Lighting 102 - 7.2: Time in a Bottle

Before we get to the assignment for this last unit in Lighting 102, I have one more technique for you to consider when using time as a variable for your flash photos. It's very useful, because it acts as a gear multiplier for those of you who may not have as many strobes as you'd like.

Given that a flash can record it's subject in an instant -- even if the exposure is spread out over a long time -- there are several ways to stretch a flash into looking several light sources when shooting a static object.

You'll remember Jonathan Boeke's cool shot from July in which he ran around during a time exposure popping his green-gelled flash from behind several trees to create this photo. It's a great idea, and you can easily see how it can make one flash look like a whole bag full of lights.

But you'll need a very dark environment and a long shutter to have time to make all of your locations for popping the flash. And if you screw up one pop, your whole photo is shot.

Another way to approach this is to use your camera's multi-exposure setting, if it has one. Some do, some don't. If your camera is so equipped, this gives you great flexibility and time to spare when you are lining up your various light locations.

If you do not have three PW's (one to manually trigger, one on the camera in relay mode and one on the flash) you'll want to wrangle a button-pushing friend to help. The camera, obviously, should be on a tripod.

If you'll remember, we set up a tag cloud for others who wanted to try this technique. You can see their resulting photos here.


For my take on Jonathan's night woods shot, I chose the multiple exposure route because it allowed me to control the ambient light. There was still plenty of twilight when this photo was taken, but since I shot each multi-exposure pop at a 250th of a sec, I could totally control my ambient.

I could even have chosen to lay down a, say, three-stop-underexposed ambient frame to flesh out the rest of the photo if I wanted. But I liked it better on black.

I tried the straight multiple exposure method about ten times (all pretty time consuming, too) and never got one I liked. So I decided to cheat. I use that term loosely, as there are no real "rules" for this kind of shot.

As far as I am concerned, any tool you have is fair game. So I decided to do this multi-exposure on separate frames and combine them in Photoshop. I shot each frame separately, and added each new photo a layer at a time, and combined them using the lighten mode. This simply compares the two layers, pixel by pixel, and the lightest pixel in a given location wins.

Which means it pretty much works like a multi-exposure -- except you can tweak each layer / flash pop before you add it to the final photo. You can shift the color, exposure, etc. It's a fantastic trick for shooting large scenes with one speedlight. I used my single loaner SB-900 for this one. (It turned back into a pumpkin last week and had to go back to Nikon.)

Thanks much to Photoshop Honcho Ben Willmore for the heads-up on the lighten technique.


The best way I can explain the advantage of being able to build this exposure around the totally controlled ambient is to say that I shot the photo at left almost an hour after the multi-pop photo. I think that kind of control is pretty cool, when you consider you are getting it with just one speedlight.

The soft look in this photo came from the fact that I used a plastic Holga lens (more on that here) on my D3. Kind of ironic, really - a $50 Holga lens on a D3. But I love the look, when combined with hard strobe.

And that's exactly what I did here -- camera on tripod, ambient underexposed a stop or two and a 30-second exposure. Just tripped the shutter and walked up to the side of the tree (out of the frame, tho) and popped the flash manually.

My choice of shutter for the multi-exposure shot above turned day into night, and the long shutter for this one turned night into day. Understanding flash / ambient control lets you do some cool stuff.


Speaking of Doing Cool Stuff

Now, it's your turn. You have just about everything I have to give on time manipulation of your flash photography. So for this, our last L102 assignment, your job is to shoot a still life. Your photo should contain a combination of flash and some form of time-based manipulation.

That's pretty wide open, I know. I wanted it to be that way because I thought we would make this one a little more interesting.

At the close of this assignment I will choose one shot, and the winner gets a set of Lighting Seminar DVDs, shipped anywhere in the world. Hopefully that will add a little layer of fun to the last assignment.


The Details

The deadline for this assignment is midnight, local, September 20th. Please make sure your photos are in Flickr and tagged before then. If you are a newb to Flickr, go ahead and sign up now (it is fast and free) and drop some photos in so you can get through the week-or-so waiting period before they let your tagged photos show up.


Here are your tags:

Strobist
Lighting102 (Note: no spaces)
Assignment
TimeInABottle (Note: no spaces)

and for your best shot, include the tag:

Final

You can see all of the take here. You can see the final edits here. Discussion is here.

Judging will be by a committee of one (yours truly). I will choose based on technique, creativity, how badly I wish I would have taken it myself, my general disposition at the time, what I may have had for breakfast in the morning, etc.

