights and rock and roll for the week. Huge thanks both to Nikon and Bogen for supporting the workshop in the way that they do. I bring down a whole bunch of SB-800 units, Justin clamps and the like, and then in the studio we have more Ranger units, light shaping tools and grip stuff than your average big city rental shop.

As you can see, we are very, very serious. The three dudes in the picture are great guys. Evan Parker on the left represents Bogen and is a tremendous resource to lots of photogs for lighting and grip solutions. On the right is Nick Rapaz, who runs the studio and is heading to NY this summer to assist Platon, who’s an amazing shooter with an incredibly definitive style of portraiture (also teaches at the workshop, a kick ass class). And Sakas is in the middle, who is also heading for New York, where eventually he’ll become a ward of the state.

Seriously… da guys… da guys are great, hard working, knowledgeable, and real go-to resources for the whole class. They are all destined for great things, if they can just stay out of jail.

So you can see the way I conduct the class is real, real boring. Today I’ll give them a pop quiz on their homework assignment of last night, which was to thoroughly read and review my white paper on file allocation tables. The quiz will be easy, though, and consist of only one question. “What the fuck is a file allocation table?”

I’ll also surprise the participants with my lecture on the historical significance of the wet collodion print process, during which I’ll examine this forgotten process and illuminate the very good reasons it in fact was forgotten. Sort of OT, but hey, I figure it’s just value added.

By the way, “da guys” were shot with a Nikon D3 and a 24-70mm lens, and lit up with the venerable Elinchrom Octa, the big fella, almost directly over the lens and about 3’ or so from their, uh, faces. Key to the deal is the 4×8 piece of white foam core just out of frame about chest height, dishing some fill. Thing is, the fill board was too quiet for these boisterous lads, especially Evan, who is going Mike Tyson on Sakas’ ear, so I whipped out (“Eeeeek! Won’t somebody help that poor man?!”) an SB-800 and slammed it into SU4 mode (manual trigger eye), programmed it to ¼ power and popped that off the board. Shot 3 frames just to make sure the lunacy was forever captured, and negotiations begin today to keep the images out of my stock files. I mean, these fellas are eventually going to be president of something, and this is just plain and simple embarrassing. More tk.

Mentioned in this post:
- Nikon SB-800
- Justin Clamp
- Nikon D3
- Nikkor 24-70mm
- Elinchrom 74-Inch Octa Bank
- Foam Board

9    comments

Mar 17

Sometimes You Get the Shaft

In Lighting, On Location, Tips & Tricks at 7:15am

Nothing like a shaft of light for drama. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in places and wished I had a 12K movie light, a scissor lift and a big ass smoke machine. Shaft city! Just like in the movies!

But sometimes, it happens for you. Saw this light coming through the busted ceiling of the officer’s quarters on Corregidor, and I thought, you know, cool! Of course the ballerina available at the time was wearing dead white, so it meant I was going into close orbit around Ice Planet 255, but, I’m always up for an adventure. So she gets in there and does something appropriate, elegant and graceful. She is as soft and lovely as the light is harsh and slashing.

But where is she? One of the things you realize over time is that a successful photograph and a successful restaurant often have something in common. Location, location, location. Now I could have left well enough alone here, but hey, it’s me, remember? Never met a subject I couldn’t overlight, so we drug out a couple of SB800 strobes and simply laid them down on the ground, camera left and camera right, about 5′ in front of the lens. Didn’t put ‘em on sticks, cause the main source of light in the pic is the way overhead and it doesn’t really bounce off anything until it hits the ground. It’s not even spilling very much onto the wall, hence the wall color, which is pretty terrific, is gone. So if there is any bounce in the frame, anything that might logically reflect light, it’s the rubble strewn floor. So the units go on the floor.

In terms of color and detail, our eyes can see it. And can see her, and even the folds of the dress. That’s cause the eye is an amazing instrument, making nanosecond adjustments we’re not even aware of. The camera, as sophisticated as it is, is a 5 stop instrument. It makes the very smart decision to expose for the highlights, and kisses the shadows goodbye. Bye bye wall. Bye bye color. Bye bye context.

But you can make inputs to the frame and dial in some light from the SB units right from camera. Messed with them a bit, and came up with this. In other words, with these small flashes, you can bend even strong light in your favor, just a little.

Had a class running, so only shot about 4 or 5 frames of this, and each one I was dialing in some different EV values. I believe these two units were running somewhere around plus 1 EV. The effect on the wall is pretty soft, and could have made it softer yet by, say, running the units through umbrellas and laying them down on the floor. But umbrellas weren’t immediately available, so we moved fast and hoped the uneven junk on the floor would break the light up a little. Still pretty hard, though. Look at the shadow of her trailing leg. That definitive shadow gets softer as you go higher in the frame towards her arm, and the strobe mixes with a greater and greater percentage of available light. It’s fun to mess with this stuff, I tell ya. You throw everything into the hopper; your gut, your sense of time and place, your histograms, the light, the color, the subject, and voila! You have ze magnificent and tasty stew! Or, sometimes, you get something you wouldn’t feed your cat. What was I saying earlier about pictures and restaurants?

