And I am wrong. For a very small monetary investment I too can capture amazing, ready-for-print portraits just like Strobist. And since I’m in the photography-ing racket and enjoy taking a decent portrait every now and then, that’s what I’m gonna do.

Like Strobist says it’s not your lens, it’s your light that means the difference between an “oh wow!” picture to a piece of steaming crap covered in maggot bile. I added that last part. Ooh, hyperbole.

Therefore, right now I’m on Ebay bidding on an old Nikon SB-28 Speedlite flash which has basic features my Canon 430EX doesn’t have *cough*PC Sync*cough* and it’s at a third of the price. At Adorama, I’m buying a 45″ umbrella and a shoe mount clamp. I’m also buying ball bungees cuz, ya’know, they’re so cute. And later in the month I’m gonna bite the bullet and buy a set of Pocket Wizards, the most expensive and arguably most important item to purchase. I already own plenty of light stands and reflectors. Plus, with Strobist’s help, I can make the snoots and other accessories myself.

In all, I will have spent about $500 for a complete single-flash lighting system that is completely portable. This is opposed to paying the same amount for a single DC-capable monolight and then having to spend an extra several hundred (or thousand) for a battery system. Ya see? That would suck lemons. Big, sickly lemons. Lemons that are way past their prime.

As you can see from the photographs I’ve posted, having a light that is NOT situated smack in the middle of your camera yields pictures that are far more dynamic than those taken using on-camera flash. Incidentally, these illustrations are taken with my 420EX mounted on my EOS 20D, however, the speedlite is aimed at a white poster held up by a mic stand in the television station where I live work.

The photographs aren’t really for the station but rather illustrate techniques of efficiently (read: cheaply) shooting with an on-camera flash that doesn’t LOOK like on-camera flash.The results are slightly impressive and did garner “oh wow!”s from the news anchors whose pictures I was taking. Still, the problem with shooting with an on-camera speedlite is that you’re still limited because the flash is still ON the camera. Yeah, you can flip it around and bounce light to your heart’s desire, but what if you’re in an open field and have nothing to bounce the light off of? That’s right, you’d be pretty damn screwed.

So, speedlite on a stand, umbrella, and wireless triggers setup seems to be the most logical and cost effective way to take sweet portraits when portability and speed are the two biggest factors. The point here is that they usually are.

This will really help out my in-the-field wedding portraits and will also give me an excuse to steal borrow some of the talent from the station to use as my guinea pigs off-camera flash photography test subjects. And to pour fuel on the fire, I even joined the Flickr Strobist group. I’m fun like that.

Ok, check this out: as a photojournalist (like DH) you’re not supposed to do any kind of photo manipulation because that would be the same thing as writing false information in the text of your story. As an artist, on the other hand, you’re supposed to use all the tools you have in your arsenal to communicate your artistic vision.

Strobist.com is about cheap, DIY speedlite flash lighting techniques and is not necessarily a “how to be a photojournalist” though it certainly can feel that way since the blog is written by one.

So what is this Flickr pool all about, anyway? Apparently it’s here for we photographers to showcase what we’ve learned from the writings of David Hobby to become better technical photographers. Some of us don’t want to be photojournalists. Some of us want instead to be artists so we use every digital darkroom technique we can to express our creative vision.

You can achieve a lot in-camera. But like any good technical photographer who can achieve precise results with his camera, a real artist can make a good exposure, can manipulate the depth of field, compose a shot correctly and use the light to paint a picture AS WELL AS do all the fun stuff in Photoshop that’ll really make his photo artwork.

I do it all the time. I come from photojournalism and I take a damn good picture if I wanted to using manual everything. But I can take that same photo into the digital darkroom and do things to it that I couldn’t do back in the chemical days.

When I go into Photoshop, I’m probably opening the RAW file and adjusting the image to suit the style I intended it to have whilst I was shooting. The exposure and focus may be correct, the colors may be true, but I may want the reds to pop a bit more than could have been captured on “film”. Or maybe I wanted to increase the sharpness of the image because I want to enlarge it and you can do that sort of thing in RAW without all the JPEG-alicious artifacting. Maybe I had a bit too much headroom to crop. Or, which is most often the case, I’m correcting blemishes on the model’s face.

Regardless, I’m not modifying the pose, the emotion of the model, the direction of the light, or the intended composition. I am enhancing a mere photo into something that pops. I didn’t take a bad photo and am trying to fix my mistakes in post.

So the complaint really should be: photographers shouldn’t use Photoshop as a safety net.

Photographers should be more than just people with a snap-shot mentalities and expensive pro cameras. Photographers should learn their craft, learn their camera, learn how to paint with light and THEN learn how to further enhance their images through digital manipulation, not the other way around.

So, learn your craft. Practice. And love your hobby (or your way of life, whatever). :)

I don’t particularly like it when people notice the camera, when they look into the lens and fake a smile. It’s so fake and posed and…expected. And it makes me feel like I’m doing a bad job of blending in. Of course, it’s hard to blend in when you’re carrying around a huge camera rig, even without a flash you still get noticed. It’s going to be tough when I get that 70-200 f/2.8: white shows up pretty well in a dark room.

