Lighting 101 PDF Released in Three More Languages

I am happy to announce that, thanks to the generous efforts of a dedicated group of multilingual readers, the Lighting 101 course has now been released into French, Hebrew and Spanish.

Hit the jump for links to the uploaded files, instructions on how to get L101 in other languages -- or maybe even translate it into a new one...
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Leading Off -- French

Thanks to the team effort on the French translation project, the L101 French version will thankfully not be a jumble of misconjugated verbs and insulting idioms. My French, she is not so good, non?

These guys did it by committee and were meticulous to a fault. I am told they deliberated over it until the last drop red wine was gone. Such dedication.

Thanks to Jacques, Mélina, Benoit, Charles, Christophe, Laurent and Jon, many hands made light work (owch - that pun physically hurt).

The PDF is available for download here. Not that it has to stay there, either. These PDFs are released for hosting/sharing anywhere, as long as they are unaltered and attribution is maintained.


Batting Left -- Hebrew

Thanks to the one-man translation machine, Tomer Jacobson, Lighting 101 is now available in Hebrew.

I had to hold my laptop up to a mirror to try to make sense of the right-to-left script.

Didn't help! But it looks beautiful and was a lot of effort for one person. You rock, Tomer.

That translation is here. As with the French version, feel free to pass it along anywhere you wish.


And at Clean-Up, Spanish

What else can I say about Rafa Barbera? He has been translating Strobist into Spanish at Strobist en Español since way back. So, naturally he felt he should take on all of the extra L101 translation and PDF formatting all by himself, too.

Having finished this task, he will next be solving the world's economic problems before moving on to single-handedly finding a solution for global warming.

The Lighting 101 PDF in Spanish is here. (Thanks Rafa!)
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Remember, a Japanese version is already available (over 4,000 D/L's from the MediaFire site alone) and of course there is an English PDF version, too.

If you want to learn more about the translation projects, start here.

And again -- many, many thanks to all of the people involved.

John Keatley: Lighting Strikes Twice

On Monday I pointed to the blog at Redux Pictures as a great stream of visual stimulation that you can have delivered to your RSS reader almost daily.

Today, we chat with Seattle-based Redux photographer John Keatley, who photographed for two different magazines a hacker named Dan Kaminsky. You may remember the name -- Kaminsky was the guy who recently discovered a security hole in the entire internet.

This, and links to John's other recent work, after the jump.
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Same Subject, Different Day

John originally shot Kaminsky for Technology Review magazine, and then shot him about a month later for WIRED. You'd think, with those kind of publications backing you, that you'd have the subject at your beck and call for several hours.

You'd be wrong. John's first obstacle was convincing Kaminsky to stick around long enough for him to set up a light or two.

Okay, well, how 'bout a glamorous setting then? Can we at least get a really tech-looking environment?

Nope. How 'bout a sparse, mostly empty apartment with rented furniture. Say, a folding table and a couch.

But you're still shooting for a pair of very visual publications, so you have to step up and do something cool with it. Which is exactly what John did.


Dan Kaminsky, Take One

So Technology Review calls the day of the shoot to guide John toward shooting a simple head shot. Which is cool, because John has a thing for head shots.

John arrived at Kaminsky's apartment to hear that his subject had a meeting at Microsoft in, like, 45 minutes. Which is news to John, of course. But a little negotiation bumped his available time up to about an hour.

That still meant that he would have to tone down his normal approach, in which he uses about six lights to sculpt his subjects. But it was something, at least.

So he instead broke out four lights and in the end wound up using only three. He sat Kaminsky on a stool with a couple of blue kickers and a frontal key coming in from above the camera.

The fill light in the photo -- reflecting both the key and the blue separation lights -- was a pillow with a piece of paper on it being held by the subject. Hey, any port in a storm. And time was short.



(Click for bigger in a new window.)

"It was kind of a funny picture," John says. "He was sitting on a little stool, with about four couch pillows on his lap and a piece of paper underneath it. And I am controlling him to the millimeter."

