Get 'em While You Can: $8 Gear Cases at WalMart

You wanna know what is most likely to kill your photo gear? Your trunk. Rattling around back there (you know, the way you drive) is pretty much tantamount to living in a rock tombler.

A poster on the Strobist Discussion Group on Flickr found something which is too good a deal not to bring up to the main board: $8 gear hard cases on the clearance shelf at WallyMart.

Says Photo_Jeffrey:

"They look like a Pelican case except I'm sure the quality isn't quite there and I'm pretty sure they aren't waterproof. Still though, it was a pretty good deal."

They aren't really photo cases. They are pistol cases made by Plano. (Hey, this is WalMart, after all.) But the middle layer of foam is the diced, pluck-out kind, so it can make whatever shape you want.

Besides, what could be better for getting your subjects in a coopoerative mood than to whip out a "gear" case with that "Saye haello to mye leetle friend," Tony-Montana-from-Scarface look?

Thanks for the tip, Photo_Jeffrey.

Interest Check: Strobist Podcasts

Having participated in exactly three podcast interviews in my whole life, I am now toying with the idea of doing it myself.

Many of the Lighting 101 topics in particular could use some fleshing out, and having the extra info would be useful to some of those readers who are not completely grasping the concepts.

That said, I would like to know what you guys think. Worth the effort? Would it be useful?

Here's what I have:

• Close to zero experience
• Sound editing software
• A microphone
• A face made for radio

Here's what I need:

• Some feedback as to what would be useful to you guys, content-wise
• Some good suggestions for a podcast hosting site

As far as the latter, I do not need anything fancy. I can upload generic .mp3's, and the ideal place would host them in a way that a simple URL would access them. I have no FTP access that I can use here at Blogger, so I am looking outside the fold.

Free would be very nice. I mean, if YouTube can do it for video, someone has to be doing it for audio. Bonus points for low pain-in-the-butt factor on the interface.

Please place any ideas and suggestions here.

Background Assignment Entries Arriving; Bits and Pieces

I see some of you are already putting up your second assignment, including this effort by Righteye.

(Click on the photo to pull up the tagged background entries so far.)

You still have plenty of time, mind you. But I do occasionally check on you guys.

Meanwhile, back in my neck of the woods, I hit the studio today with dreams of a cool, light-painted product shot dancing in my head.

As it turns out, a bottle of beer is perhaps the most ill-suited item for "light painting" on the face of the earth. All that curved glass gave me fits with my reflections.

So I dropped back and punted, bailing to plan "B." It involved a neat little double-diffused lighting technique that I will put up and explain when the photo actually runs next week.

On those times when you cannot control the reflective quality of the surface of the subject, you just have to create a light source which gives you exactly the gradient reflection that the glass needs. More on that later.

It was actually strange to be lighting in a studio, instead of on location. I used our fancy new Profoto gear, which cost more than my car is worth. Honestly, I'd be scared to cart this stuff around.

I just finished my first of two scheduled podcasts, this one being for StudioLighting.net. It's about a half an hour long, and will be broadcast (podcast?) in early August. I will put up a link when it is live.

I am also supposed to do one for a photo podcast site called "Tips from the Top Floor".

I'll link to that when it is live, too.

External Sync Mod for Canon Flash

Michael Bass is offering a neat little mod for you Canon 580 EX speedlight owners. He will add a miniphone jack to the flash for $59.95 plus shipping. For that price, you also get fast turnaround and a cable (shown in the photo) to connect the flash to a Pocket Wizard.

This thing works both ways - tied to a receiver to fire the flash, or with the flash on camera and hooked to a transmitter to fire it (to light up a second flash.)

This will, of course, void your warranty. But the electronics of adding an extra jack are very simple, so I would not expect complications form this particular surgery. But be advised.

There's more info here.

Varsity Flash Presentation

No, not strobe, but Macromedia Flash. (You'll need it to see the stuff.)

My paper put up a slide show of some of the Varsity covers (and inside shots) and it looks pretty neat. You'll recognize some of the pictures from having appeared here earlier.

I dunno how long they will leave it up, so give it a look. Almost all of these were done with just one or two small flashes.

Check it out here.

(Click at the bottom right of the pop-up slideshow to see photo captions and credits.)

On Assignment: 5-Minute Test Shot

As I was heading home from work the other day, I was getting into the elevator at work as my boss and a features photo editor were getting out.

"I am down to one project," I mentioned to them. "You got anything?"

(I like having a few things going at once, in different stages of development. So I am not shy about asking what may be available to stick in the pipeline.)

"I got a food shoot next week," the picture editor said.

