Genius Of Photography Series
December 31, 2008 by Syl Arena · Comments Off
This month’s “Best Web Video” is actually an entire series — the Genius Of Photography produced by the BBC (site here). If you are trying to figure out how to be a photographer today, I think it’s essential to expose yourself (pun intended) to a bit of the 170 years of our collective history. Consider this 6-part series to be a must watch.
Outside the UK, the Genius Of Photography appears periodically on Ovation (USA), ABC (Australia), Knowledge Network (Canada) and elsewhere. Fortunately for the impatient and impulsive, the entire series has been posted on YouTube in 10 minute installments. To make things easy, I’ve collected all 37 links below.
Enjoy. Learn. Pass it on.
The Genius of Photography Series
1. Fixing the Shadows - Tracks the first attempts to make images permanent and the mass appeal that the invention of Kodak created. Featuring: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Eadweard Muybridge, Andre Kertesz and others.
Ep 1 - Part 1
Ep 1 - Part 2
Ep 1 - Part 3
Ep 1 - Part 4
Ep 1 - Part 5
Ep 1 - Part 6
2. Documents for Artists - After World War One the potential of photography attracted the attention of artists and governments alike. Featuring: May Ray, Dorothea Lange, Alexander Rodchenko and others.
Ep 2 - Part 1
Ep 2 - Part 2
Ep 2 - Part 3
Ep 2 - Part 4
Ep 2 - Part 5
Ep 2 - Part 6
Ep 2 - Part 7
3. Right Time, Right Place - Examines the photographs of D-Day, the Holocaust and Hiroshima raising questions about history as seen through the viewfinder. Featuring: Henryk Ross, W Eugene Smith, Robert Capa and others.
Ep 3 - Part 1
Ep 3 - Part 2
Ep 3 - Part 3
Ep 3 - Part 4
Ep 3 - Part 5
Ep 3 - Part 6
4. Paper Movies - Charts the golden age of ‘photographic journeys’ and how the use of colour slowly became a credible medium for ’serious’ photographers. Featuring: Stephen Shore, Tony Ray Jones, Ed Ruscha and others.
Ep 4 - Part 1
Ep 4 - Part 2
Ep 4 - Part 3
Ep 4 - Part 4
Ep 4 - Part 5
Ep 4 - Part 6
5. We Are Family - Having conquered the street and the road, photographers approached the final frontier: the home, the self, and private life. Featuring: Larry Sultan, Cindy Sherman, Richard Billingham and others.
Ep 5 - Part 1
Ep 5 - Part 2
Ep 5 - Part 3
Ep 5 - Part 4
Ep 5 - Part 5
Ep 5 - Part 6
6. Snap Judgments - Shows how photography has become part of the art world where a single image can cost $2.9m and, in the digital world, where all images are possible. Featuring: Martin Parr, Gregory Crewdson, Seydou Keita and others.
Ep 6 - Part 1
Ep 6 - Part 2
Ep 6 - Part 3
Ep 6 - Part 4
Ep 6 - Part 5
Ep 6 - Part 6
Smashing Pumpkins With High-Speed Sync * Gang Light - Part 2
December 15, 2008 by Syl Arena · Comments Off
The line drive at 1/400 = blurry seeds flying everywhere.
GANG LIGHT – Part 2: Just how fast a shutter speed do you need to freeze the seeds flying from a pumpkin that your teenage son is trying to drive over the left field fence? Also, how do you create beautiful light on a dreary, flat light afternoon in a way that let’s you shoot at a really fast shutter speed?
Fortunately, I had a dozen Canon 580EX II Speedlites and an arsenal of RadioPoppers (all on loan from their manufacturers) so that I could try to answer these important questions. As you’ll see below, the answer to the shutter speed question is “really, really fast.” The lighting question takes a bit longer to answer.
The base hit at 1/3200 = still a bit of blur if you look really close.
Freezing Supersonic Seeds
Back in the days when I got my first SLR (hint: Nixon had just resigned), the top shutter speed on most cameras was 1/500″. In comparison, some 30+ years later, the shutter speeds on prosumer DSLRs seem supersonic. You’d think that anything north of 1/2000″ would be fast enough to freeze pumpkin shrapnel. Turns out that pumpkin seeds are supersonic too.
I shot at a variety of speeds — all in full-stop increments from 1/400″ [1/800", 1/1600"...] When I hit 1/3200″, based on a super-chimp of the camera’s LCD, I was sure we had stopped space and time. Back in the studio, with the benefit of Lightroom and a large monitor, I discovered otherwise. Turns out that the magic didn’t happen until 1/6400″.