Not exactly the picture of a glamourous set you might expect when shooting for the national mags, but it gets the job done.

John says that Kaminsky was really generous with his time -- what little he had. He tried to make good use of the limited time by coaching Kaminsky through a series of expressions. And in the end it was the wry, sideways glance that carried the photo.

"I shot a lot of stuff," Keatley says, "but this is the one that jumped out at me."


Dan Kaminsky, Take Two

A month later, when WIRED did a story on the security breach, John again got the call. Same bare apartment -- save a couch, card table, some guitars, etc. -- and the same subject.

John was doing a little straightening up for the WIRED photo and saw the dumbbell in the corner and decided to leave it in. Every little detail left in the photo is part of the narrative. The router, for instance, is being held together by tape. Perfect.

Kaminsky, again, said he had a meeting with Microsoft in an hour. Which was a little disconcerting, as WIRED was looking for several options as opposed to just a nice head shot.

To make things more interesting, this was his first shoot with a new MF digital back. You know, just to make things a little more complicated.

So he began working through different looks for the room, moving things around. (Good portraits are said to be 10% photography and 90% moving furniture.) John said he moved his environmental elements around until he ended up with a photo he could sit back and look at with contentment.

That's a great way of articulating it, really, as your photos are either going to make you content or pissed off later. And it all depends on how well you take care of the details before you make the picture.



Okay, so the top picture is a little more flashy and has that great expression going for it. But I have to say that I really love the WIRED shot above. The sparse environment, the lost-in-thought expression, the nuanced light. (Click to see it bigger in a new window.) These are the kinds of pictures I spend serious time on when I see them in a magazine.

"Typically what I do is I start with my key," John says. "I decide the shaping that I want. For this one I was using a spot grid to create shadow."

The gradients are all from the light -- not Photoshop. The gridded key is coming in from hard left. For fill, he used a soft box coming in from over his left shoulder, and the finished out the fill with a couple of umbrellas for a total of four lights.

He started with the key for shape, then kept bringing up the soft box and umbrella fill until he got the contrast that he wanted. The idea was for the light to be soft, and still have some contrast.

John has a mix of Elinchrom Rangers, which he loves for their power and portability. These are augmented with a growing arsenal of Profoto Acutes. It may sound excessive, but shooting with a medium format Hasselblad H3D2 at lower ISOs requires lots of light to carry depth of field.

He says has been leaning towards the Profotos lately, because he prefers the reflector mounts and their faster recycle times when compared to the Rangers. Also, the Profotos are well-represented in the rental houses, which is important when he travels.


Saving the Best for Last

John has recently begun blogging about his shoots. The blog is evolving quickly, and is definitely RSS-worthy. IMO, the more shooters doing this at John's level, the better.

If you're smart, you'll only believe half of what you read in his blog posts. If you're really smart you'll know which half to believe, as John weaves a pretty constant stream of BS. Any person who shoots serious photos without taking himself too seriously is aces in my book.

You can also see John's full portfolio on his main website, here.
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Photos © 2008 John Keatley

My Daily Ritual: A Nice Steaming Cup of Redux

A lot of people start the day with a cup of hot coffee. I prefer to get my caffeine from Diet Mountain Dew, but you can't really hit that before lunch or you look like an addict. (I can quit any time -- I quit seven times last year alone.)

So, my morning pick-me-up is to cruise over to the Redux blog. It's run by Myles Ashby, and in it he offers a steady stream of published work by the very talented shooters at Redux Pictures.

There is no faster way to grow as a photographer than to consume a steady diet of good photography -- and take the time to try to understand which qualities in those photos appeals to you. I am into location portraiture, so Redux is a great fit for me.

Myles' approach is simple. He scans the tear sheets, runs the pictures all the way across the editorial hole, then tells you who shot them and where they ran.

Redux is a wonderful boutique agency which is part of a network of similarly minded agencies around the world. Bonus: If you do a little clicking through on the main site, you'll probably end up looking at cool photography until 3:00 a.m., like I did the first time I explored those links.