It's not a project, but it is a one-shot deal that I can hit with a little advance thinking, so I'll take it. I'd tell you what it is, but it's not cool to give any local competition a heads-up as to what we have in the on-deck circle. But it's a basic food item, which will need a tabletop illustration.

And for the purposes of this post, it really does not matter what it is, anyway. The point is that I spent the rest of the 30-minute drive home figuring out how I wanted to shoot it.

I decided to try out the technique of light painting for the first time. I've seen lots of cool stuff done with it, and this subject could use a little visual dressing up.

Long story short, after dinner I am in the darkened upstairs hall of my house with my camera on a tripod and a Nikon SB-800 speedlight in my hands.

The Nikon SB-800 has a neat "modeling light," which is really about a 100hz stroboscopic flash function. The flashes fire so fast that it effectively turns the flash into a very powerful flashlight that lights up for about a second at a time.

What I wanted to do was to very quickly test this modeling light function to see if it would work for light painting a small object. So I shot a tennis shoe in the dark at f/11 for 30 secs at ASA 200 and played with the strobe, aiming it at the sneaker and firing bursts from a variety of directions during the 30-sec exposures.

The goal here is not to make a great photo. It was to quickly test a "proof-of-concept" to confirm that the flash could be used as a light source for light painting small objects.

I made four frames in about 5 minutes, refining my technique every time. They are represented by the four-shot montage at top. They are in order -1, 2 are at the top; 3, 4 are on the bottom. The first shot was overexposed because (1) I was working without a meter, and (2) a meter would not have been very helpful anyway, given the number of variables in a moving lightsource time exposure.

The idea is to get it reasonably close, and then quickly zero in on what you want.

By the time I had shot fourth frame, I was confident that I could get a nice photo out of the technique by using the SB-800 as a light painting wand. It's surprisingly easy to get a cool, 3-d type of look with just the one small lightsource.

So I put my gear away and began the more difficult process of convincing my 5-year-old that taking a bath would actually be in his best interest for the evening.

(That's rather like presenting an argument before the Supreme Court.)

Getting the technique down enough to prove it will work left me with figuring out just what look I want for the final food shot, and how I will go about getting it.

Which is what I am thinking about right now.

Always think of a big problem as a series of easily solvable smaller problems. Just crank through the little issues, one by one, and the photos will fall into place.

I can't wait to play with the technique at length. And I will post the food picture after it is shot and published.

Next: Shiny, Pretty Things

Boot Camp Assignment #2: Background Check

Okay, so you've got a headshot under your belt. It's a good start, and I hope it has provided the kick in the pants many of you needed to get up and actually start doing some of this stuff.

The vast majority of you did quite well on the first assignment. And I think most of the misses can be attributed to aiming too high, as far as complexity of the photo was concerned.

The most important lessons to have gleaned from assignment #1 would be:

1) Show up with your best effort. Even on those little, "try-you-on-for-size" assignments.

2) Aim for the headshot sweet spot: Keep it simple enough to look great it runs tiny, but elegant enough to hold as a cover.

3) Don't wait until the last nanosecond to start your assignment. (heh, heh...)

Boot Camp assignment #2 will require just a little advance planning. It will make use of one of my very favorite back-pocket tricks, and I hope that you will find some value in the technique.

But before we get to the background assignment, I would like to give you a little background on finding (and using) a suitable collection of backgrounds. (Can you tell I am writing this after a long day at work?)

When we did the sunset portrait in On Assignment, the idea was to think of a sunset as a unique, custom background delivered to you for free every evening.

But sunsets are unpredictable. The serendipity of an unpredictable sunset adds to its beauty, of course. But there are times when you need to know exactly what you are going to get. Sometimes sunsets just don't materialize very well. And many times they might not be appropriate for a particular assignment.

When most people think of setting up lights and shooting in front of a background, they tend to picture a photog in a studio, shooting in front of a big piece of paper. Savage is one of the most popular brands. I'll admit to having gone through quite a bit of "Savage Thunder Grey" in my day, before pretty much swearing off of the stuff.

I have nothing against paper backgrounds, per se. It's just that they are so, well, boring. It just fits right in with that "lighting-is-something-you-do-in-a-studio" ethic that I have come to see as needlessly constricting and expensive. And the background paper itself ain't cheap, either.

About ten years ago, it occurred to me that there were literally hundreds of much more interesting backgrounds within 30 minutes of my house, just waiting to be shot against. Not only were they free, but I didn't even have to find some way to store them when they were not being used.

After realizing that this resource was there for the exploiting, I began to look at many ordinary scenes in completely new ways. I began to shoot snapshots of brick walls, rock walls, old barns, public murals (I love those) and many other interesting, varied, textured surfaces that eventually became my own little private collection of layers of interest for my future photos.

