5th-Place SPOY Winner, Via Peoples' Choice Vote

Congratulations to Ryan Taylor, for his stunning night shot of a wake boarder. Ryan used another person (out of the frame, at camera left) being pulled in an inner tube, to position a Nikon SB-800 in a protective bag.

The result was a dramatically lit photo which would have been impossible to duplicate with on-camera lighting.

This is just the type of innovative, small-flash thinking that pushes the envelope for everyone. And Ryan should be especially proud that of all of the winners, his alone was confirmed by the votes of his fellow readers. (Over one thousand people voted in our one-day run-off.)

The vote count was confirmed by both hand count and computer count, using two different people. (Thanks, Paul!)

Also, please join me in congratulating the other four finalists, whose photos were strong enough to ensure a very suspenseful day (with multiple lead changes) for all of us -- not the least of which, I am sure, the five remaining finalists. We will be naming the 1st-place winner later today. Now, get back to your drinking and stealing cheap, New Year's kisses.

And above all, drive, walk, or stumble safely home. If you have been tipping a bottle, use a designated driver or find a couch. I have a readership level to maintain...

Congratulations, Ryan. If you could please place in order the prizes below (and yes, it matters what order, in the event someone does not come forward to claim a prize in time) so that we may facilitate the speedy transfer of the loot.



Thanks again to the following sponsors for contributing such fantabulistic prizes:


• An AlienBees ABR800 Ringflash, courtesy AlienBees.

• A pair of Pocket Wizard Plus II's courtesy the MAC Group, facilitated by Midwest Photo Exchange.

• Elinchrom D-Lite 2 Kit, courtesy Elinchrom and facilitated by The Flash Centre.

• Two Nikon SB-800 Speedlights, courtesy Nikon USA.

• A Canon Powershot G9 Digital Camera, courtesy Canon USA, facilitated by Midwest Photo Exchange.

_____________________


Discussion, including details on the judging process and the honorable mention (6-10) photos, here.

SPOY 5th Place: You Be The Judge

The very cool 3rd-place "Ants at the Trough" photo, by Peter Steeper, showed a 2007 date in the Flickr system, but was in fact taken in 2003. This being the 2007 Strobist Photos of the Year, Peter and I mutually agreed to remove it from consideration after the fact.

Given that the contest was for photos taken in 2007, we both felt it the fairest course of action. Mind you, it's still a kick-butt photo, and Peter should be very proud of it. Other arrangements are being made in thanks for Peter's gracious handling of the date confusion.

With a hole left in the top five photos, and five honorable mentions waiting at the ready, and Chase Jarvis inconveniently en route to Paris as I type this post, we are left with a decision as to what to do.

That's where you come in. Hit the jump for details.
_________________________


First of all, 5th place moves to 4th, and 4th moves to 3rd. Which now leaves the hole at 5th.

Problem: Where to find a judge on such short notice to determine which of the honorable mentions gets bumped up to 5th?

Solution: The 5th place slot now becomes a Peoples' Choice, from the remaining honorable mentions. They are listed below, in no particular order. (Please note the number by each photo. )

The members of the Strobist Flickr Group have all been deputized as 5th-Place, Peoples' Choice Judges. You will be choosing one, and only one. We, uh, you will vote simply by leaving a post in the thread linked below and stating the number 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5.

Please vote only once. Any instance of duplicate votes will result in none of your votes being counted. You may change your vote at any time via the edit function. If you wish to lobby, please do so in the SPOY Discussion Thread instead of within the voting thread. And please keep your lobbying to being in favor of a particular image, rather than trashing another one.

IMPORTANT: Your post in the voting thread should contain one digit: 1-5. Simply cast your vote by typing a number.

The voting closes as of the end of 2007, which is about 22 hours from now, Eastern Time US. You'll know voting is closed because we have arranged for a shiny ball to drop down in Time Square in New York City to mark the closing of the polls. Any votes cast after that time will not be counted. We are arranging to have the NYC vote-closing ceremony televised, too. Check local listings in the US.

Without further ado, here are your five honorable mentions from which to choose. You may click through from any of the photos to see the photo's Flickr page for more information.

__________________________



Number 1

















Number 2












Number 3













Number 4
















Number 5















_________________________________

I am very curious to see how smoothly this goes. If it works, it could pave the way for an all-peoples' choice 2008 SPOY. Assuming there is a 2008 SPOY.


Please vote here.


Thanks for your help!

Strobist Photos of the Year, 2007 -- 2nd Place Winner

Three down, two to go.

For each of the previous winners, we have given comments as to why they were chosen. We'll do that after the jump, but for the final two I also want to post some of the comments of the other Flickr users left when they first came across the 2nd-place photo on its Flickr page:


"Wow. Amazing. Is this real?"

"Superb!!! How did you get the light on her legs?"

"Absolutely stunning lighting and POV."

"This is amazing! Truly original concept. I like that it looks like a fantasy painting."

