Keith Robins Photography goes flashing at the seaside! Balancing daylight and flash is not the easiest of challenges, in fact less than five percent of photographers really understand how and why flashguns work in conjunction with available light.
This blog is a mine of information about exactly that.
I'm hoping that by reading all the posts in this blog that you too will be able to handle this most creative of lighting combinations and all you'll have spent is a little time.

Burton Bradstock in early March at around 5pm is the first photo. A flash on that rock in the foreground would have given added interest and help balance the picture.
Second photo is about an hour later. I definitely should have used a flash here - set on minus 2/3rds of a stop so it is not at all obvious - which is surely the whole point of this exercise. Must clean that front filter more often!
It's getting damned cold and my trouser legs are wet through kneeling in the wet shingle with a wide angle lens. Next time I'll bring a pair of wellies, or better still a pair of fisherman's waders.
Brian is seen here struggling with the principles of daylight flash balancing, but he's a fast learner and is soon able to take pictures just like these.

I used F18 at 1/160th on 200 ISO with my canon 550EX on ETTL. Strange to say that the camera, a Canon 5D, was in the manual mode - so too was the lens which is focused on Brian.
Even though the camera is in manual mode it does not effect the ability of the flash to operate successfully in ETTL.
Why manual mode for the camera? I wanted complete control over both aperture to control the flash, plus shutter speed which governs the intensity of the daylight. Now I can make the sky as dark and threatening as I like, mean while retaining a good exposure of my maim subject - usually a figure or a portrait.

This goes against the normal everyday trend of photography where one speed up equals one aperture down to get a similar exposure.
I feel completely at ease with flashguns and this rather unusual way of operating the settings on my camera and flash and have done so for over thirty years. Some of my old manual flashes needed light modifiers such as the lenses from a pair of old Polaroid sunglasses, several layers of handkerchief, or just a thumb placed in front of the flash lens. Nowadays there are auto modes via so many menus it's baffling, plus these modern things seem to have a mind of their own and often refuse to co-operate.
The copyright was added with one click of a brush and then toned down using Opacity.
Hold down the Alt key and type 0169 in the right-hand numerical keys to get a C symbol. type your name - select it with a rectangle - go to Edit, Define Brush Preset, click OK and your logo is the very last brush in the brush palette. Open a new layer before adding your logo, then use Transform to adjust or rotate.

Brian wants to find out about using a flashgun and comes to Keith Robins Photography to use my kichen!
Brian is reasonably new to digital photography but he took less than an hour to discover the relationship between available light and flash light using apertures and shutter speeds.
His Olympus bridge camera is able to talk to Olympus flashguns and we had two guns to play with!
This first picture took one gun aimed at the wall behind me - no wires and no little slave, not even a radio trigger in sight. The popup flash on his Olympus did the talking but needed a crisp packet turned inside out to reflect the signal towards the ceiling so it didn't effect the image.

For the next one I held a flashgun in each hand at arms length out to both sides. The one in my left hand was full power while my right-hand thumb was across the middle of the other flash lens reducing the output by a whole stop. This is a trick worth remembering when using totally manual flashguns which can be picked up from E-Bay for virtually nothing - I got a matching pair for 50 pence each.





This last photo Brian took was from about four feet away and used one flash plus a silver faced gift bag about twelve inches away to camera right in my left hand.
Brian was absolutely over the moon at these results as you can imagine, but he agreed to let me do the black and white conversion using the Black and White filter in Photoshop CS3.
Next time out is a trip to the seaside for a sunset plus flashing session.