I keep them all in a little folder on my laptop. I give them coded filenames that tell me everything I need to remember about them.

For instance, a filename for a nice, textured building surface photo might be:

N_820CharlesBalt_PU.jpg

There's a lot of info there. First and most important, the "N" stands for "North," which is my favorite direction for the background to be facing. I am in the Northern hemisphere, so a north-facing wall is in shadow anytime of the day (as the sun arcs across the southern sky for me.) You Southern hemisphere folks will perfer the south-facing facades.

East and West facades are most useful in evening and morning, respectively, as they are in shadow during those times. Shadow/shade is useful because the light will be even. And it'll be knocked down a couple of stops, which makes lighting much easier with low-powered flashes. And, if you warm up your flash, the cooler-colored light in the shade on the background provides another layer of color contrast separation in the photo,

Next is "820CharlesBalt," which tells me the address and city. (This address is made-up, for you Baltimore readers. No headstart for you.)

Last is PU, which is short for "public" - easy access. "PR" would mean "private," which is fine, but that is just another permission hoop to jump through. Some backgrounds are worth it, though. And if you ask nicely, most owners are flattered.

This brings up the point of whether or not you have permission to shoot in a city locale. Big cities like New York, Paris, etc., (and even many second-tier cities) have permit requirements for shooting on public streets. While it is another layer of hassle, I do not want to hear anyone moaning that they live in Paris/London/Tokyo/etc., and that this is a huge disagvantage.

You have tons more choices that the rest of us, so quit your whining. Be creative. Use inconspicuous lighting gear. (Maybe have someone hold your small flash instead of using a stand.) Shoot early morning. Head to the suburbs, out of the city proper. Be adaptable to your limitations.

Once you start cataloging all that your city, town or rural environment has to offer you as a thinking, planning photographer, you will likely be amazed at the possibilities. And you will wonder why you hadn't been doing this all along.

So now that you have a cool background or 20, what are you going to do with it?

The easy way is to use one softened light and shoot one or two stops over the ambient. Late even or early morning gets you lower ambient (and easier overpowering) if you need it.

You'll have a few decisions to make. Hard light or soft? Close enough to the background to incorporate the subject's shadow - or not?

And, if you have the ability, one light or two?

This is where that second light can really pay off. Lighting your subject and the background separately can give you loads of control.

To visualize this, (and I actually want you to do that right now) think of the background light first. Place the light right behind your subject. They will conveniently block it from the camera's view, providing they are not Calista Flockhart or one of the 23-lb Olsen twins.

Now, with the light firing just to the cool background you found, you have created a silhouette of your subject. Even here, you have lots of possibilities. Warm colored background light? Cool? Even? Zoomed-in-center-hotspot? You get the idea. And that is before you have started to choose how you will define your subject with the other light.

And using just one light can get you some cool stuff, too. How far above the ambient will you shoot? Or will you let the flash light the background, too? What about a hard-angled, snooted light to bring out the texture of a subject directly against a rough background?

Remember that the ratio of the flash-to-subject distance to the flash-to-background distance will determine how bright the background is, compared to the subject. Total control, even not taking daylight into account. Read through some of the Lighting 101 posts on balancing strobe if you need a refresher.

Want to completely nuke the daylight? Wait twelve hours after your little sunny problem and I assure you that overpowering the ambient will not be a problem.

And night street lighting provides enough light to focus by, while being easy to completely overpower with small flash.

"But Dave, where are the examples? We need some examples!"

Nope.

I am not trotting out five or six good idea just to have you guys ape one of them and not have to think on your own. That's kind of the whole point here.

Heck, I might even shoot this one myself. Haven't decided yet. (I do have so much free time, you know...)

So, Phil Phlashen, here is your assignment:

Need editorial portait of Pat Coolwall.

Will run full page in magazine, so shoot vertical. Photo will run on a left-hand page, so assume that when composing. Please light it.

We have color on the page, so color is highly preferable, but not required. If you shoot black and white, you'd better "wow" us.

Framing can be anything from waist-up to full body. No tight headshots, please, as it will run full page. try for high impact, good lighting, strong engagement between the subject and the viewer. The reader should feel that they know something about Pat after seeing this photo.

As always, if in doubt, keep it simple.

Deadline is 7/16/06, 11:59pm your local time.

Tags are:

strobistbootcamp
background
amateur (or pro)
(your country)

I have set up a during-the-assignment discussion thread, here.

I gave you a lot more info this time. And having seen the headshot process, you should have a good idea of what to expect.

Above all, have fun.

-DH