PLEASE NOTE: Please do not enter pre-existing photos into the running for the DVDs. I would like to award them to the best photo shot specifically for this assignment. We are doing this one on the honor system, but make sure your EXIF can back you up...

Best of luck to all, and I am looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Labor Day Weekend Speedlinks

Summer is almost over, but not before one more round of white-belted speedlinks. The latest batch, inside:
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• Vivitar, the maker of the (once) ultra-dependable 285HV flash, has been sold from one conglomerate to another conglomerate. We'll have to see if that helps the manufacturing quality, hurts it, or if they kill the 285 altogether.

• Robert Benson (who you may remember from his SPOY win and this awesome repeating flash volleyball shot is now blogging. Some very good commercial shooter -related stuff so far.

• Rachel, over at S!TB, riffs on Monte Isom's amazing shoot for Adidas. Most important tip: How to get a field full of Chinese talent to smile... (Thanks, Nathanael)

• WIRED shows you how to get wired: Charlie Sorrel's newb SB-24 tutorial.

• From left field, but worth the OT trip: Richard Hernandez, from Multimedia Shooter, on how to mount your 35mm lenses on you camcorder.

Introducing: Lighting Q and A

UPDATE: Thanks for all of the great questions coming in! Lighting Q&A is already off to a great start.
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One of the best things about the internet as compared to traditional print media is that the information flows both ways.

Given that we are on the last section in Lighting 102, I wanted to make sure we had something in the wings to keep the two-way info going. So, starting next week, I am going to try to incorporate a regular Lighting Question and Answer series.

Hit the jump for more details.

First of all, I still recommend the Strobist Group on Flickr as a source for answers. In terms of helpfulness, camaraderie and sheer information exchange, I think it has grown to be the best lighting knowledge resource on the web. And that is all thanks to you guys.

On it, you'll find over 30,000 members and over 20,000 discussion topics (uh, try a search or two before posting) to answer your questions. But even at 30,000 members, that means that less than 15% of you are benefitting from the group. Alas, Flickr is blocked in some countries, so I understand that it is not an option available to everyone.

But looking at the quality of many of the questions I see pop up in the comments of archived posts makes me think that many people could benefit from a regular Q&A session on the main site, too.

So, fire away.

Obviously, we will not be able to respond to every question. But if your question seems like it would be of interest to a broader group of people, there will certainly be other readers who will benefit from the answers. So those will get a close look.

If you need a question answered quickly, the Flickr group is still your best bet. But I think the Q&A's could grow into one of the most helpful parts of the site. That, of course, will depend on the quality of both the questions and the answers. So we'll see.


Guidelines

Try to ask your question in a way that balances detail with brevity. Three or four sentences is ideal. I will likely edit most of them down a little. So if you want to err on the side of a little extra detail, that's cool.

The questions can be about anything related to off-camera flash. If you have read something in L101 or L102 several times and it still does not make sense to you, ask about it. There will certainly be others in your shoes, and it will also help me to identify areas of weakness in the core reference sections of the site.

If English is not your first language, please don't be shy about asking your question. I will smooth out any language issues before publishing. Readers who regularly point out the litany of typos and misspellings on this site will note the irony in that last sentence.

Speaking of other countries, please tell us where you are from. Include your first name, last initial, city and country (and your state, if from the US). Frankly, it is amazing to me, the geographic dispersion of the site's readers. Over the course of a typical month, you all log on from about 175 different countries and/or territories. That's pretty cool.

To ask a question, simply leave it in a comment on this post. Questions will not be moderated into publication but rather pulled and filed for future use. Please include your name and geographic info in the body of the question, rather than relying on the various ID mechanisms used by the comments feature.

The first dozen or so questions to come in are missing this info, so let me put a little boxy thing around this and say it again: Please include your first name, and your geographic location with your questions! (Thanks!)

If you want to include URL of your photo-oriented website for possible linking in the event your question is published, feel free to do so. Bear in mind that this is primarily a way to learn more about who is asking, and not a way to publicize your made-for-Adsense, manhood-enhancing herbal pills website. Also, understand that people may be able to glean your contact info if you include your URL.

You may want that, or you may not. Just a thought.

Lighting 102: 7.1 - Flash Zoom and Stone Soup

Remembering back to our last post in Lighting 102, we talked about panning, rotating and selective diffusion as a means of altering your photo after the flash has popped but before the shutter has closed.