How Keith Robins Photography photographs WOW factor drips of water!
Taking photos of drips takes time and patience, plus a little bit of know-how. For instance, try lighting whatever is being reflected in the water and not the water. In fact keeping the water in the dark is probably one of the best tips I can give you.
Try firing a hotshoe flash across the liquid's surface and lighting up something as simple as a reddish coloured festive dinner mat, a photograph from an old TV Times, or a pale yellow toughened glass cutting board, which are the items I've used in these three examples.
This is a technique I learnt underground during my caving days. (Goodness me, that's nearly 30 years ago!) Keeping the water dark always returned better photos than when the flash was pointing directly at a dark muddy pool and backlighting came out far better for moving water shots. Ripples also showed up better with backlighting, or when reflecting a cave wall or a caver is beyond and carefully lit so there is something tangible to show up as a reflection.
Camera settings of 1/200th or slower takes care of the flash side of things while an aperture is chosen to go with the flash power setting.
By reducing the power to 1/16th the duration of your average hotshoe flash is reduced to around 1/5,000th, which is plenty short enough to capture the fastest of drips. Surprisingly, the aperture is still up around the f5.6 to f11 mark, even at 1/16th power.
These ultra-fast flash durations, requiring reasonably wide apertures, dictate narrower depth of field so focusing has to be spot on.
I set the camera on manual focus and zoomed in on the markings of a steel ruler which was right under the drip, then pulled the zoom back and framed up.
A tiny pin hole in the base of the plastic bottle is necessary to allow a drip at around a two second interval, just about slow enough for a battery powered hotshoe flash on reduced power to recycle in time for the next drip. It's easy to get carried away and take hundreds of photographs once you've started capturing good shots
The idea is to count the drips out loud and nod your hand up and down in time. In your hand is the shutter release for your camera and your thumb is also keeping time with the count, but only actually pressing the button every other drip, (flash tubes can overheat with fast repeated use). Keep an eye on the camera preview screen and adjust your count very slightly to capture drips in different stages of falling and splashing.
Within ten minutes you should be getting pictures like these. Of course all the kit takes a while to find and assemble, plus the setting up takes an hour or so. Even finding a pair of pliers and a needle to pierce the bottle took me over twenty minutes!
Hanging your bottle from a lamp shade with a rubber band and clothes pegs works surprisingly well. And if you can't find a large black seed tray then maybe a bin liner dipped between four lengths of wooden batten will probably last long enough for this exercise. A cat litter tray will do, but watch out for unexpected puddles from Tiddles.
Does the floor get wet? Yes, but not much. Is this exercise time well spent? Yes, most definitely! Telephoto lens? 60mm to 105mm is best. Mirror lock up? No, the flash is way too fast. Coloured water? Not neccesary, just rely on the background that you're lighting to give you all the colour you need. Angle the flash from one side to reduce glare in the reflection. Also angle it slightly upward to keep the water dark, we want backlighting only via bounced light. With the flash set to manual extend the zoom to avoid stray light touching the water. Keep checking the front of your lens for splashes.
This last image shows a short length of four inch soil pipe as a support for the flash, a toilet pan connector is holding the magazine along with a pair of enormous clips from the garden. The magazine is sagging, which I deliberately left to illustrate how nothing has to be spot - on except the exposure and the focus.

Sharpening images in Elements 4 without halos. Keith Robins Photography has written a previous post referring to a rather unusual method of sharpening in Adobe CS3, but as most photographers seem to prefer sticking to the basic Elements I thought I'd try an alternative technique using Elements 4 with very similar results. Go up to Image in the top toolbar and choose Greyscale and your image turns black and white.
Now go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask and move the percent slider up to 300%, yes really! The Radius stays around 0.8 and the Treshhold remains at Zero.
Save As under a new name so that you can reopen the same image from your files and folders, but this time you're going to keep it as a coloured photo.
Use the Move tool and hold down Shift while you drag the black and white picture into the colour image and then select the Overlay mode for this new top layer.
The colour of the lower layer shows through the black and white sharpness of the upper layer.
By clicking on each photo in turn you should be able to see which of these images has been sharpened.

Keith Robins Photography tries sharpening with a big difference! Black and white photos of men can stand a lot of really gritty sharpening. I absolutely love these B andW pictures of Ollie, especially the biting sharpness. Ollie was a former member of Yeovil Camera Club back in the 7o's and willing posed for us.
I tried using unsharp mask but wasn't keen on the resulting halos and colour fringing often associated with normal everyday sharpening.
I vaguely remembered reading an article on the web last year suggesting Lab Colour mode as an alternative method of sharpening - so I gave it a go.
First thing is swap to Lab Colour mode, which is found under Image in the top toolbar.
Next, click on Channels in the Layers palette and select the Lightness layer. The other three layers will turn off when you do this. Find the normal everyday Unsharp Mask and whizz it up to 300% - don't worry it'll turn out just fine! (Obviously this 300% is not set in stone so just use that as a starting point, I have used as much as 500% with extremely good results.)
In the Radius box just beneath I went for 0.8 pixels and the bottom box, Threshold, was left at zero - click OK.
Click on the top layer to open up all the other channels again, then go back to Image and swap back into RGB mode. Select Layers as opposed to Channels and you're back in the world of good old layers which we all known and love.