Getting back, I like weddings just fine. The romantic in me wants to capture the sparks and fireworks, the journalist in me wants to capture the candid spontaneity of the event and the businessman in me likes getting paid. You just have to go with the flow, let the client acclimate to you, blend in, be polite but firm and get the job done. As far as someone who is uncomfortable with the camera, that’s when I say “I know how you feel; that’s why I’m a photographer.” and I use a telephoto lens so I don’t impede on their personal space. Pretty soon they warm up to me and I can get up close with a wide lens and shoot from the hip to get coverage. That’s usually during the reception…which probably means after they’ve had a few drinks.

And I rarely, if ever, use flash. When I do, it’s more than likely at the reception or during group shots at the ceremony location. When that happens I have some sweet off-camera strobes I use. To which I’ll be upgrading to studio strobes with battery packs pretty soon so that should give me even more coverage. I’d rather be shooting combat zones in times of war, but whatever. The bills are paid.

I’ve been shooting long enough to know (read: “make an educated guess”) what setting I need to apply to the camera in any given shooting scenario. You get to the point where you can eyeball the formula to achieve a technically correct photo. Something along the lines of value of light+color temperature+ISO+required focal length+intended depth of field+aperture+shutter speed.

In the studio I know I can set up my camera at ISO 100 at f/5.6 and 1:250 with the lights at 1/8 power and achieve a ballpark look. I can then eyeball the fine-tuning using the camera’s LCD Polaroid and histogram.

I got the experience, not only from using manual and failing — learning from my mistakes, but also from setting the camera to auto and seeing what algorithms it would come up with in various situations. After looking at shots that work and don’t work and why, combined with reading and EXIF from mine and other photogs’ work, I began to understand not what the words meant because I already knew what exposure and color temperature were, but how to apply that knowledge to make a technically correct photo.

To clarify: I say “technically correct” because I’ve had photos that had the correct camera settings, but the shot was aesthetically unappealing. In other words I’ve had an action-stopping shot of a football receiver with his torso so far out of the shot you couldn’t tell if he was catching the ball. The reverse is to have a beautifully composed shot that was over or underexposed or was out of focus.

So just because someone shoots manual all the time doesn’t mean he doesn’t screw up or is a better photographer. It means they’re technical awareness and comfort level are high enough that they trust themselves to figure out a better setting than their camera. I personally enjoy manual shooting because my shots will be more consistent which means more keepers and fewer throw-aways.

In conclusion there is nothing wrong with shooting fully manual or fully automatic. It all just depends on how comfortable you are with your gear. Get more comfortable (via experience), shoot more manaul, get more consistent shots, become a better photographer.

Now we just need to work on composition, lighting and timing and we’re all set.

I think that’s pretty sweet.

Read the Strobist article that turned me on to PocketWizards.

It’s fastened snugly to my Nikon SB-28 using good old fashioned friction. You can clearly see the PocketWizard fastened to the swivel mount via Velcro strip so it doesn’t bounce around whilst in transit.

By the way, this little portable light setup has served me extremely well since I’ve put it together. I’ve had it fall to the ground from tall heights (minus snoot, plus umbrella) on several occasions and it has yet to explode on me. I even bent my Photoflex adjustable umbrella and squeezed it right back to perfection. What’s cool is I actually seem to be getting better at this whole “lighting” thing. :)

Getting back to the subject, I tested out my new toy tool by firing it at the kitchen drapes hanging defenseless against the onslaught of homemade snooty goodness.

At a distance of five feet, the 6″ snoot struck a beam of focused light that created a flashy sweet spot of about 2.5′ across and around 1′ in height. I walked around the house and took snooted strobe shots of whatever I could find. Even did a few texture shots against an open pamphlet in the kitchen.

Then I bothered my dad in the living room for a few minutes while I tried out a few different things. I learned something new over the holidays this week. If you remove your lens from its camera mount and hand hold it a bit away from the camera, you can do some serious damage to the lens’ perception of depth of field.

I ‘ve been doing the poor man’s tilt shift lens thing since I learned it [cough, yesterday] and decided to apply it to the use of my newly snootified flash. Thanks to Zack Arias for the “ghetto tilt shift” idea. I decided to make a statement with my picture; something to the effect of my dad spends way too much time on the computer.

And here I am writing a very descriptive blog, with illustrations, in the middle of the night. Like father like son, I suppose.

When I was done, I went to my room and tried my hand at some self portraiture using my new found knowledge. The culmination of which resulted in what I think is a photograph I’m going to be proud of for a really long time.

You can check out the images in a larger form at Flickr by clicking on them. However, I think my self portrait looks best on black.

Thanks to David Hobby and Zack Arias for graciously spilling their knowledge onto unsuspecting amateur photogs like myself. Y’all da bomb!

Cheers.

After three exhaustive hours of Googling, I could find nothing even remotely helpful save for a few forums, most of which were not at all easy to follow.

