Small lights in a big studio... and more underpants...

Hey there all and thanks for tuning in for another blog post. Today we have a little bit of a continuation from the last blog post, insomuch that the images accompanying this blog were taken during the same shoot with Serena.

So why share these images, you ask? Well the thing I liked about these is that I did this entire series of images using only speedlights, triggered by PocketWizard TT1 and TT5’s. From memory I have only ever done this once before, but as that was some time ago (a few years in fact) so I was keen to try this out again.

The diagram on the right shows the lighting set-up itself. Pretty simple really. I mounted the softboxes and beauty dish to my SB-900’s by using a bunch of these great little flash brackets that you can get on eBay. They are so much sturdier than some of the other rubbish out there and they really do take a beating and are capable of supporting quite a bit of weight.

I don’t quite remember the exact light ratios – sorry – but I can tell you that the key light (the beauty dish) was metering on Serena’s face at f/4 and I’m pretty sure that the softboxes were about 2/3^rd’s of a stop below that; which makes them register the light meter at f/3.2. Shooting at this aperture allowed me to capture some of that gorgeous depth-of-field that you can see. Yummy. Well, I like it at least…

The image on the left above was actually a test shot, wherein I turned the beauty dish light off all-together “just to see what it looked like”. I have to say that I don’t mind it but all in all I thought there was just a little too much contrast for my liking, for what I had envisaged in my head to what was appearing on the back of my Nikon D3s. Not to worry, a flick of a switch on the PocketWizard AC3 zone controller sitting atop the camera and the beauty dish was turned back on again. That sure as heck beats getting up and down and having to fiddle around on the back of the flash itself to adjust stuff. Enough said.

Although speaking of not saying quite enough, I should point out that all the lights, even though they were TTL capable SB-900’s being triggered by TTL capable PocketWizard radio’s; everything was set to manual. Again, although I didn’t write it down; but from memory I think the beauty dish was at about 1/8^th power, making the softboxes dialled into 1/8^th minus 2/3 of a stop. This translated into almost instantaneous power recycling and allows 8 shots in one quick burst without having to stop and let the flashes recharge. Cool.

Getting back to the lighting diagram just for a moment, you may also notice that all the lights were gridded. I really love the control this gives for reducing the amount of light that spills all over the place. The beauty dish also had a “sock” on it in addition to the grid to soften the light just a little bit more. So the white backdrop roll that I was using turned that nice pleasant neutral grey.

Well that’s about all I can think to write for now. It’s been a really long week and a flat-out weekend so I’m going to call it a night. Thanks for reading, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.

Still hanging in there... and a bunch of paper...

Hey there everyone.

Wow, two months since my last blog post huh. Seems like that long too actually, been so much happening. So much so that I almost forget all that has been happening. The highlights?

Well, we now have hired two new assistants, so welcome to Beck and Alanna. It was a much bigger process than I imagined trying to hire an assistant. We were literally inundated with applicants to our little advertisement. I interviewed over 20 applicants in the end. There was such a wealth of talented photographers applying to work with us, it was all a little humbling. But the tough decision had to be made and these guys kinda shone over the rest. Awesome to have you guys!

We also have a brand new website - finally. Check it out at www.timography.com.au. My wife, Dee who runs the office and does all the accounting, liasing, back-office stuff that I really can't stand to do organised it through Oliver and the guys and gals at Perth Web Design, and I think they have done a great job. It took us a little longer than expected to get it online as we were so busy with clients that it sort of took a back seat for a while but we finally managed to get all of the content uploaded and ready to go. I hope you like it.

Um, what else? There’s been lots of new gear that I will probably get around to talking about at some point in the near future. There’s been a few mishaps mid-shoot that really put me on the spot, but we came out on top in the end. Speaking of new gear, the topic of tonight’s blog post has come about by some of that new gear, or moreso the need to get rid of some old gear...

Last week saw the arrival of the long awaited PocketWizard Flex and Mini TTL radio triggers for Nikon products. These puppies are amazing! I got the opportunity to use them on a wedding shoot just yesterday and oh my God – they are brilliant. It is so nice to be able to get consistent flash exposure, wireless, in TTL. Have I said how fantastic it is? Turn up on a location, turn on the flashes and triggers, take a bunch of shots and move on. No more having to set everything on manual anymore (although it still definitely has its merits, more on that later too!).

Anyways, the new triggers meant that it was time to finally offload my old Pixel TTL radio triggers. These things never really worked that well anyways so they have been collecting dust in my office. I needed to get some images in a hurry for eBay but I couldn’t be bothered setting up my light tent and portable tabletop lighting rig. It was late in the evening and the wedding shoot earlier that day really took it out of me!

So I thought... I have a bunch of flashes that will work on wireless CLS mode. I thought some more. I remember reading on the Strobist blog where David had found himself in a similar situation and managed to fashion himself a temporary light box out of a bunch of A4 sheets of plain old white office paper. So I gave it a go.

As you can tell from the image above, there isn’t a lot to it – other than a bunch of flashes sitting on the floor! They were all set to the same channel and group so they would all put out equal power and distribute their light fairly evenly. So that’s three Nikon SB-900’s and one SB-600, all in remote mode. The whole lot was being triggered by using a SB-800 in commander mode sitting on top of my D700. I ended up dialling in -0.7EV for group A (the flashes on the floor) and I had the SB-800 set so that it was turned on to TTL and contributing to the exposure. It took a little bit of playing around but I ended up setting the SB-800 so that the flash head itself was upside down but parallel to the floor, with the flash head turned around so that I could use the built-in bounce card to push the light up to the roof and bounce back down on the subject. Oh, and I dialled in the SB-800 to be +0.3EV.