The fourth time-based manipulation I frequently use is zooming through the exposure. And last month we pulled that technique out of our as.. bag of tricks during the "stone soup" shoot in NYC.

Having thrown down the gauntlet for a local shooter to come up with a subject and venue, I was at first a little underwhelmed with the response. I mean, this was NYC, fer Pete's sake. There had to be something interesting going on.

Then Tim Herzog popped up, with not one but four separate ideas. His strategy: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

What stuck was an invite up onto the roof of one of those amazing apartment buildings on the Upper West Side overlooking central park. Not a bad location, you know, if you have to slum it... Here's the view, looking northeast, right after sunset. It is a five-shot stitch shot on a D300 and assembled in CS3. (Thanks for the easy pano tip, Ben!)


If you are not the jealous type, click on the pic to see it bigger. Michael (who granted us access to his rooftop) just stood there enjoying the view with us, with the serenity of a man who has chosen a kickass place to live.

Timothy, ever the gracious host, had also brought along puppeteer Patrick Zung as our subject. And Patrick is not one of those "sock puppet" makers, either. He builds these cool puppets used for stop-motion animation. The joints were made out if pool balls -- genius. It was cool and creepy, all at the same time. Like something out of the movie, "A.I.," if you ask me.

The view was amazing. But logistically, I knew the photo was gonna be tough. The park pretty much went to black after the sun went down. And the Midtown buildings, along with the rooftop's layout forced us to shoot in a way that was tough to get the good lights in the frame unless we crammed up against the edge.

Also, we had no way to light him from the far side. Unless you had a 300-foot light stand. Or Spiderman.


So, as our light started waning, I lit Patrick and friend with an umbrella'd SB-800, ( front camera right) secretly wishing I had invited Peter Parker along to assist. We really needed that light out on the far side for separation.

As our ambient started to drop further, I added a couple of accent lights to add some shape to our subjects.


As you can see, one came from back camera right and another from underneath the puppet. These gave a more 3-D look to our guys. Also, I gelled those flashes with a 1/2 CTO and a fluorescent green combo, which gets you a neat, sodium vapor feel without going all of the way there. Sort of the way sodium vapor looks to the eye, rather than to the camera. It is more logical. Straight white light would look weird and contrived in this environment.

Shooting handheld with a 70-200/2.8, our ambient light was dropping fast. Patrick's black top was not going to separate without some light from the left, and things were getting darker by the minute.

As my shutter speed inched toward the Hail Mary range (~1/4 sec) I started pulling the zoom as I shot. This gave me another look to the lights -- and a more abstract look to the photo. Suddenly the environment was not necessarily a New York rooftop. It was a weird, swooshy thing that really started to fit well with the creepy futuristic puppet vibe.


So we decided to let the black top go dark and just hint at the separation with the swooshed city lights. (I could vary the background light by opening up the shutter.) I really liked the effect that zooming gave the background. And the up-light on the puppet (and Patrick) added some nice form. FWIW, the form on the shirt comes from the back/right light.

It is important that the ambient light level on Patrick was lower than that in the background. Otherwise he would ghost badly during the burn-in time. We had scads of sodium vapor up there, so we knocked it down some with a piece of black foam core that is always with me in my bag. We simply "A-clamped" it to the light fixture.

I would have used Tim as a gobo, but he was already working as my voice-activated back-right light stand. There is still some ghosting on Patrick, but I think that little bit works okay within the abstract feel of the photo.

Another thing on the zoom -- start the zooming (wide-to-tele in this case) before you hit the shutter. This makes for a smoother effect without the jerky looks you'll get otherwise.

We finished it out at about the one-second at f/2.8 (ISO 400) light level. When it gets that dark, it is time to call it a night. Plus, there was to be food involved at this point.

In NYC, you are never more than a few minutes walk from some good food -- and Tim delivered there, too.


NEXT: L102 7.2 - Time in a Bottle

Nikon D90 Video, from You-Know-Who

Now I know why Chase Jarvis has been grinning like an idiot for the last few months. He had, like, five pre-production, gaffer-tape-disguised Nikon D90 cameras to play with. And he couldn't say a peep about it, until now. Looks like a great camera for PJ's who are being asked to shoot web video as an add-on.

On thought: They certainly are not flapping that mirror up and down at 24FPS for the 1080p video.

Which means that it might have some kind of electronic shutter. Which means that it just might be one of those magic, high native sync bodies.

I am trying to run it down now. If you happen to work at Nikon and you can find out, hit me in the comments or call me on the Bat Phone. 'Cause we need to know, like, yesterday.

