Sunday 16 August 2009

Elite Junior Triathlete Nicola Morgan looks fantastic here, almost as good as in real life. So much confidence in one so young!
As leading light of YeophotoGroup I was originally thinking of using hotshoe flashguns for this shoot, but I'm glad now that we went for the Elinchrom studio flashheads instead.

Although it's extremely heavy the 2.8 Kwatt generator was also a good move. With hardly a break in the rythm it kept up with the Elinchrom's power demanding 0.7 of a second recycling times for nearly two hours of solid shooting.
With the wind picking up part way through the shoot there were a few time when I was glad of the milk carton counter weights keeping the lighting stands stable. Trevor suggested sand as ballast as water could leak away in transit and leave us without the safeguard of stability for our delicate lights.
Even after years of using high shutter speeds along with fairly high apertures to make the sky dark I never cease to be amazed at just how creative photography can be when using several flashes at an angle to the camera.
The choices of whether to use hotshoe or studio flash depended on the light in an early evening sky, would it be too strong and overbearing in its intensity.

You can't argue with f 16 as a means of keeping that bright sky under control. The pictures below demonstrate the point perfectly, although some would say that we've gone way over the top and I've made it too dark. My response is - show me how you can improve on these shots and I'll listen, maybe I'll even learn something new. I do like to push the boundaries though as the limits are.... what exactly???


Meanwhile, I love the high contrast between Nicola and clouds and know for sure that next time I'm on a serious shoot I want studio flash, I want great backgrounds, texture, vibrance, correct skin colour and above I want eye-popping pictures.
Many thanks to Crusader Corperate Workwear of Lufton Trading Estate, Yeovil for printing these Hi-Vis vests which make us look so professional and dedicated. Also many thanks to Nicola and her dad for their time and effort to help all of us achieve a most exciting evening. Hope you like the pictures Nicki and best of luck on your next Triathlete event.

Can't wait until the next shoot as I want to use floodlights on the background so that with a careful chosen shutter speed we'll get blur. Half the fun of photography is visualisation and then planning. The second half is adapting your plans as the situation changes and new challenges arise. Try to be prepared with an alternative method of lighting up your sleeve, just in case the genny won't start, the lights fail, a fuse blows.
Keith (Strobist) Robins.

Saturday 8 August 2009

My flashgun suddenly starts bellowing smoke!! I connected a 6 volt motorcycle battery via a 4 foot length of wire and it didn't whine when I turned it on. Now that's funny, it's supposed to make a whining sound - hang on a minute, what's this, smoke? Oh Nooooo!!!
I had shaped two blocks of wood to act as dummy batteries in one of my old flashguns plus one of Trevor's guns - trust me to pick up the wrong one!
I had just soldered the ends on and then connected it up without double checking the polarity - silly!!! Always check, double check and then triple check that the polarity is exactly as it should be before turning on the power.
I took ten screws out of the casing and yanked the electronic innards out thinking this was the end of my Starblitz flash, but could see no signs of burnt circuitry. The smoke? Thankfully it was merely the insulated card at the bottom of the battery compartment getting rather warm due to a dead short. Also there are now two battery springs with hardly any springiness left in them. Luckily it's the two that I don't need.
Oh, and yes I pressed on and connected up, correctly this time and Bob's yer Uncle there's that good old familiar whining sound from the flashgun, a little orange light comes on. Yippee!!
Now to see what this baby can really do. Full power recharges in about three seconds. In the mid auto position this drops to about one second and in the low auto (weakest) I can just keep on hitting the firing button and the flash keeps up, the orange light stays on continuously.
Will I ever go back to normal AA batteries again? I doubt it. It's not a cost thing it's all about speed of recycling. I want a flash that recharges quickly, before the client starts to think that you've finished taking photos and wanders off. There is nothing worse than waiting, waiting, waiting for a flashgun to recharge.
High energy AA's are okay for around the twenty flash mark but then they begin increasing the length of down time, then after forty flashes we're up around the half a minute depending on temperature, battery age, flash power setting, etc.
Total number of flashes per six volt battery charge is up around 500 at full power and over 1,000 at low auto setting on the Starblitz. The Vivitar produces over 400 full power flashes but closer to 2,000 on reduced power setting! Now that's what I call Rocking, Man!
The photos accompanying this article are of my Vivitar 285 HV which I successfully converted last year.
Things to watch out for? Short circuits if you carry one of these six volt batteries in your camera bag, picking up the wrong block of wood, dropping the battery on your foot - Ouch! Hop, hop.
Some of you have asked how I clip this battery onto my belt. Two pieces of old car inner tube, they're like heavy duty elastic bands. One goes twice around the battery top to bottom while the other splips inside near the top, down through my belt and out around the lower half of the battery. So quick, it never jumps off and whacks your foot, plus it will hook over one of the adjusting knobs on a lighting stand. I used to work in a tyre company over forty years ago and I still had an ancient inner tube in the shed, 155X13 from a Ford Cortina I believe. Never throw anything away lads!