So yeah, as you can see, the end result turned out pretty well. I was really happy with how the images of the Pixel triggers and the PocketWizard triggers turned out. Look for yourself. If I hadn’t spend the last 5 minutes explaining the whole process you would be hard pressed to tell that the images had been taken on the floor with a bunch of A4 paper and 5 flashes.

So why did I do it this way? Because I could. Do I need another reason? Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.

Video Blog #10 - Using Nikon CLS on location...

Hi everybody. Welcome to another thrilling – edge of your seat blog post. Ok, so maybe it isn’t quite that exciting but I’m sure that both of you that read this will get something out of it! Ha.

So, to tonight’s video. Right off the bat I want to send a big thank you to John at ViWest Video Instruction for all his help and enthusiasm in getting these videos out there. This is our first episode using a green screen background which allowed us to use the virtual apartment backdrop. Cool stuff.

The location we used for the video is an old disused dairy milking shed! It turned out to be a superb spot and there really was somewhere cool to take a shot almost everywhere you turned your head. Very cool stuff.

Anyway that’s enough from me for a little bit, have a look at the video…

What I’ll do now is just give you all a quick rundown on the lighting set-up that was used for each set that we did in the video.

This is probably my favorite image of the afternoon. It was actually the last shot that was taken on that segment of live shooting on the video. I probably shouldn’t be telling you all this, but in this shot the hair light positioned at the rear of the set has actually gone off a little over-cooked. It was actually dialed in to be quite a bit softer than it is in this image. But this is actually a good point to remember when it comes to using Nikon CLS out in the field, or in any location for that matter.

My point being - the CLS system only works well to a point. Let me now qualify that statement. Is it relying on the fact that the camera’s metering system can get a clear view of all the light that is being added in to the shot. This is obviously very easy for the key light (softbox) as the light it is emitting is filling the foreground; i.e., Serena, very clearly. CLS works by incorporating Nikons wonderful i-TTL metering system wherein a series of usually unperceivable “pre-flashes” occur momentarily after the shutter button is pressed but before the image is actually taken. Now, in this particular image the camera’s meter must have been dissatisfied with the amount of light it could see coming from the hair light during the pre-flash so it just dumped everything into the shot. In this instance I recon the result is quite pleasing, but it is not strictly what I told the camera to do.

So this is something to keep in mind; wherever possible make sure that the light coming from each remote speedlight is clearly visible to the camera’s meter… unless you don’t want it to see…

Anyway, to quickly recap on the video, the main light is coming from a Nikon SB-900 shooting through a collapsible Lastolite softbox. The rear light is a Nikon SB-800 mounted on a shelf on the back wall by using a Manfrotto spring clamp. That light is also gridded using a newly purchased Premier Flex Adaptor System and a Honeycomb diffuser or grid. I have only just heard about the Premier flash accessories and I have to say that they work really well. They also do a Beauty Dish for a speedlight that I intend to purchase tomorrow and give it a good workout. More on that in the coming weeks…

This next shot is just a really simple set-up. This was taken using only the shoot through umbrella and SB-900; the hair light was not on for this particular exposure. In hindsight I think I would have liked to have the umbrella a little closer to Serena as although an umbrella is a soft light modifier there are a few harsh shadows in the image simply because of the way we took the shot and due to the narrowness of the room we were in, I had to position the umbrella on the other side of the room; as you can see in the video.

That actually brings up another lesson for the younger players out there. A light source is only as “soft” as the distance between it and your subject. That same umbrella placed 300mm from Serena’s head would produce virtually no shadows whatsoever but rather it would wrap around her face enveloping it in a wonderful soft glow. But, move that same light source and modifier (the umbrella!) 3000mm from the subject and this is the result; the shadows are much more pronounced. This goes for absolutely any light modifier too, whether it is an umbrella, softbox or silk. The closer the light source is to your subject, the softer it will appear.

And now, the final image for today’s blog post. We were running out of time and had to do one more lighting scenario to wrap up the video. We actually took a bit of time getting the last scenario (with the umbrella) right. All the while the sun was setting right behind us, but we could not see it directly from the room we were in. When we finished though and came out into the light – my word it looked cool! There was only one thing for it; place Serena in the huge doorway at the end of the shed with the sun right behind her.

I made mention of this next fact in the video, but I’ll say it again. From experience, especially in bright light scenarios like this one, I find it beneficial to be as close to your light source as possible. This is because we are only using light, or in this case infrared light, to trigger the flashes. In really bright light this system does not work at all if you are more than a few feet away which is why in the video I don’t use anything else other than a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Ideally I would like to use my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for portraits but this would mean that unless we were in total cover (like the first scenario for instance) the remote flashes simply will not receive the signal from the commander flash on top of my D700.

Anyway, this last set-up is just using the Lastolite softbox again and a SB-900. I set the metering on the camera to [Centre Weighted] and took a meter reading from Serena’s face and then re-composed the scene and took the shot. This ensures that the camera will send enough flash to correctly expose Serena’s face. I had actually set the camera to manual exposure for this shot. I pointed the camera at the background and took note of the exposure meter in the viewfinder. From memory it was something like 1/2000^th second shutter @ f/4.5, ISO200. I then set the exposure +2 stops, or about 1/500^th second at f/4.5 to really blow out the background. This also produces another effect; it means that all that sun-setting goodness will produce a nice natural rim light on the subject as it has done here. Point to note on this one – i-TTL works with Nikons no matter what shutter speed you have selected when you have [Auto(FP)] sync speed set in-camera. Sorry Canon guys! But the end result is quite nice as you can see.

Ok, well I think that is enough from me for one sitting. Have a great week everyone! Oh, don’t forget to keep your comments and suggestions coming – I really appreciate them.