UPDATE #2: So far, looking more like garden-variety sync -- video is apparently being pulled from the live view. Arghh -- I wanted it so bad....

Lots more over at Chase's site.

More on the process behind this, the full brochure and your comments, after the jump.


So, What is This? An Ad?

Rewind a few months. Chase gets the gig from Nikon to shoot the product brochure for D90. This is standard practice for every new camera model that comes out. It has to be done way in advance, with preproduction models. The secrecy is air-tight, the NDAs fly and it is all timed to be available when the camera is released.

This is something very few photographers ever get to do. But those brochures magically appear, full of photos, before the cameras are even on the shelves.

(Little secret: The photos from some camera brochures are not even shot with the actual cameras. Production timelines, or preproduction bugs preclude it.)

Chase's idea was as new as it was simple. Rather than just shoot a bunch of still photos for a brochure, why not wrap a video around the whole process. After all, it would be pretty cool to be handed a bunch of gaffer-taped, top-secret cameras from the future and told to go nuts with them. His bet was that photogs would think it was cool.

Chase is an A-list shooter, and one of a very few living his photo life in the fishbowl. So this kind of a multimedia was a natural for him -- and it was his idea. If you had to define it, that might be kinda hard. To my knowledge something like this has not really been done before.

It's part commercial, part On Assignment, part made-for-YouTube, part underground-end-user thing (that really was his crew shooting D90 stills and video) and part MTV video.

To me, it is interesting because of the mold breaking that is going on with this project. It is also cool that a company as big as Nikon would allow their new baby to be introduced this way. If you think about it, that's a lot of control to give up to a hipster shooter from Seattle and his peeps.

Could it fail? Absolutely. And the failure would be written on the video's YouTube page every day, for ever and ever, amen, in the form of the view count number.

Will it fail? I think probably not. Released at midnight, it already had been picked by dozens of sites by 3:00 a.m. Not exactly rush hour on the internet. But the whole thing was timed to launch on Japan time, so that's when it lit up.

And the fact that it spread so fast is a validation to several things: One, the power of the medium. I would hate to be a magazine right now, unless I was a magazine that could figure out the whole Web Thing.

Two, the decentralization of eyeball-grabbing power from the publishing conglomerates to the universe of individual bloggers. Any one of you could choose to run the video on your site -- or not. The media consumers define the level of success.

Last, the most important validation is the idea that a photographer, more than an ad agency, knows what is cool and entertaining to other photographers. Yeah, duh, but look how long it has taken to get here.

Chase and his crew got to play, we got to watch and a very cool little camera got to be born in an all-new way. Interestingly, I find the product brochure (available here) to be way more interesting, having seen the MTV version of the behind the scenes. But I am pretty geeky like that.

I basically watched it unfold at the last minute as a close outsider -- no financial interest, but a very keen interest in the gear aspect and the leveraging of the medium. Taken to the Nth degree, it is pretty cool (and/or maybe a little scary) to think just how far this decentralization could go.

So, where are you on this? What did you think of the whole process? And for curiosity's sake, did you watch it more than once? That's always my mark for whether a video resonated with me.

Feel free to join the fray in the comments.
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:: Nikon D90 Final Product Brochure ::

Lighting 102: 7.0 - Time-Based Variables

Way back when, we talked about the idea that you could balance your flash and ambient light levels by leaving the shutter open long enough for the ambient light to burn in.

But during that "burning in" time, there are also lots of things you can do to add layers of interest to your photos. And that is exactly what we will be covering in the last unit of Lighting 102...

The beauty of altering your camera's settings, focus, focal length or position during a flash/ambient exposure is that you can merge two completely different sets of circumstances into one single frame. It's a little like in-camera Photoshop -- with a nice, creative randomness attached to it.

Today, I want to go through a few of the ways in which you can manipulate your photo during burn-in and show some examples of the end results.


Flash and Pan

For this shot of a soldier in the woods near Ft. Meade in Maryland I based my exposure on the ambient light level. The first value chosen was the shutter speed, which was chosen to create the best pan effect.

Having chosen the shutter, that also gave us the aperture for the proper exposure. Then, it is just a matter of adjusting the flash to the correct power to light Robert's face.

So, why even use flash at all?

First of all, because the flash adds a nice margin of error to a pan shot. Since the flash happens instantaneously, it will freeze your subject. This works best if the background is brighter than your subject. If you expose for the background, your subject will be dark -- and ready to be frozen by the flash without any ghosting.