The home run at 1/6400" = seeds frozen in space.
Left: 1/3200" Right 1/6400" - an important difference in sharpness
My hero shot for the afternoon. Details shown above.
Lighting The Bash With High-Speed Sync
High-speed sync, as I’ve explained elsewhere, changes the way that a Speedlite fires. Rather than one big burst, the camera tells the strobe(s) to fire a continuous series of pulses. The idea behind this technology is that the strobe turns into a continuous light source for the brief duration of the exposure. To get this instantaneous recycle, the power of the flash is greatly reduced. With high-speed sync, you can use virtually any shutter speed on your camera. [Confused? Then click on the link above and read that article before continuing.]
The downfall of high-speed sync is that it significantly reduces the power coming from the strobe. This means a couple of things: 1. you have to move the lights really close to the subject and 2. you need multiple lights.
As I wrote in the piece on Ben Willmore (here), my friends at Canon USA and RadioPopper loaned me an arsenal of Speedlites and Poppers (radio triggers). The lessons I learned with this shoot continue to erode my thoughts about the lunacy of having so many small strobes at hand. In fact, given that the second-generation of Poppers has been launched (details here) and the pesky fiber optic is a thing of the past, setting up so many lights will not be a big deal in the near future.
The Gang Light Rail - 12 Canon 580 EX IIs triggered by RadioPopper P1s
For the pumpkin smash-a-thon, I bolted a dozen Canon Speedlites onto a 7′ piece of red oak. The Gang Light Rail was held aloft by a couple of C-stands. I stood under the rail with the master Speedlite atop my camera. Given that I was close enough to get splattered with pumpkin guts every time, I don’t believe that the strobes could have been fired by traditional eTTL using the infrared receivers on the remote units. They’d have to be able to see my master unit. The geometry just wasn’t there so that all twelve units could see my master.
The pumpkin smash only deepened my affection for RadioPoppers. I was able to move in and out, left and right, without any concern for the position of my master unit in relation to the remote lights. Given that in some shots I was literally a couple of inches from my son’s swing radius, it was very nice not to have to worry about maintaining the line-of-sight between the remotes and the master.
I also have to say that I love the quality of light coming off my Gang Light Rail. The soft quality is created because the width of the lights along the rail wraps the light around my subject. Each strobe unit is a key and fill light at the same time.
You can also change the weather with high-speed sync. Did you notice the difference between the rail shot and my pumpkin shots? The rail shot was made with my camera choosing the shutter speed based on the ambient light. For the pumpkin shots, my manually-set shutter speed was 5-stops below ambient. The light grey sky turned into a storm-filled sky.
I Can’t Think Of Another Way To Light This Shot
Given the camera gear that I have on hand (Canon 5D) I have to live within the limitations of the focal plane shutter. [Again, read my earlier article on high-speed sync to understand why the type of shutter makes a difference with sync speed.]
Many comments on the Willmore piece, both here and on Strobist, suggested that I was a fool to use a dozen Speedlites instead of a big (expensive) studio pack to turn noon to night. I’m called a fool all the time. If I’m going to earn the title, I’d at least like to get it for the right reasons.
So, I’d like to preempt those same comments here and say again “I’m a Canon shooter. I have a focal-plane shutter.” Sure, I could bring in a big (expensive), bi-tube studio pack and fire it off at a low-power setting - which would give me an ultra-fast burst of light. But… there’s that focal-plane sync speed barrier. With my 5D, my sync speed is 1/160″ (the manual may say different, but I’ve fired this camera over 100K times, and my sync speed is 1/160″). So anytime I shoot with a studio pack, the fastest I can shoot is 1/160″ - if I want to illuminate the whole frame with flash. [David Ziser has a very interesting piece about shooting at faster speeds - but the pumpkin shots don't have the composition that David's technique requires.]
Let’s do the photo-math. The hero shot above was made at 1/6400″ at f/5.6. There are five and a third stops of shutter speed between 1/6400″ and my sync speed of 1/160″. So, to light with a big (expensive) bi-tube, studio strobe, I’d have to shoot at 1/160″ because that’s the sync speed for my 5D. To keep the ambient light (the sunlit background) exposure the same, I’d have to stop down five and a third stops from f/5.6 to f/40-something. Funny. I don’t have a lens that goes past f/32. Further, the edges of the frame and the background are better in soft-focus. So, how to shoot at a relatively wide aperture if my fastest shutter speed is 1/160″?
I guess I could throw on my Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter and dial in a ton of neutral density to make the studio pack work at a wide aperture at 1/160″. Maybe. Have you ever looked through a Vari-ND dialed down 6 or so stops? It’s almost impossible to see through. It’s not something that I’d want on the end of my lens when I’m dancing a couple of inches outside the arc of a pumpkin-spattering bat.