In case you haven't realised I'm a supporter of Jpegs - I have tried RAW but found it decidedly soft and absolutely everything needed working on wityh evry single image - time wasting! I'll continue to let the camera do the donkey work and I'm not tempted to bother trying RAW again, thank you very much. I take around 400 pictures a week, mostly experimenting with lighting and unusual effects and I want to see them right away, full screen.
Besides, I can still use all the Adobe Camera Raw tweaks on my Jpegs prior to opening them in Photoshop. However, if you want to prove me wrong - go on then, I challenge you to make a better picture via Raw in the camera!
After sharpening these photos were changed to black and white using a Black And White adjustment layer in CS3 and moving the red channel slightly to the right and the yellow channel a little bit further. This lightened up the shadow detail in Ollie's features without blowing the brightness of his shirt collar.
I guess one day I'll get used to how Actions operate and that'll speed things up enormously, but for now I enjoy using Photoshop so I'll plod along slowly. Even so, each of these images took less than ten minutes to start looking really good, then I started playing around with oval selections, inverting them, feathering to 130 pixels and finally using another adjustment layer, Levels this time, to introduce a little darkness around the outer edges.
I also use the same 130 pixel feather to make a selection and then press Control + M to bring up the Curves adjustment box and then drag the line down a bit to darken, make another selction and use Curves again to make that selection slightly lighter. This seems to work in a more pleasing manner than using the Dodge tool or the Burn tool.

There were two lights used here, one via a shoot-thro brolly and the other bounced into a silver sunshield. Originally designed for a car windscreen on sunny days this £4 makeshift reflector is now supported on a couple lengths of plumbers piping. (See a previous post for info on how to make this easily assembled gadget.)
Ialso used a black blanket background supported on plumbers waste pipe and a short length of plastic guttering fixed atop a single lighting stand. I designed that litle gadget over twenty years ago and still find it extremely quick and simple to erect.
The tip of the brolly was less than eighteen inches from Ollie's nose and to camera left, while the reflector was about two feet away to camera right with the flash only just out of camera view. These lights are ancient and rather warm in tone so I either use a DIY colour balance card, or carry out a custom white balance which is easy on the Canon camera, plus just a little tweak in Adobe Camera Raw before opening up into CS3.

A setup like this uses very little space and most living rooms / lounges / or a large kitchen can be utilised. The studio flashes used here on Ollie are thirty years old and have no power controls, so my alternative set of Elichrom D-Lite 200watt would have been an absolute dream to use.
I ought really to sell those old lights on EBay but hey, old habits die hard. Alternatively, I could have used a couple of old hotshoe flashes with equally good effect. What I'm trying to say is, use whatever lighting you have lying around and instead spend your money on a better lens, or some versatile software such as CS3, or maybe a more patient or attractive model.
Incidentally, I recently spent a couple of hours making up a whole arsenal of tiny diagrams to suit my own lighting needs. These are saved as a huge number of layers and kept as a PSD file, which enables me to move them around, rotate, turn off the ones not needed and flipping over those facing the wrong way. I love Photoshop!!!

One radio transmitter and three triggers for £40. What a bargain for Keith Robins Photography!
Amazon is the place to visit for a fast efficient service. I ordered the triggers on Wednesday and, even though there was a Post Office strike in action, the packet was delivered on Friday. the Vivitar 285HV flashgun which I ordered the same day came a couple days later, well packed and in good nick. Thank you to the postmen for what I term a pretty good service in your hour of strife.
How do the triggers handle in use? Brilliantly!
The normal place for a radio transmitter is in the hotshoe along with a trigger mounted beneath a remote flashgun - this arrangement fired one of my Vivitar 285HV's at up to 50 metres, a lot further than the advertised 30 mtrs. I was more than pleased with this result.

For the next test I added an optical slave into the chain, just to explore the limitations. One Vivitar on the camera, then at 30 metres distance the radio transmitter was slotted into an £8 optical slave, a second 285HV was then slotted into one of the three triggers and placed an additional 30 metres from camera. The equipment all works together just fine, which is fantastic!