Second, it gives you control over the relative exposure level between the subject and background. I could have raised or lowered the background level, for instance, without changing the tonal values on Robert's face.

(More on how this photo was made here.)


For this shot of an up-and-coming local hip hop artist, I spent a few frames grabbing a flash/pan look even though he was not moving during the exposure. It was an assignment that appeared to be doomed form the start, so I was grasping at straws.

(Perversely, I kinda enjoy the challenge of situations like that. As long as they do not happen all of the time.)


The top frame is a static shot, and this is the panned version. The rapper (who performs as "Bossman") had just been signed by a record label and his ego was in overdrive.

I am sure he thought he deserved to be surrounded, nonstop, by a dozen of those dancing hotties from MTV and BET. And as such, was far too cool to waste his time on a lead photo in the Features section in the local metro daily. So (once I pried him out of his living room) anything I wanted to try for variety had to be done without changing the setup.

But even when pinched for time I am always looking to burn a few seconds trying something different just to see what it looks like. And even if this one did not work out very well (we went with the still version) the point is that a quick change of the shutter speed and moving the camera could give me a second look -- without wasting any more of His Majesty's precious time.

(You can read more about this blood-from-a-turnip shoot here.)


Will it Go 'Round in Circles

Another way to add an abstract layer is to rotate the camera during a flash exposure. When I am shooting with just a point-and-shoot and built-in flash, this is sometimes the only way I have to amp a flash-lit photo.

In this shot of Danny Ngan owning Chase Jarvis on Guitar Hero, rotating the camera during a flash exposure helped to make the background a little more abstract.
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Whether you are panning, or panning or rotating, you want to begin the action before you press the shutter. This will give you a smooth effect, without the jerkiness that happens if you wait until you start the exposure to start the movement.

As before, it also helps if you are working against a brighter background.


Diffuse the Situation

Using time as a variable during a flash exposure does not necessarily mean moving the camera, either. You can shoot one portion straight and the other portion heavily diffused, for instance. Or filtered. Or both.

In the "Winter Book Club" assignment show at left, I started the exposure by firing blue-gelled flash from the back while there were about eight layers of plastic wrap over my lens. Then I removed the diffusion and finished the exposure painting with the modeling light on a second SB-800 with a CTO gel attached.

All of this has to be done in a darkened room, of course, or you will get (unwanted) burn-in from the ambient light. You can see more detailed look at how this photo was made here.


By now, you should be starting to get other ideas on how you can use time to manipulate your images while they are still being formed. You might, for instance, choose to light someone against a sunset and the defocus the camera during the ambient portion of the exposure. If you need for the image to stay in register during the process, a tripod is obviously a big help.


NEXT: L102 7.1 - Flash Zoom and Stone Soup

Keaton Andrew's Got Next

UPDATE: After all of the sour grapes hand wringing over the KA's post production work, he was kind enough to upload the naked version of this photo to his Flickr stream. Check out his aluminum foil slave helpers, too. (Thanks, KA.)
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The first three sentences of photographer Keaton Andrew's Flickr profile pretty much sum up his mission statement:

"Hello, I am Keaton. I am 18. I am determined to become one of the best photographers in the industry."

He just might, too. When I came across his senior portrait of a baseball pitcher, it made me think about motivated lighting in a way that I never had before.

One of the things I like most about the crop of teenage shooters in professional photography's on-deck circle is the fact that they are not bound by convention.

Andrew has clearly studied at the school of Dave Hill, and picked up the idea of multi-shot compositing without going for the whole "heavily post-produced" look.

Take the baseball shot above, for instance. Shot with three AlienBees, the rims would have looked incongruent in this (polarized sky) day shot, which in itself was composited via a series over a darker exposure. So Andrew simply added the stadium lights in, in post, to motivate the effect of the rim lights.

Which never, ever would have occurred to a 43-year-old fart like me. Heck, to Andrew, Dave Hill is an Old Fart, too.

(Ha! You reading this, Dave? You are now officially an Old Fart to someone.)



People like to complain about the different-looking, heavily-post-produced stuff by young guys like fellow teenager Joey Lawrence. But seriously -- take a close look at what these guys are accomplishing at such a young age.

Then take a long, hard, honest look at what you were producing at eighteen years old. What do you think they are gonna be doing when they are 43? Hope I am around to see.

To see more of Keaton Andrew's work, check out his Flickr portfolio and/or his website.