The Redux Blog is 100% photography -- like opening the fridge in the summer and scooping out the center of the watermelon and leaving the part with all the seeds for everyone else. In fact, the only way it could be better (for me) is if Myles spent a few paragraphs on each post breaking down the lighting.

But I'm a niche market. And besides, I have been talking with a couple of Redux shooters about just that. More TK.


Link: Redux Blog

(Photos by Robyn Twomey [top] and Tom Wagner.)

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Idea: SB-III Barn Door Mod

I have played around with the LumiQuest Soft Box III enough now that it is one of the few light mods I always pack if I am gonna be shooting people. You don't use it like a normal soft box -- you want it in real close, so it gets softer and is powerful enough to overpower the sun.

But I also noticed that one of the things I love about it is that fast fall-off you get when working in very close, like in this photo, shot for the ad. I love that soft light with fast fall-off so much that I have often found myself enhancing the fall-off with a nearby gobo.


This shot, if you'll remember, used the slightly smaller SB-II right overhead and a gobo in really tight to keep the light off of the top of his head. (A little fill was added in, too -- more here.)

And when I use two SB-III's as rim lights I tend to put them in close enough so that I have to worry about lens flare. So I usually have to gobo them there, too.

That got me thinking: If I am usually gobo'ing the light anyway, why not just build a single barn door into the unit itself? Saves a stand and a clamp, right?


Equal Parts Cardboard and Gaffer's Tape

I wanted the flap to be adjustable, retractable and to fold flat along with the SB-III when packed. So I just covered some cardboard with some black gaffer's tape and attached another strip lined with Velcro to secure it at the chosen angle.


Nothing fancy. The "hinge" is made out of gaffer's tape, too.

In addition to two ways listed above (blocking rim flare and shielding the top of someone's head from a nearby top light) I'm betting will most often use it to make a shaft of soft light for close-in, TTL flash portraits.

Holding the camera in the right hand and the light source in the left hand makes a nice cross light to back/right sunlight. And if you can gobo off the light as it works around the (camera left) side of your subject's head, you can definitely do some very cool stuff with nary a light stand in sight.

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Nifty Three-way Flash Bracket at WPPI

Cool little triple flash bracket from Lastolite, the "Triflash," is being shown on the floor of WPPI this week. Being a Bogen Imaging product, I can only think McNally had something to do with this. Not available yet, so we'll have to wait a bit.

Looks very useful (and small) for spreading a decent amount of speedlight juice into an umbrella. You can mount one, two or three strobes easily.

I am liking the clamp. But my favorite thing about this photo is that someone is actually making fake speedlights for displays now. Just like the fake TVs in the Ikea showrooms. We've arrived.

[UPDATE: No, we haven't. Those are apparently Metz strobes, as per the comments. Sigh.]

More info: Lastolite Triflash

(Thanks to Curtis Joe Walker for the heads-up.)

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PocketWizard FlexTT5 and MiniTT1: Full Review

PocketWizard had been noticeably quiet recently while the flash remote landscape continued to evolve with new technology. But today they re-set the bar in announcing their new flagship models, the Flex and Mini.

And while they do work perfectly well as garden-variety remotes, they bring some ultra-cool capabilities that go well beyond manually synching an off-camera flash to your camera.

I have been a PocketWizard user since the very early days, and was lucky enough to be in the loop for early testing. To be honest, I am still a bit wobbly-kneed at some of the things the new ones can do.

Unfortunately for me, they decided to go with a Canon-specific model first. So I felt a little like I was working in a foreign language while I was test driving them. Not to worry, as Nikon-compatible models are reportedly on the way.

In a nutshell, the system rocks. And if you are a Canon shooter who already uses PocketWizard remotes, you are going to want to at least grab either a Flex or a Mini very soon -- mostly because of one very special feature. More on that below.

Full info dump, after the jump.


Flex? Mini?

First off, to avoid and confusion, the "MiniTT1" unit is the camera-top unit. It is very small and has an internal antenna.


