Twin Geeks Photography

The following shots of fire spinners are some of the more challenging shots I’ve taken with off-camera lighting. Here’s my thought process involved.

First of all, until PocketWizard’s ControlTL and RadioPoppers came along, off camera flash for the most part was a 100% manual affair. This may seem intimidating to beginners, but really, with a few simple rules, setting the exposure isn’t that difficult.

Let’s get the technical details out of the way: these shots were taken on a Canon EOS 5D Mk ii, with either the EF24-70mm f/2.8L or the EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS. Lighting was provided by a single, film era Nikon SB-25 ($60.00 used). The flash was gelled CTO and the camera’s white balance set to daylight. Balanced against daylight, the flash’s output takes on an orange tinge – making it appear that the subjects are lit by fire light.

As an engineer, I approach setting the correct exposure as an algebra problem. For any off camera shot there only exists 4 user-controlled variables:

* The output intensity of the flash (as seen by the subject)
* Shutter speed
* Aperture
* ISO

Just like solving an algebra equation, we try to nail down the unknowns. The first one I tackle is the flash’s output. I know that to have any chance of getting good shots, I need to shoot *a lot*, given the unpredictable nature of the dance subjects’ movements. So, having to sit around and wait for the flash to recharge (2-3 seconds) is probably not acceptable. My choices are really M1/4 and M1/8 – quarter and eighth power. I know that I’m going to be trying to drag my shutter speed (more below) out to possibly 1 sec exposure, so M1/4, and being mindful not doing a “spray and pray”, would be my good starting point.

Once I set my flash output, I arrive at preliminary numbers for 2 more variables: ISO and Aperture. By now, the sun had set and the sky’s rapidly darkening, so for a first order approximation I can afford to ignore the ambient light. From experience, I know that the combination of a gell and a diffuser is about 1.5 stops of light being taken out, so I started at f/2.8 and ISO200. the exposure is decent and so I run with it.

Now, my last variable: shutter speed. this really depends on the dancer i’m photographing. I want to capture as much of the fire trails as possible, so i experimented with various speeds, from 1/6 to 1 second.

Occasionally, the amount of fire being spun creates a large enough “light source” that it contributes to the ambient exposure and blurs my final images. when that happens, I up the flash output to 1/2 power or full power, and then stop down my aperture the corresponding 1-2 stops to compensate. this way, the ambient light contributes less to the overall exposure compared to the flash pulse – and thus a sharper, more well defined image.  See here – notice how there’s a lot less ghosting of the face, etc.  The flash’s much stronger pulse is what’s recording the face, but the aperture, stopped down to f/5.6, means that the ambient light sources isn’t recording much onto the sensor for the rest of the exposure.

Sometimes, having the flash misfire isn’t a bad thing.  The flash failed to go off for the following image, but I really liked the results.  It also gives you a good idea of what the ambient only contribution to the image is:

“Woah.  Print and frame my work, in 2 weeks?”

So, a while ago, I won a spot in the Pravda Studios / Seattle Flickrites Gallery show.  Up until that point, I havn’t printed a single picture that I’ve shot – I’ve been content with just displaying my work on an LCD monitor.  Suddenly faced with a photo gallery show, I decided to give myself a crash course on print making and framing of artwork.

It was no doubt an expensive endeavor – I believe that anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well – and even though the rules allow for matted / mounted artwork, I felt that it was important to complete the entire process, both from an academic perspective, and from a presentation point of view.  Afterall, matted prints will get dinged up quickly (have you seen my home office?), and I’d be flushing the printing costs down the drain.

Now, if I had won the lotto, this would have been an easy exercise.  Buy a nice big Epson / Canon ink jet printer, print all my stuff, take to frame shop.  The only problem is that I don’t have the space for a big honkin’ printer, and a frame shop would want about $80-150 per piece framed.  Multiply by the 10 pieces I’m displaying, and I’m looking at blowing a week or more’s worth of take home pay for 10 pieces of artwork that probably won’t sell.   As far as ROI (return on investment goes) that isn’t exactly attractive.