Someone somewhere said the method was similar to the PhotoFlex Photo Drops except “handled differently”. Of course, not a big help, but it got me sort of in the right direction. After I figured it out, I felt like a moron but at least learned it before my big photoshoot tomorrow evening. Oh yeah. Having trouble with a portable backdrop in front of the client? Oodles to my credibility, I tell you what.

So to everyone else out there also having similar (or possible carbon copy) troubles, this is for you! :)

The “film” is actually several stills of me “acting” in front of my Canon EOS 20D on a tripod with timer. I then put it all together in Photoshop and animated it in ImageReady. I figured the animation would help more than words.

Instructions:

1. Place the Botero 5×7″ muslin background in front of you (facing away from you) and then rotate it until it is laying horizontally on its side.

2. Gripping the background with the top and bottom (now the left and the right sides), pull the two sides slowly toward you until the background begins to fold. (Note how the background folds itself into two distinct cicles resembling a figure 8.)

3.Take the circle nearest your head and push it away from you so that it folds down into the circle laying on the ground. The Botero 5′7″ muslin background is now folded and ready to be placed inside it’s carrying pouch. Cheers. :)

Originally posted at Photo.net here.

Marcela was pleased with the pictures which I cropped for 8×10″ then uploaded to Flickr where she ordered some prints.

The portraits were shot CR2 in grayscale. Canon 20D + BG-E2, EF 50mm f1.8 II, Nikon SB-28 strobe at 1/4 power fired into 41″ umbrella 5 feet away. ISO 100, f4.5, 50mm. PocketWizard remote triggers. 32″ gold reflector hand-held on right. It sucked holding the 20D in my left hand and in portrait orientation. Auto focus.

I love my expensive little hobby.

My suggestion would have normally been to check ebay for old Nikon SB-24s or 28s. I personally own a Nikon SB-28 setup which is my portable studio and I didn’t spend more than $500 for it including the most expensive element: the wireless transmitter. But you don’t necessarily need one if you’ll primarily be using the setup for indoor studio shots. The Nikons are normally around $100 but good luck finding them on ebay nowadays.

My recommendation would be to visit B&Hphoto.com or Adorama.com and look up the Vivitar 285HV. It costs $89 brand new and it’s powerful enough to get the job done. After that you need a light stand, a light stand adapter with a cold shoe and a no-less-than 40-something inch white umbrella. Then you’ll need a simple PC sync cord to trigger the strobe (strobe and flash are interchangeable nomenclature). I doubt the entire setup will cost more than $250.

All you’d need then are AA batteries.

You could spend a little more money and also get a flash bracket so you can take the setup on the road (since it is unwise to mount the flash onto your Canon camera as they operate on different voltages and one would fry the other). Maybe get one of those tiny softboxes for shoe-mount flashes or one of those omnibounces or the Gary Fong Lightsphere. Best part is all these options are relatively inexpensive. AND they work.

So why did my investment end up at $500? Because instead of going PC sync I went with the PocketWizard Plus II wireless transmitter option. I had to get two because you need a transmitter and a receiver for the initial setup. And each costs $187. But in the long run it’s better for what I do since I take mine with me everywhere, I use long lenses for portrait work and I don’t want to trip over wires…expensive, flimsy wires which ultimately need to be replaced far more frequently than I’d like. So I made the expensive plunge and haven’t regretted it at all. And they also run on AA batteries.

So I would personally recommend the PocketWizard option and for a little bit more than a new SpeedLite which would still result in pedestrian snapshots, you’ll get awesome, studio quality portraits of your beautiful daughter.

Another option, go PC sync and for the same price as the PocketWizard option, you can get twice the equipment. However, I don’t recommend this because for a beginner, one flash is ALREADY too much to worry about. Besides, I do all my work as a one strobe pony and I’m fine so far.

Check these out:

1. 2.
3. 4.

I took these photos with my $500 wireless-triggered Nikon SB-28 off-camera flash setup. You can see the setup making a cameo in the fourth picture. The only thing missing from anything I’ve mentioned in this post is a reflector (which fills in shadows). Look at how harsh the shadows are in #3 and #4 and how #1 and #2 have detail in the shadow area because of my use of a reflector.

Here’s a look at the setup of #2:

See the use of the reflector with the bare strobe? Reflectors are an excellent investment. You can get a nice 30-something inch five-in-one reflector for about $25. For the money you’re saving already, I’d say go for it. You can even get the huge collapsible background I use for around $130. So already, you’ve spent $370 with everything except the PocketWizards. But you’re still triggering via PC sync cord which should be okay until you upgrade (and you’ll want to later). And since we’re talking about wireless I’m going to recommend you not go with the cheap eBay alternative. You get what you pay for and in this case it’s flimsy at best.

Now that I’ve given you a bunch of pointers here’s what you should do:

Go to Strobist.com and read up on off-camera flash technique, DIY adventures and tons of thrifty, working examples for awesome photos that are worthy of publish. Pretty soon your daughter’s friends are going to hire you to take their photos.

So I guess the next lesson will need to be on portrait lenses, huh?