Thursday 6 August 2009

Nicola is an Olympic triathlon hopeful for 2012. On Sunday the 2nd August she won a bronze medal in the London Junior Elite Triathlon - Wednesday evening I spot her picture in the Western Gazette sports pages and intend asking her ref photos. An hour later and she is in our studio ready for a few portraits. Are we fast movers or what!!!
This is my favourite image from about forty studio flash shots taken last night. Okay so it's not in colour - you should know by now that black and white and I go back a long, long way.
It's now five-thirty Thursday morning and I can't sleep, so I fire up the computer, make a drink and open Photoshop.
I produced this black and white soft focus image of young Nicola via the amazing Black And White filter in Photoshop CS3 by lightening the Red and the Yellow channels. Two stages of softening were added along with a couple of masks and finally, drag in our YPG copyright slogan. I'm sorry we have to do this but there are people out there who think our work is so good that they'd rather pinch than take their own photos for their websites. Bit of a compliment in a way I suppose, although I'd prefer they accredited the images to YeoPhotoGroup, in which case I'd probably give it to them for free.
Levels and curves produced an improvement in the overall lighting, which was a little below our normal high standard due to there being six people in our cramped little studio.
We also tried some daylight shots, (left), plus the shadows are filled using a silver surfaced sun visor for a car windscreen costing just £2-99 at Aldi supermarket - it's held rigid by a large 'H' shape of 15mm copper tubing (what else?).
The gorgeous catch-light in the lower half of Nicki's eyes is a reflection of this 2 foot by 4 foot reflector which I held horizontal just above waist level while Kelv took this image. Kelv definitely knows his Nikon camera and his grasp of lighting is growing week by week.
We're both impressed at how incredibly successful this reflector is in producing soft fill-in lighting and I shall certainly be using this gadget during all my outdoor portrait sessions. Will post up the details of how to build my 'Super Silver Bouncer' as soon as.

Meanwhile, Nicki wants some sponsorship photos of herself in action which is going to produce its own set of challenges as far as lighting is concerned. Flash and daylight balanced, the shutter speed right down around 1/10th of a second for blur and my Vivitar 285HV on full power for main lighting at a three o'clock position. A Starblitz at seven o'clock position for fill lighting - Nicki would be running left to right in this particular setup.
I want to go for late evening, brow of a hill, running and cycling past at various speeds, use second curtain flash to capture a sharp shape with a faint blur trailing behind Nicki due to the slow shutter speed. I want sharp detail on tracksuit, logos, and Nicola's lovely features.
Must also leave enough room around Nicola so that the background, lit by really weak daylight, is attractively blurred but not over-lit. Over this blurring will appear the sponsors logos etc.
This is going to be some shoot! Anyone willing to help carry the kit and hold up the lights and reflectors on this shoot? You'll certainly learn a lot about lighting on the hoof!
I might even try my Elinchrome D-Lite 200's outdoors by running them on a borrowed 2.3Kw generator.
Once I know the generator is capable of handling the power requirements then I might get around to making up a lighter, more portable 12 volt power inverter. I mean, how difficult can it be to knock one of those up in the shed!!? Now come on, don't jest, I'm serious! Watch this space.