Given the time crunch and budgetary limitations, I chose to go the following route:

• Shop for pre-made frames from IKEA, Ben Franklin, etc – ideally from the discount pile.
• Calculate based on frame size and mat availabilty the size of the prints that I can make to fill the frame.  (See below for calculation notes)
• Ask very nicely at the local frame shop – I used Frame Up Studios in Fremont- great guys – to recut my existing mats, if possible – or cut new mats, if not.
• Borrow time in the engineering lab at work to clean/ reassemble the frames.

Now, with this approach, I actually have a chance of recouping my investment.  It’ll be much more hands-on (although, much more stressful) I’ll definitely learn more.  Below are my results from my little adventure.

Shopping for Frames and Pre-cut Mats

Just like how hot-dog buns comes in packs of 6 and hot dogs in packs of 8 – the size of frames, precut mats, and camera aspect ratios is another prime example of inter-related industries not communicating with each other.  For most DSLR shooters out there, an uncropped image tends to fall into two ratios:  3:2, or 4:3.  The 3:2 aspect ratio stems from the ISO1007 135 film format, where the image size was 36mm x 24mm with a 2mm gap between each image on the negative.  The more common APS-C form factor keeps the same 3:2 aspect ratio also, with a image size of 25.1 x 16.7mm.  Somewhat less common is the 4/3s camera system, which uses a 4:3 aspect ratio to match common non-wide screen computer monitor aspect ratios (VGA @ 640x 480, SVGA @ 800×600, XGA @ 1024 x 768, SXGA @ 1280x 1024, UXGA @ 1600×1200, etc).

However, this doesn’t really help you when you buy pre-cut mats.  After 4″ x 6″ prints, there are no pre-cut mats with an opening that matches the 3:2 ratio.  And if you’re a 4/3rds shooter, the choices are even more bleak.  5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, 16″ x 20″ – these dont’ really help you much.  Sure, you can always crop your shots to match these print sizes, but often that is an artistic compromise at best.  And if you’re somewhat adventurous and crop some of your shots to a 16:9 aspect ratio for display on wide-screen monitors … well, good luck finding a frame to hold that.

My frame selection was dictated by cost – I knew that the worksmanship will be sub-par, they’d scratch and ding easily, but IKEA frames were … adequate.  It was a case where we’d say in Chinese that the flour costs more than the bread – at about $15 a frame, including mat and glass and mounting hardware, I’d be paying more in raw material costs alone if I were to try to DIY.  With the understanding that I’ll be printing my shots on Rachel’s Canon Pixma Pro 9000 (max print size:  13″ x 19″)  and competition rules that states a minimum of 8″ x 10″ for prints, I worked out the math to figure that the most economic way to comply with the rules is to print 2 prints per sheet of photo paper.  Therefore, my maximum short-dimension of the print cannot exceed 9.5″ (19″ / 2).  Giving myself a border to work with around the print, I arrived at a print size of 8″ x 12″ (2:3) for my regular “SOOC” crops.

As luck will have it, the pre-existing mat from the IKEA fram has a slightly smaller opening.  So I was able to have the opening enlarged (@$5.00 / mat) at Frame-Up to get the mat sizes that I need.  Problem solved.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about the decision to step up the game a bit and build my own frames and cut my own mats.  Stay tuned.

Well, I finally ran out of clever blog titles. Probably for the best!

Today was a bit crazy, and so I found myself with midnight approaching and no topic to post. A quick survey of some folks online produced the question of ‘How does one do night photography?’ So, now I have a topic. Huzzah! It’s sort of basic, but as this was a requested question, I’ll work with it.

Night photography is, of course, tricky due to the low light. So there are two basic types of night photography to concern yourself with.

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So today is a first here on the Shutteresque blog, where we take a question from the audience! My friend Jon asked me, “If you’re trying to take a picture of a cityscape, how do you pick a focal point?”

When you are shooting with a point-and-shoot camera, there’s probably not much you can do other than try to pick the most distinctive/unique building, or some other element of the scene which stands out and deserves to be the center of attention. The easiest way is to find what draws your eye naturally once you’ve composed a shot, and focus on that. Generally that will be the element that draws the viewer’s eye as well, so having it in focus is an easy choice. But you can get creative; sometimes I like to leave the entire cityscape ever-so-slightly blurred, and focus on a tree nearer to me.