Like I said above, the lunacy of having so many Speedlites on a shoot is melting away.
More Gang Light Adventures
Part 1: I Shot Ben Willmore, 12 Speedlite Ring Light
More to come…
David Hobby Silenced By Syl
December 12, 2008 by Syl Arena · Leave a Comment
I thought I was building a playful, Rube Goldberg flash rig… It turned out that I had actually created an apocalyptic contraption able to blacken the sun for an instant and simultaneously silence David Hobby, the genius behind Strobist - the world’s most widely read photography blog. Read about it here.
News about the “ring of death” spread quickly. Ben Willmore, the “victim” of the original test firing, wrote about the experience here. Wired magazine wrote about it here. Gizmodo picked it up here. They also wrote about it in France.
I Shot Ben Willmore… In Broad Daylight * Gang Light - Part 1:
December 11, 2008 by Syl Arena · Comments Off
GANG LIGHT - Part 1: Shooter with crazy red hair, plays with 12 Canon 580 EX II Speedlites and 8-feet of red oak to build a high-powered “ring” light, then fires it with a dozen RadioPoppers in high-speed sync mode at a best-selling Photoshop author.
I shot Ben Willmore on the street in broad daylight today. There were several innocent bystanders watching. The sun was high in the sky and coming in straight over Ben’s shoulders. I centered my favorite lens right on his eye and BANG! I had him in 1/8000 of a second.
Shortly before the “incident”, Ben and I met up in San Luis Obispo on day 3 of Joe McNally’s location lighting workshop at The Lepp Institute. Joe was kind (or crazy) enough to ask me to come down for a quick talk to the 16 students in his workshop about my experiences with RadioPoppers.
Ben is also a frequent instructor a Lepp — as well as a perennial favorite at Photoshop World. You may know Ben from his many books on Photoshop. [If you're looking for a crash course in stepping up from CS3 to CS4, check out his Photoshop CS4: Up To Speed. It always gets me through the upgrade.] You may know Ben for his Digital Mastery DVDs. Yes that Ben… the guy who drives around the country and writes about his life on the road in WhereIsBen.com. If you don’t already, you should also get to know Ben through his innovative photography - which dissolves the boundary between camera and computer.
Ganging Up A Dozen Canon Speedlites
Thanks to generous equipment loans from Canon USA and RadioPopper, I’ve been playing with 15 Speedlites this week. Why? To see what I can do with more pocket strobes than even a guy like McNally should be allowed to carry.
Turns out you can stop a motocross rider flying through the air at 40 m.p.h. with enough sharpness so that you can see the individual links on the motorcycle’s chain — look for that Gang Light post soon.
You can also attract crazy looks from guys who should know better when you pull out a 2′-square wood frame that has a dozen Speedlites bolted to it. Ben’s certainly a curious and intelligent fellow. The first thing he did was ask me to put my head in the center of the lights so that he could take my photo. Actually, I think he was checking to see if my head would explode from so many strobes going off at once before he stepped in front of the rig. [Update: See the evidence here on Ben's blog.]
Turning Noon Into Night With High-Speed Sync
Ambient exposure at 1/160
High-speed sync at 1/8000
PixSylarians know that I’m a huge fan of RadioPoppers (proof here and here). It’s also well-known that I’m very fond of shooting in high-speed sync (proof here). If you’re not yet a full-blooded PixSylarian, RadioPoppers give me eTTL control of my Canon Speedlites without the hassle of a line-of-sight connection. High-Speed sync is the flash mode where my Speedlights fire in incredibly rapid bursts rather than as one big flash so that I can shoot at speeds way beyond my camera’s sync speed (1/160 on my 5D).
To make the opening shot, I did four things:
- activated the high-speed sync setting on the master Speedlite parked atop my camera - the RadioPoppers then worked it out so that all 12 remote units were also in high-speed sync mode.
- set my shutter speed to 1/8000 - to totally kill the sunlight and turn noon to night. Even at the widest aperture on my lens (f/2.8), at 1/8000 there was no daylight to speak of as far as the camera’s sensor was concerned.
- set the Speedlites to maximum power - I used Manual for this rather than ETTL. Again, the Poppers did the talking for me. I went to Manual because in eTTL the range of Flash Exposure Compensation is capped at +2EV and I wanted more.
- adjusted my aperture until I liked the amount of flash exposure coming through.
More Gang Light stories:
Part 2: Smashing Pumpkins - 12 Speedlites on a Straight Rail