It uses a CR2450-size (or CR2354) 3v button cell, but is designed to be very stingy on power usage. There is an auto-off feature that shuts it down whenever your camera goes to sleep. This allows a ballpark battery life expectancy of "hundreds of hours" according to PW.

That said, these are not batteries you can find out in the middle of nowhere. They might not necessarily be in stock in your local Target or grocery store kiosk. In quick checks I have found my local outlets to be hit or miss.

Radio Shack does carry the them, but my local store only had two in stock. However, given the battery life expectancy if you keep one spare in your bag you should be fine.


The "FlexTT5" is the unit that would be located at the flash (or remote camera) end. It is bigger and runs on AA's. Alkalines are recommended, but Ni-MH's worked fine, too. Battery life is around 60 hours of use with alkalines.

The Flex also can serve as a camera-top model, and can do everything a Mini can do. So if size is not as critical as is readily available power sources, some may opt to go with all Flex models instead of a Mini/Flex combo. But the Flex is expected to cost about 10% more than the Mini.

The antenna for the Flex is external and folds out, revealing the USB port used for custom configurations. More on that below.

Both units have pass-through, full TTL contacts in a hot shoe format. Which means no more PC cords needed for hooking them up to speedlights. In other words, your SB-600 (no PC jack) and every Canon flash other than the 580 EX II, (which already has a PC jack and did not need a hot-shoe hook-up) just got a whole lot more useable in both manual remote and remote/TTL modes.

Most Nikon flashes were always easier to use off-camera because of the PC jack, but now PocketWizard has helped to level the playing field for Canon.

They are both solid in their construction, and the Flex has an integrated 1/4x20 mount. It is low-profile, and will not screw up your flash alignment in an umbrella. For purists, it would be very easy to fashion a bracket that would put your flash right next to the umbrella shaft. But the Flex is low profile and also removes the need for a cold shoe in an umbrella setup, so I would probably just use it straight.

Here's a blessing and a curse for the Flex: It can double as a makeshift flash stand when a speedlight is mounted to it.

Why is this a curse? Because the TTL contacts basically serve as one of the balance points on the bottom. This could be problematic, but a protective workaround should be easy enough. You know you are gonna use it that way on occasion, so just be careful to take care of those contacts.


Slightly Ahead of Their Time

Okay, may as well start with the headline feature: They do remote TTL, and they do it well. They call it "ControlTL," and it is technologically very different than the way the RadioPopper handles remote TTL.

In fact, while testing it was generally my lack of familiarity with Canon's E-TTL system that proved to be the limiting factor, not the Flex/Mini itself. I was using a Canon 40D and a kit zoom lens, with 580-II's and 430-II's. And being a Nikon guy, felt very much like a fish out of water with that system.

It was as if someone had invented barbeque ribs that were actually good for your heart, but they only were effective for women. Incidentally, some of you EXIF scrapers noticed that I had been shooting with Canon when I posted in Flickr. This is why. And no, I am not switching.

Range in TTL mode is 800 feet, and they can trigger a standard (manual mode) PocketWizard from up to 1,200 feet away. I did not have enough line of sight distance to best it, but range and reliability have always been a PW strong suit.

As far as remote TTL shooting, the area lit by the flashes will be the limiting factor more than the range of the Flex and Mini themselves. That is to say that a flash placed a couple hundred feet away in TTL mode would likely be lighting a small enough portion of the frame to stress the metering system of a TTL system, anyway. Suffice to say that for just about any practical TTL challenge you can dream up, these should fit the bill.

Engineering-wise, there is some very sophisticated communication going on behind the scenes. The PW's actually intercept the crosstalk between the camera and flash by acting like a flash on the hot shoe.

The camera sends a series of signals back and forth that precede the flash's firing. It's this head start on the flash's actual firing that allows the Mini and Flex the time to communicate via radio the information needed to set up the TTL sync. Or at least, that's how I understood it when PocketWizard engineering guru Jim Clark first explained it to me over dinner at an Italian restaurant last fall.

