A Little Light Fare

They say: Half the world doesn't know how the other half lives.

I say: Half the world doesn't know how. The other half lives.

Dinner with me is as likely as not to be a pizza bagel (pepperoni, if you rate) and a Diet Mountain Dew. But when Chase Jarvis invites you over to dinner, don't be surprised if is it catered by a hotshot chef. With professional musicians. In an 30,000 sqaure-foot airplane hangar. With photo and video coverage.

Hit the jump below for a little background on how in the world you would light such a thing, or just head over to Chez Chase for video and photos...

When Chase first told me about this thing, I just smiled a shook my head. I'll give the guy this: He thinks big. Then I started thinking about how you would light something in an environment that big.

For the record, it's the same cavernous place you see in the Seattle Uber-Meetup videos. Having been there, I can tell you that it is big and dark. His first solution is to crank the ISO. This way, he can kill both the photo and video lighting birds with one stone by using continuous lights.

But you still have the problem of where the light will come from in such a big space, and how much area to light. As you can see here, he went with four tall-boy stands to enable a variety of lighting schemes on the dinner area.

He had an additional spot that he added for the performances. He didn't necessarily use all of the lights all of the time -- just kept them around in case they were needed.

The stands were on wheels, which means that they could easily move them around on the spot, making a variety of different light setups. As the evening went through its visual iterations, the lights could be rearranged in a matter of seconds.

Visually, the whole gig was self-aware enough to occasionally include the lights in the photos. Which certainly makes things easier.

Bear in mind that the outside ambient light would be dropping like a rock through twilight. So when the lights were mixed nicely, he chose to include ambient through the windows in the frame. After dark, he composed for the group and just let the background go dark.

It is important to have light coming from the back in a situation like this, or at the very least from the back/sides as rims. You need that separation from the dark background.

So, next time someone from Pearl Jam is hanging out for dinner at your airplane hangar-sized house, you'll at least have a head start on the lighting.

Chase blogs about it here, and there's lots more good stuff (including recipes) at the Songs for Eating and Drinking site.

Coming in November: Annie's 'On Assignment' Book

Mix equal parts talent, ego, resources and schtick and you'll end up with A-List people shooter Annie Leibovitz. You'll remember her from the annotated Queen Elizabeth shoot video, among many other high-profile sessions.

Her upcoming book, Annie Leibovitz: At Work, looks to be a behind-the-scenes study of some of her more famous shoots, including the royal shoot referenced above.

I have always had a "love-eyeroll" thing for her, having heard too many stories from people she has worked with to avoid the latter. But I very much enjoy her work and absolutely learn something every time I get the opportunity to study her photos more closely.

Amazon has it available for pre-order at $26.40 (list is $40.00) with price protection between now and when it ships.

"On Assignment: Annie Leibovitz" for that kind of coin?

Heck yeah, I'm in.

(Thanks to Charles P. for the heads-up.)


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Art on the Wing: Bradford Fuller's Fly-In Studio

I am probably not the only one who has noticed Bradford Fuller's beautifully lit bird photos in the Strobist pool. His artful mix of flash and ambient against a 2-D background gives the photos a lyrical feel. And the red stamps added in post at the bottom make them seem as if they came from faraway lands.

If you pull back the curtains, and you'll see that Bradford is doing all of this with a Nikon D200, a single SB-800 and a piece of mat board.

That, and a lot of imagination...




The photos look as if they are paintings from another time and place -- a look Bradford achieves via his artful mix of flash and a shutter speed designed to either freeze his subject or to allow its movement to paint through the flash exposure. But his "exotic location" is in Maine in the northeastern US, right next to his house.

Using flash for bird photography is easier than you might think. The key to getting photos like this is to realize that if you can control the light and the backdrop, you can control the overall look of the final photo. Add to this the beauty of a natural subject -- and the unpredictability of the flash/blur combo -- and wonderful things can happen.

Bradford's "studio" is much more spartan than the final photos would suggest. He uses a feeder, of course. So he knows where the birds are going to be. That makes everything else an exercise in geometry.


As for the backdrop, it is simply a piece of mat board, made all the more interesting by the many rains it has endured. He places it on an easel, knowing the birds will pass in front of it on their approach to the feeder. This controls his background, and give the photos the look of a 2-d painting rather than a photo of a 3-D scene.

The light is from an SB-800, placed outside of the frame to one side. From the photo at left, he appears to be using a Cactus PT-04 remote trigger, or some other equivalent "eBay" remote.

The mixture of flash and ambient is of course controlled by how he balances the two sources -- usually choosing to lead with flash and fill with ambient. At close range (and with bare flash) his SB-800 easily puts out enough power. He then works on them in varying degrees in post processing.

Bradford says that his work, like many other things, is about 90% "showing up," as per the popular Woody Allen saying. And for him, showing up means shooting through a hole in the screen of his window.

After all, why suffer for your art if it is not required?


His photos have intrigued me to the point that I will trying some of my own this winter. I am already thinking of what the photos would look like with the birds cross-lit on the 45's from top and bottom.

The possibilities for a fly-in studio like this are endless. Given that you are only going to be shooting an a small area (defined by the location of the background) you could choose to develop as complex a lighting scheme as you wanted.

But the simplicity and beauty of Bradford's bird shots will keep me coming back to his portfolios again and again.

You can see more of his work in his Flickr set, and on his daily blog. If you try this on your own, and get a great shot, please share it with us in the Strobist Flickr pool.