"I thought about wow! but then I see so many others expressing the same sentiment. What the hell... WOW! Just WOW!"


(See the 2nd-place winner and judges' comments after the jump.)
_________________________


2nd-Place Photo: Woman Playing Volleyball at the Beach


Second place goes to California-based photographer Robert Benson, for his cross-lit shot of a woman playing volleyball on a beach.









From Robert's comments, some thoughts on the setup:

"To turn outdoor bright sunlight to a controllable dark, you first have to put camera on slowest ISO setting (50 or 100), go to your camera's fastest shutter synch speed (usually around 1/250th), and dial aperature down to around f16 or f22," he says.

"Then set up your off-camera lights. Outdoors they will have to put out enough power to light subject at that small F16 or F22, and with moving subjects, the duration of the flash should be short, to prevent motion blur."
______________________


(As most of you know, you can duplicate this technique by using a camera which allows hi-speed synching, which gives you the ability to do this with a pair of speedlights. This method also keeps the flash duration way down, which eliminates motion blur.)


Chase Said:

Nicely executed shot here.

The certain je ne sais pas (I know not what) of this image is actually that there is no je ne sais pas at all. We know it all. It's a very classic formula for making a great image and it deserves to be recognized as such. 

The formula is:

A) The timing: Peak action with some tension in the moment; 

B) The light: I'm guessing it's what I call the "sandwich" technique (strobe left, strobe right, and backlit with the sun. Also, the use of the sun to draw the viewer to the focal point and the overall underexposing of the image to amplify texture in the clouds and the sand is a wise move. And finally,
 
C) The composition: The subject position in the frame generally is pleasing; the separation from subject, ground, net, sun, and ball creates beautiful tension (and simultaneous fluidity); the camera angle adds drama and accentuates the athleticism of the subject.

I Say:

This photo is so much more than just lighting technique, which of course was well-executed. As Chase said, many factors come together to make this a very dynamic moment: The tonal gradient created by the obscured sun drawing the eye into the compositional center frame, the tension, the way the light defines the muscles, the simple (yet dynamic) composition, the timing.

On that last point, a tip for aspiring action shooters: The moment just before something happens has much better tension and timing than when the thing is actually happening. And if has just happened, you missed it. And for you portrait shooters and wedding shooters, how much more interesting the fractional second before a kiss actually happens than the kiss itself.

Finally, the icing on the cake for me on this one is the sand: Frozen, defined by the crosslight, and looking for all the world like a nebula shot from the Hubble Space Telescope.

_____________________

Congratulations, Robert, on the photo. If you would be so kind as to choose your top two prize choices, in order, from the list below and stick it into a comment on your photo's Flickr page, it will greatly help to speed the process of distributing prizes to the five winners after they have been announced.


Thanks again to the following sponsors for contributing such great prizes:


• An AlienBees ABR800 Ringflash, courtesy AlienBees.

• A pair of Pocket Wizard Plus II's courtesy the MAC Group, facilitated by Midwest Photo Exchange.

• Elinchrom D-Lite 2 Kit, courtesy Elinchrom and facilitated by The Flash Centre.

• Two Nikon SB-800 Speedlights, courtesy Nikon USA.

• A Canon Powershot G9 Digital Camera, courtesy Canon USA, facilitated by Midwest Photo Exchange.

_____________________


Discussion, including details on the judging process and the honorable mention (6-10) photos, here.

Reader Question: Why Do Rim Lights Blow Out?

Reader Till Hamburg asks the above question in the Strobist Flickr Pool, and posts a series of photos just to prove his point. First of all, a little explanation of what Till means by these numbers. Then, an explanation and how to make that angle-dependent strength thing work for you.

The series of photos at left have two lights which concern us. (Looks like there is a backgrond light going on there, too. But let's ignore that for the purposes of this discussion.)

In the top photo, the rim light is set one stop hotter than the light at camera right (which is illuminating the subject's face.) In the middle, they are equal. And in the bottom, the rim light is one stop lower than the main light.

__________

PLEASE NOTE: I think he has his f/stops reversed in the label on the bottom photo. As you can see, the main light is remaining constant, while the rim light drops a stop each frame, heading toward the bottom.
__________

This lighting quirk used to screw me up all of the time when I would shoot a rim-lit situation, until I figured out what was going on.

Why it happens, and a way to make this work for you, after the jump.
____________________________


Rimshot, Please...

The first component of the higher efficiency of rim light is the physical property of the way anything reflects when it hits something at a shallow angle. I always use the analogy of light behaving like a pool ball when it comes to reflections, as in this post on how to light people wearing glasses.

So let's stretch the light-as-pool-ball analogy a little more and think in terms of retained energy. A glancing reflection off of something will use up less energy than a direct hit. So to will light glancing off of a 3-d object. It is simply a more efficient way to reflect.

Second, rim lights are more likely (than main lights) to be hard light sources. As we have learned, hard light sources create stronger specular reflections than do larger light sources. I know the specular reflection strength is a component to rim lighting being more efficient because I see the effect lessened when my rim light is soft.