If you’re shooting with a camera with manual controls — and this does include some ‘point and shoots,’ I note — you have a few more options beyond just picking a focal point and taking what the camera gives you. But to really make use of those options you need a bit of understanding of precisely how a photographic image is exposed.

Onwards to the quick summary/refresher course!

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(I’ve been asked why I’m breaking some of my posts; I’m trying to be nice to people on dialup and not dumping all the images of a post into the initial body. Instead, I’m placing them behind the cut to make things easier.)

Sometimes you have an image where you like the composition, but your primary subject doesn’t stand out as well as you would like. There are various ways you can bring a subject out a bit more: blurring the rest of the image, or brightening just the subject (or making the rest of the image a bit duller), and so on. But one of the most popular and most effective is the use of selective color.

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Because I /am/ trying to keep to my resolution to post to this blog once a day for a while, you get a last-minute post. But since I am tired after tonight’s “Brews and Views” photographer meetup, you get just a short one.

One of the joys of digital photography (or scanned negatives) is that you can toy with your shots after they’re taken. I’m not talking just about Photoshop work here, but about finding other pictures hidden in your original shot. Sometimes when I cannot get out and shoot for some reason or another, I go through my Aperture library and find old shots to revisit.

Often times I find that experience has let me see my old shots in a different way, and can see additional pictures I previously did not. Sometimes simple changes, sometimes more complex. (continue reading…)

(I’m trying to write a post a day on here for now. Let’s see how long this lasts…)

Many of us love black and white photography, and I am no exception. I still have a Canon film body (a dinky Rebel K2) and will periodically shoot black and white film with it. For all our obsession with megapixels and lack-of-noise and everything else, there’s something still very striking about the contrast and grain pattern of monochrome film.

Of course, I find that shooting my monochrome work is easier with digital than with film these days, simply due to a decreasing number of places where one can get film properly developed and a lack of space for my own darkroom.

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I’ve heard people lament how the 5D Mark II can shoot in incredibly low light, but not always autofocus when the contrast is poor. There is a little-known but extremely useful trick with most of the Canon DSLRs and the Canon Speedlite external flashes which lets you get around this issue.

If you’ve used a Speedlite on your Canon, you have likely seen the little red grid that the Speedlite casts when trying to focus; the camera seizes on that and can do much faster and more effective focusing even in low light. This is useful, but sometimes you want the fast focusing in situations where you aren’t going to be using the Speedlite.

Most of the Canon DSLR bodies are capable of using the Speedlite only for the focus-assist capabilities rather than for the actual flash. The trick is to leave the Speedlite mounted on the camera and powered on, but disable flash firing in the body.

The function may be in slightly variant places on different camera bodies. For instance, on the Canon EOS 40D the function can be found under the second settings menu (the wrench with two dots), under ‘External Flash’ options; you can disable the flash firing from there. For the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the option is in the ‘External Speedlite settings’ in the third settings menu (the wrench with three dots), and then in the first flash functions menu. (For the 5D2, this menu is only available when the flash is mounted, as there are some flash-specific options which appear when a compatible flash is present.)

I’ve personally used this technique extensively with a 580EX on both the 40D and the 5D Mark II. I know that this works with the 580EX II as well, and can also be done on the 50D. I’m not certain if the 430EX, or lower-end camera bodies such as the Rebel series, support this trick. (Comment if you know!)

In any case, once the flash firing is disabled you leave the Speedlite mounted and turned on, and the camera will use only the AF assist grid. Your low-light focusing will be immensely improved; I know several band photographers who use this trick for shooting shows without using a flash but still getting quick and sharp focus.

Edit: I have been told that the other Canon Speedlites can indeed also be used this way.

Edit 2: Terence points out, quite rightly, in the comments that the Canon ST-E2 wireless hotshoe remote also can be used this way. If you have an ST-E2, you can simply mount that instead, and take up less space on the camera.