Learn SEO While You Help to Feed People

UPDATE: Someone unloaded a can of whup-ass on me in the comments, to which I responded and uploaded yesterday's inbound search-related metrics. So if you would like some background info, it is there. But let's keep it civil, if at all possible...
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If you are in the Baltimore/Washington area and are interested in learning more about Search Engine Optimization, I will be speaking on SEO as it pertains to photographers at a "Photo Nights for Charity" event on 9/17.

If you are a shooter who is on the web, SEO is key to increasing your online footprint. This is not technical stuff, either. Anyone can do it.

One hundred percent of the money raised will benefit the Maryland Food Bank, which can really use our support right now. And there is a cool photo-related perk for attendees, too. I hope you will join us.

More details here.

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Keep a Lighting File, Version 2.0

Back in Lighting 101 I wrote about the importance of keeping a lighting file. And having made the jump to the iPhone, keeping a lighting file is now way easier -- and more accessible.

Hit the jump for more on this -- and two iPhone apps that are great for location shooters.

Now that the 3G is out and I have (finally) taken the plunge, I will no longer have to put up with every other photographer I know telling me to get one of these things.

Alright, already, you guys were right -- it is made for photographers. I considered the idea of putting my portfolio on the phone, then ditched it in favor of uploading several different versions of my portfolio. That way, I can immediately choose which set of photos are best suited for the person who is about to see them.

In addition, I have merged the lighting file into something I have labeled as an "inspiration folder". It's filled with my favorite shots from guys like Dan Winters, Gregory Heisler and Peter Yang, along with a few dozen of my absolute favorites from the Strobist reader gallery.

I come across ideas that I want to save all of the time. Recently, I have started shooting them right into the iPhone with the built-in camera. This, of course, sticks them right into your camera roll along with all of the blurred photos of the cat snapped by your kids between games of JawBreaker. (Okay, I am addicted to that one, too.)

As smooth as he iPhone interface is, iTunes won't let you treat the camera roll as an accessible image folder as far as I can tell. But if you launch iPhoto (which I normally hate) while the phone is attached, it'll let you import the photos directly.

Then just export them to your designated iPhone-synching photo folder on your computer and they will pop up wherever you wish to put them.

Even more than the idea of a physical lighting file, I love the that, (a) I can snap a cool magazine page whenever I see it, and (b) I always have the photos with me. I have had an inspiration folder on my laptop for a couple of years now. Now I keep the photos with me everywhere I go. Way better.

The photo up top, BTW, is from this month's Fast Company magazine and was shot by Brent Humphreys. You may remember him as having shot the WIRED Magazine cover that was blogged with lighting diagrams.

I just spent fifteen minutes looking through his portfolio, and I think I just found some more inspiration.

Do you have an inspiration folder? Who is in it?


Photo-Friendly Apps

I spend a lot of time on email and Google reader, which lets me easily follow a couple dozen blogs very efficiently. One button and the are all queued up, ready to read.

But two other apps stand out as being particularly useful to location shooters: Weather Bug and Photocalc.

Why Weather Bug? Because, unlike the standard weather app, Weather Bug gives you the ability to see local weather radar. So you know how much time you have left before you are gonna have to bail from an outdoor shoot during transitional weather. And it is free, too.

And Photocalc, which is loaded up with mostly useless navel-gazing photo calculators to justify the $2.99 price tag, has one thing that is very useful: It grabs your location and will display the exact time of sunrise and sunset in your area.

That's a big help when you are doing the sunset backdrop thing and your subject is asking you what time to show up.

It also has a mini-spreadsheet-style guide number calculator, shown above, which will help to train your mind for faster flash power estimation.

If you want to learn more about Photocalc before foregoing 3/4 of a cup of Starbucks to buy it, check out WIRED blogger (and longtime Strobist reader) Charlie Sorrel's review.

Time to Give Away Some PocketWizards

The votes are in, and the July winner for the PocketWizard / Strobist "Going Wireless" contest is...

Ryan Allan.





Congrats to Ryan who took a skateboarder shoot / lighting demo and turned it into art. Not that art is required to win, but it just stood out from the other entries and was the unanimous choice for July's winner. His was chosen from those videos entered before the end of July.

Several other vids stood out, and they (like all of the other videos) remain in the running for future months. Get those videos in and tagged, folks. We had a total of 24 videos entered in time for this month's judging. Them ain't bad odds for a free set of PocketWizard Plus II's.

Little hint, there are over a hundred Strobist-tagged videos in the system which could be in the running for the coming months. All you have to do is add the tag "pocketwizardstrobist". Don't strain yourself with the extra workload.

Already have some fun stuff coming in this month, too. The earlier you get your videos in, the more chances you have to win.

Full details on the PocketWizard / Strobist video contest here.

How to Break your SB-800's Little Neck Like a Chicken

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric, in the comments, for the surgery-based workaround (see comment at 11:58 a.m. on 8/13/08). And yes, I know the vid was way too drawn out. Which is why I told you where you could skip to...



Peter Gregg spends two minutes and 40 seconds admonishing you not to do this. Then shows you exactly how he strong-armed his Nikon SB-800 speedlights so that they will now go 135 degrees to the left. (Clarification: When you are looking at the flash from the front.)

The SB-800s of normal photographers only go 90 degrees to the left.

Many CLS-ers lament the inability to turn the signal receiver window to any angle needed when shooting multi-light, off-camera. This (insane) little mod would seem to rectify that.

FAIR WARNING: I am not going to do this to any of my babies. In fact, I get a little squeamish just watching it. But if you are stupid brave enough, it might give you access to every click-stop through the 360-degree range.

Or it might get you a $320.00 paperweight.


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