Next, I wanted to know whether a flash in ETTL mode would operate the remote flash. I placed a Canon 550EX in ETTL mode on top of a Canon 5D, which in turn was set to manual. The optical slave was connected directly to the Vivitar 285H. This system failed miserably!
A flashgun in ETTL mode, or a pop-up flash, sends out a small pre-flash before the shutter opens to calculate the strength of flash exposure needed to light the main subject. Of course this pre-flash will also set off the remote flashgun operated via an optical slave unit before the shutter is open. When the main light fires a few milliseconds later it's too late for your remote flash as it has already gone off and is still in the process of recharging.

Maybe this is why some photographers, new to the world of flashguns can easily be lead into thinking that multiple flash is beyond them, especially as their images consistently portray dead flat lighting from the on-camera flash.

Fear not, there is a way around this most irksome problem!
You may have noticed that when taking a photo a half press on the shutter button causes focusing / exposure info to pop up on screen for about 15 seconds.
The trick with using an ETTL flash as a master to fire remote flashes on radio triggers is to half press the shutter button to bring up this information, then press the star button which fires the tiny pre-flash along with the remote slave flash. Meanwhile the shutter is still closed.
Now wait about 10 seconds, but no longer than 14 seconds, before fully pressing the shutter button to take the photo proper. If you're using newish batteries this should be long enough for the remote flash to recharge and both guns will now fire while the shutter is open and give whatever power you have set on them.

However, when the on-camera flash is set to manual there is no pre-flash and both guns will fire as one light without any trouble.
I also tried using aperture priority and it worked great.
Carrying out the same test using shutter priority I found that the Canon 5D limited the speed to 1/200th with the end result coming out spot on.
All this exploration took several hours and I'll need to repeat this type of testing a few more times before it sinks in - remember I'm new to ETTL and the Canon 5D as maual flash has been my staple diet since the early seventies.
Hope this is some help in your flahs photography - Keith Robins.

Studio flash outdoors - at night! Okay so maybe it's been done before via an extension lead. However, Keith Robins Photography is adventurous enough to investigate the great outdoors as a backdrop and discovered that full length portraits do not need rolls of expensive background cloth / paper. Nor is there any need to flag any of the flash heads to prevent stray light illuminating those annoying creases which seem to occur in even the smoothest and blackest of background material.

In a few of the recent posts of YeoPhotoGroup, an off-shoot of Keith Robins Photography, you may have noticed us using a generator to power a pair of Elinchrom D-Lite 200's. Handling that heavy beast of a generator took two men to carry it plus two more to carry our camera gear and all the other boxes and bags of lights, stands, reflectors, modifiers, softboxes and assorted cables necessary to operate an outdoor studio.
Eventually, in a rash spur of the moment decision, I splashed out on a caravan inverter plus a new 12 volt 45 amp battery for my works plumbing van meaning there is now a spare battery in fairly good nick going spare. We can now operate two powerful studio lights from a small two wheeled shopping trolley containing this make-shift 230volt power supply.

Elinchroms are renowned for their 0.7 second recycling time which allows you to capture that fleeting expression of relief just moments after the shutter has fired which is when some models appear to briefly relax during the often daunting task of posing for the camera. During this two hour bridal shoot the recycling time for our D-Lite 200's remained very close to manufacturers specs and never went once over two seconds. An additional benefit is that once the really short time the lights take to recycle, the drain on the battery drops to such a minimal amount that it would probably last a whole weekend before the old van battery needs recharging.


In the first image here, Hannah is sat on a plastic sheet to keep her dress clean. A softbox front left and quite close created a soft main light and another Elinchrom with an alloy reflector lit the bushes behind her. Grace joined Hannah for the second and third pictures and revealed the difference our lights made to the texture of their lovely dresses. A silvered sun shield from a car windscreen mounted on a framework of plumbers 15mm copper pipe helped illuminate the shadows on the right. (More details on this DIY gadget in a later post)
Using 1/200th of a second shutter speed caused the background of Sydney Gardens in Yeovil to go black, while f11 at ISO 200 controlled the lights. All this was between 8pm and 9pm on 9th September, hence the lack of available light.
Our next challenge is to get a little more ambient light into the background, probably a seaside sunset along with a striking silhouette.
Then it'll be a portrait session with a firework display going on behind, okay so we could handle either of these tasks in Photoshop but where's the lighting challenge in that? We'll probably revert to our hotshoe flashguns for this one although I am very tempted by the much stronger Elinchroms which can handle a softbox or a large brolly without losing too much light.