I like dance, what can I say? I’ve said many times that dancers and photographers have a lot in common in that we are hard working, creative, and underpaid. Recently, on a trip to Milan, the venerable La Scala School of Ballet graciously allowed me to shoot their workouts and practices. What a wonderful place!

Not only did I witness great dancers in training, the opportunity gave me a chance to practice more with the AF modes on my D3. More on that tk.

And finally…..HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good old St. Pat’s. First time I ever came home truly hammered. I was 17, and my high school senior class always marched in the parade. (We were taught by the Irish Christian Brothers, go figure.)

After the parade dispersed, all of us disappeared into bars that weren’t checking for ID, and proceeded to get stupid. I was lucky I found Grand Central Station and the train home. Only took like, 2 beers. Complete lightweight.

Now, the day is spent more quietly. I start my class today here in Santa Fe. (Don’t think they have a parade here, but that’s just a wild guess on my part.) It’ll be a great week, as they always are here at the workshops.

My friend Mark Krajnak, the K-Man, the man in the fedora, he of the Flickr site and the New Jersey Noir style of shooting, sent me a pictorial note of how he might spend St. Pat’s. Seems he got comfortable with an Irish writer and a bottle of Jameson’s:-)

15    comments

Mar 11

“Clicks” Cover Shot Explained & Vertical Grip

In Lighting, On Location, Tips & Tricks, Videos at 1:56pm

A reader wrote in and said they enjoyed the book, but was disappointed I didn’t discuss how I did the cover. So here goes.

The model is holding the jagged mirror in her left hand, and the camera is basically perched on her right shoulder. Shot with a D2Xs, with a 17-55, my favorite DX format lens. The camera sees the sky, and her reflection (tweaked the mirror just about where I wanted it). Then, off to camera right, is an SB-R200, the baby close-up brother to the SB800. It is about 2′ from the model’s face, just off the field of view, and controlled wirelessly from the SU 800 on the camera. As I recall, the sky is pulled down about a stop via minus one EV, and the flash is pumped up just a touch to compensate.

Da Grip….update….Couple of folks wrote about vertical grip on the camera. Here’s the thing. The grip I’m talking about really is mostly applicable to left eyed shooters of motor driven cameras. But that doesn’t mean elements of it–the boxer’s stance, the elbows tucked, center of gravity positioned properly, exhaling, etc. can’t be stripped out of this and applied on a selective basis. Some folks asked about shooting verticals. Without a vertical release, holding and firing the camera in the vertical position is plain and simple just tougher than holding it horizontally. (I have asked art directors for more money to shoot a vertical picture as opposed to a horizontal one, just on the basis that it is harder to turn the camera vertically. Haven’t gotten it yet. I’m only kidding, but if someone offered me the dough I would take it!)

Also, for those interested, here’s the video version of Da Grip and an outtake featuring Nigel, my wife Annie’s cat, who joined us on the set for a bit.

30    comments

Feb 22

Update on The Moment It Clicks

In Lighting, Links, Thoughts at 2:09pm

The book has been pretty well received. When I first looked at its ratings climb on Amazon, I just figured it was my sisters, clicking away, running up their credit cards, helping out their baby bro.

But, the book kept climbing, and holding up a pretty high ranking, spiking all the way to #10 of all books on Amazon. That puts us up there with all the murder mysteries and romance novels!

I thought about it and figured the appeal must be the noir-ish, sweaty style in which I wrote it, thrown in with some good photo info. Think of mixing the Adorama catalog with a bodice ripper.

A sample:

It was a dark and stormy night. Outside the windows of the cheap motel, the thunder rolled. Her heart was quaking. He had sparked her with a pepper, re-arranged her pixels, and she knew she would never forget it.

“Will you stay?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

In the flashes of lightning, she could see his face was stern and resolute. “I can’t stay, babe. I told you when all this started I wasn’t a stick around kind of guy.” The lightning effect was augmented, of course, by the Pocket Wizard transceiver he had in his pocket, tripping an Elinchrom Ranger RX unit with a Free Lite head and a long throw reflector on a c-stand complete out in the parking lot. Inside the reflector pan was loosely taped a Rosco Cinegel quarter blue (Quarter CTB), to give the light a pale, cool feel, just like lightning.

“I know,” she replied. Her voice was steady but her quivering bosom gave lie to her words. “Will you come back?”

“Depends if there’s ever any news again in this lousy burg,” he said. “It would also help if you had a twin sister. But I guess that’s no go on both counts.”

He shouldered his cameras and stepped to the door. Framed by the lightning and the slashing rain, she could see he had a Nikon D3 with a 200-400mm AFS VR Zoom f/4G IF-ED. How she longed to touch it one last time!

He tossed her an Lexar 8gb UDMA 300x CF card, and on it was scrawled a note….”Thanks for the good times…”

When she looked up, he was gone.

Kidding of course….

[More after the jump]

Read the rest of this entry »

35    comments