There's a LOT of tech in there. He was talking about the split-second communications protocols in DSLRs, HyperSync offset, instantaneous quantum data transmission (not an actual PocketWizard project -- yet), etc. After a while, my mind started to explode a little. I half expected him to levitate a bottle of Chianti with his superhuman engineering brain.


Wrestling with Off-Camera TTL

But all of this was just spec talk. What matters is how they work in a real-world environment. So I called my friend Justin Kase Conder, (who shoots Canon) got him NDA'd, and went out with him to shoot some high school wrestling.

The gym was lit with vapor lights -- not really close to anything in the fluorescent range. So we greened three Canon flashes and dialed the camera's white balance around until they looked close on the camera screen.

We stuck the three Flex-equipped flashes on stands in a roughly triangular pattern around the mat and let the TTL drive the flash exposure wirelessly. Our ambient exposure was set to underexpose the room by a couple of stops, so areas that were not lit by flashes would not be pitch black.

As I said, I'm no Canon E-TTL whiz. So I kept it simple and stuck them all on the same channel. As far as the camera and PW was concerned it was a single TTL flash firing from three different locations.

The camera and PW Mini/Flex platform did just fine. Any variations I saw in exposure appeared to be as a result of Canon's E-TTL system, which acts pretty differently than what I am used to with Nikon. For instance, if we zoomed way out and the subject matter was very small in the frame, it might get a little hotter as the camera tried to compensate for the metering. Normal TTL stuff to consider.

In fact, the PW remote TTL did very well, except that when we started aiming close into the backlights the flare would walk the exposure around some. That is normal for TTL flash, too, so I suspect the variations had very little to do with the wireless platform itself.

For a shoot with some decent flash distances, it worked very well on total auto. I am really looking forward to getting the Nikon version and trying it against a more known (to me) quantity of a TTL flash system.


High-Speed Focal Plane Flash Supported, Too

The Flex/Mini system is essentially transparent when working in focal-plane, high-speed sync.

This is a very power-hungry technique for the flash, because of the pulsing nature of the FP mode. So keeping a short flash-to-subject working distance is important. With the Flex/Mini system, for example, you can shoot a long-lens TTL, hi-sync portrait in midday light and back the camera way up while keeping the flash in close to the subject.


(UPDATE: This is demo'd in the PW video, just added at the end of the post.)


This is something the RadioPoppers will do, too, but that system approaches the synching sequence very differently than do the Flex and Mini.

Alright, so it does TTL and does not need a PC cord at the flash end. But I shoot manual, and my flashes have PC jacks on them. So none of that is going to be enough to crack open my wallet. But then they hadda go and do this:


The NSA Folks Would Be Proud

I live very close to the National Security Agency (NSA), which is jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency". The NSA gathers intelligence by eavesdropping and intercepting electronic signals. So they know things.

Well, the new PWs "know things," too. Remember how they can replicate the whole light-based wireless TTL operations by jumping the signal timing on the camera-to-flash pre-chatter? Well, what else could you do if you knew the camera was about to fire your flash?

You could tell the flash to fire a little smidge early, is what you could do. And if you could vary the timing on that signal, you could squeeze an extra stop of shutter speed out of most cameras' sync, too.

We're not talking focal plane synch, with its power-robbing pulses, either. We are talking about using that timing jump to lose the tiniest portion of the energy in the "ramp" of the flash pop. Efficiency-wise about 95% of the flash energy is getting through -- but at a full shutter speed higher.

Adding a stop of shutter speed in an ambient environment means that you can open up a full stop of aperture to get the same exposure. Since your flash cares only about the f/stop, it effectively gets (almost) twice as powerful with the more open aperture.

Alternatively, you can use the extra stop to drop the ambient more, as in when you are balancing out in the sun. Long story short, the Mini (or Flex) increases the sync speed of your existing cameras which effectively makes your flashes more powerful.

How can they do this, given the fact that different cameras have pre-sync timing sequences?



Simple -- they let you control how much the "HyperSync" jumps the camera's timing sequence. They call it a HyperSync offset, but I call it magic. You can get in there and adjust the timing, in microseconds, to experiment and find the setting the best suits your camera and flash.