So, how can you use this info?

Well, you certainly want to use your weakest light as a rim light to take advantage of the efficient rim light thing. In fact , when I am rim lighting in close, I usually start my SB-800s at 1/128 power and adjust my working aperture to where that looks good as a starting point.

As you can see above, even one stop down is a little hot for a rim light. I tend to start out at two stops down. (If you work without a flash meter, as I do, use your guide number chart to get you close on the first pop.

Also, if a room is ambient-lit in a poor, muddy-ish, ASA-800 kinda way and you only have one light, consider using that light as a separation/rim light (instead of in front) to add depth to your scene. Because of the efficiency of the lighting angle, you can back that speedlight way back (adding depth and internal separation and slow fall-off to the whole scene) even though your speedlight is not very powerful.

___________________


Related posts:

:: L101: Lighting People With Glasses ::
:: L102: Specular Highlights ::
:: Guide Numbers: Your Free Flash Meter ::

Peter Steeper: Eating at the Trough

UPDATE: There was a mixup in the date on our third-place winner, with Flickr having the photo as a 2007 shot, when it fact it was shot four years ago and dropped into Flickr in 2007. While still an amazing photo, the "Ants" photo was removed from the competition by mutual agreement between the photographer and myself. Thus, 5th goes to 4th, 4th goes to 3rd, and a vote-off is held for 5th place. More here. For informational purposes, we are leaving the photo and description up as inspration to ant-infested photographers everywhere, including myself.

"Eating at the Trough," by Canadian amateur photographer Peter Steeper, was made with a Canon G3 point-and-shoot digital camera, a 420 EX flash and an off-camera cord.

Says Peter:

"After an incident in the kitchen with ants I decided to take advantage of what I thought was a great photo opportunity. Then my wife discovered what I was doing. The experiment ended suddenly."

As for the outpouring of familial support for his domestic photographic endeavors, he notes:

"The background is one of my wife's fine white china dishes. I am banned from ever using her china again as a prop."



Chase Said:

Conceptually brilliant.

The vision it took to create this shot is impressive. Note from the shooter's description that an incident in the kitchen turned into a creative opportunity.

Whether it's an obsession with photography or simply a creative thread in the photog's brain - being attuned to this moment as a great moment to create a cool shot is something of a wonderful gift/talent.

Combine that vision with a solid execution (love the highlight on the right and the shadow on the left defining the "depth" --and thus thick consistency-- of the syrup). The highlights on the ants' little bodies are really cool for bringing them to life, and I'm guessing that the bubbles in the syrup were a happy accident, but they add something to the value of this shot too.

This image has some of the same characteristics of the winning shot you'll see soon -- people will stop in their tracks to look at this shot. It's got visual mojo.

I Say:

As I mentioned in the lead-in, this photo epitomizes the idea of the photographer making the photo rather than the gear doing it. A point-and-shoot and a small flash, with dash of spontaneity, led to a spur-of-the-moment photo.

Some might call the light simplistic. IMO, much more would have been overkill.

And the light was necessary for more than just aesthetic reasons. That close of a macro shot needs some aperture to control depth of field. At such clse range, even a small flash makes small apertures possible.

The smaller chip size of the P-n-S camera helped, too. A smaller chip means more depth of field for a given aperture setting. (This would have been a much more difficult shot to pull off with a dSLR for several reasons.)

But beyond the technical stuff (there were far better technicals displayed elsewhere in the pool) this is a photo that could be used to convey many different ideas that have nothing to do with ants.

They are us, whether we are blue-collar workers, guys at a bar, sugar addicts, mooches, or any number of other things.

_____________________

Great shot, Peter. And thanks for your gracious understanding about the date.

Dave X. Tejada: Head Shots, and Pimping Your Chimping

How do you get to never be without access to your prized Golden Girls DVD collection while on the road, and write it off on your taxes at the same time? If you are David X. Tejada, you make up some lame story about how clients would rather chimp themselves on a seven-inch screen instead of the 2.5" back-of-the-camera version.

Being Dave, he sneaks in a little lighting info, too. That big feathered soft box / reflector combo is makin' some bacon for him. And I love how well the small seamless rolls fit into cubicle land. You can shoot Dilbert and get him right back to work before Wally comes back from the coffee machine.

And anyone catch the second, stealth fill card in there? That table is white and folds up to nothing. Makes me wonder if he scrounged it from on site, or if he gets to write off his picnic gear, too. Great idea.

I'll tell you right here that the next Wally-Mart special fold-up table I buy will be white.

And don't worry, Dave. I'm right there with you on Nikon not increasing the size of the back-of-camera monitors as fast as our eyes are going south.
__________________

More Dave:

:: Dave's Lighting Bag ::
:: Dave's Photo Cave ::
:: On Assignment With Dave ::
:: Dave's Blog ::
:: Dave's Interview on LightSource :: (Podcast)

-30-