The HyperSync mode works on full-frame cameras, which have the least margin for error. So in theory, at least, it should work even better with the small-chip cameras, which have more wiggle room around the edges of the chip.

It's only a matter of time before the message boards start lighting up with best settings for every camera and flash model combos to rack the full sync out as far as possible. As the best tested numbers come in, I'll keep a running tally here. Gawd, I love the internet.


Old PW Users Don't Get Hosed

The new system works in manual -- including the HyperSync feature -- with the old models, continuing PocketWizard's tradition of backward compatibility. You simply configure the mini to any one of the previously existing 32 traditional PW channels (supports the MultiMAX channels, too) and you are ready to roll.

But you can also walk the HyperSync offset number around and get significant improvements in any camera system that uses your current PocketWizards. That's why I think many people will be snatching up a single Flex or Mini (either will do this) right of the bat. You do not have to be a remote TTL shooter to get a big benefit from the system.

Note that you cannot change legacy channels on the fly -- they need to be changed in the utility program. And speaking of the utility program, you can pre-load two configurations into each Mini and Flex. The "C1" and "C2" settings are entire multiple configurations, not just triggering channel selections.

So it's easy to have a HyperSync setting built in for, say, both your speedlights and your monoblocs. They will have different sync lead times and thus different hypersync settings. But you can easily switch between them on the fly. (You could also use the two configurations to have different legacy channels ready to go on the fly.

For me, the idea of turning all of my cameras into faster-sync bodies is reason enough to jump on a Flex or Mini right away. And I would, if they had a Nikon-model Mini ready to go. (Grr.)

But I do understand why they have to have different Minis and Flexes for Nikon and Canon -- the TTL pin configurations are different. (The firmware and config utility handles variations on individual camera and flash models, so one physical design per camera brand is all that is required.)


TTL Uzi

One more thing. Since the camera is bypassing a lot of the optical flash pulse timing sequences (it sees the Flex or Mini as a single, on-camera flash) you can actually shoot TTL, off-camera flash at up to 8 frames per second. Your limitation will be that you'll have to be at low enough power so the flash itself can actually keep up.

But the whole system is capable of delivering those speeds while monitoring the TTL info at the same time, which is pretty impressive.

And overall, it is important to know that the Flex/Mini is not so much a physical device as it is a configurable, programmable universal platform. So look for new capabilities to be popping up for them in the future.

Price is not exactly in the eBay remote neighborhood. It is expected to be about 10% more than the current PW II's for the MiniTT1, and 20% more for the FlexTT5. But again, you do get backward compatibility with your existing PW's.


UPDATE: PW has put up a promotional video on the Flex and Mini which hits all of the main points:



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More information i s available at PocketWizard. Prices TBA, but the Mini is said to be about 15% more than a Plus II, with a Flex coming in at a little higher than that. (UPDATE: $199 for the MiniTT1, $219 for the FlexTT5.)

Here's a bit of a bummer: US and Canadian markets only for the time being. I am trying to run down any info I can on that, and also a link to an online product manual. (UPDATE: Product manual here.)

Also, this discussion thread started early in the morning, as soon as they started slipping the new pages into the PW website...

Lastly, over at the PocketWizard Blog, Matt is accepting questions about the capabilities of the new Flex/Mini platform. I suspect he will get a few. Don't be a doofus, though -- check out the product manual (linked just above) first.

Pass the Kool-Aid, Please...

Just saw the Feb. 2009 issue of Practical Photography for the first time. It is produced in the UK but has just made it to my local Border's. They did a cover and 14 pages (!) on off-camera speedlight shooting.

The mag featured lots of shots with diagrams, gear choices, photos by Strobist readers, a few by yours truly and some way cool BMX mountain biking shots by Adam Duckworth.

They even called every last one of you a fanatic, yes they did. The nerve. Just because a few people wear long, white robes at meetups, makes us some kinda cult?

(No worries if the pudding tastes a little funny -- we got a comet to catch, people...)

On US newsstands now, and worth a flip-thru.

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