The View from the Pinhole

We’re two days removed from the most recent wedding show, put on by the Welcome Wagon at the (former) Wyndham (soon to be Sheraton) hotel in Dorval. Overall, I’d say the show went pretty well. We were much closer to the door this time (right next to it) so we were able to greet every person that attended. Much better positioning than last time, when we were near the end of the line and might have spoken to half the attendees.

I’ve always preferred doing this kind of show to the big ones because they are much smaller, more relaxed venues where you have more of a chance to talk to people. None of the loud noise and rushed atmosphere that you get at the big shows, and you don’t have 75 other people in the same building offering the same services (no joke… at the last Marions-Nous wedding show there were around 70 photo companies listed).

I also took photos of the fashion show that took place. Being the official photographer of sorts, I figured I should probably put on a good show so I brought my Elinchrom BX500ri studio flash with me. I had it mounted on a light stand about 10 feet in the air with a big softbox, pointed right towards the runway (catwalk? Gangplank?) and then found myself a nice corner angle to shoot from. I’ll post some of the results later, but for now, here’s a snapshot of the booth we had, complete with Dan taking a brief break.

I’m de-scanning my digital files.

I have an experimental project I’ve had in mind since last winter. Several years ago, I discovered a product called Halo-Chrome, which is a paper toner used in black-and-white darkrooms. When used during the printing process, it tones all the latent silver in the highlights a metallic silver. The end result has the look of being printed on either brushed metal or a mirror, depending on the type of paper being used. The process was a little difficult, but the results were amazing.

The problems I face now are that I want to use this technique for sample images in my wedding portfolio, but firstly it is a process that must be done during printing in a darkroom and all my weddings were shot digitally, and secondly it is not an archival process. I need to find a way to bring my digital files into the darkroom, and then I need to find some way of making the prints archival if I want to be able to offer them as finished products to clients.

The first problem is one whose solution I’ve been aware of for several years, but it’s not an easy process: digital negatives. This involves printing a negative on transparent backlight material with an inkjet printer and then making a contact print in the darkroom. It’s simple enough in theory, except since every paper type responds differently to contrast it involves lots of testing to make sure you can print a good negative without posterization.

After several attempts with limited success I gave up on the idea for a while. Then I started to look for a lab that could make a 35mm negative from a digital file. After a bit of research, I not only found one, but it’s even local! Only 25 minutes from my house.

I chose three b&w images from recent weddings and brought the files in to be printed (de-scanned? analogified?). A few days (a week) later I went in to pick them up, and from what I could tell they seemed pretty sharp and had a good dynamic range to them. I was impressed that they were lined up perfectly on Ilford Delta 100 film. It helps when you know you’re using good, sharp film. I deliberately sent in three images at once because I didn’t want to have just a single negative to print. Individual frames are impossible to line up properly in a negative carrier.

The printing process went fairly smoothly (after going through several sheets of paper that had been fogged somehow), with my exposure times being somewhere between 10-20 seconds with a 3-grade filter. I could probably make the next batch of images a little more contrasty than usual to give a punchier neg so that I could lower the filter number next time.

The overall results were a little soft, but after examining the negatives closely I’m pretty sure that it’s actually because of my enlarger and not the negative. That having been said, I’m still happy enough with the results to go ahead with the next step. While the images may look soft, they’re film-soft, not digital-soft. They still look good. I am now waiting for the chemistry to arrive so that I can do the final step of my experiment.

And yes, I had thought of scanning the negatives to post sample images here, but the idea just seemed counterproductive…

Many people try to take action photos of their pets running after a stick, their kids playing soccer or other events, and they don’t seem to be able to get a good shot. The image is blurry, or the subject is too far away, or the image they get on camera isn’t at all the image they thought they were taking. As anyone who’s tried can tell you, taking good sports or action photos is probably one of the most difficult kinds of photos to take because you only have a fraction of a second to take the shot before the scene you want is gone forever.

Given the right equipment, good reflexes and a little luck, great shots happen.

Unlike most other kinds of photography, like portraits or landscapes, the photographer has no control over the scene. Events are unfolding as they would even if you weren’t there and if you miss the moment it’s gone forever. There are a few ways that you can improve your chances of getting “The Shot”: make sure you have the right equipment, learn to predict the future (while difficult, not impossible, I’ll explain more later) and PRACTICE.

First, the equipment. While you don’t need to spend thousands on a pro-level camera and lens combo, the basic $129 cheapo camera just won’t cut it. To begin with, the lens simply isn’t strong enough to fill the frame with two people at center-field if you’re shooting from the sidelines. This kind of camera also isn’t fast enough. Even the best point-and-shoot cameras usually have a significant delay between when you push the button and when it actually takes the photo, making it all but impossible to time your shot. Pre-focusing on a specific distance can speed up the camera, but then you have to sit there with the shutter button half-pressed until your subjects get to the spot you focused on, and then you have to hope that they’re actually doing something worth shooting.

Most imporantly, many point-and-shoot cameras can’t track a moving subject. Their autofocus system is designed to focus on the distance your subject is at and lock it there until the photo is taken. It won’t adjust to follow a soccer player moving at full speed.

The best equipment for action photos is an SLR camera with a good telephoto lens. To begin with, SLR’s allow you to literally see through the lens with a series of mirrors, allowing you to watch the scene unfold in real time. Screens and electronic viewfinders just don’t have the same effect as looking through an SLR viewfinder.

An SLR also has effectively no shutter lag. The shot you saw when you pushed the button will most probably end up being the shot you take. This means you can reliably judge your composition by what you see in the viewfinder, without having to take a shot of an empty scene, hoping that by the time the camera takes the shot your subjects will be there.

SLR cameras also have a continuous focus mode. Unlike the basic AF that compact cameras have, this type of AF is ideal for action. It never locks the focus, constantly adjusting for any small movement. This makes the camera capable of tracking moving subjects as they move closer to and farther from the camera.

As for the lens itself, a good telephoto lens is recommended. For action photos, however, “Good” does not mean that the lens has an image stabilizer built in. For this kind of work, a stabilizer is actually all but useless (gasps of shock from some readers aside). The reason is that a stabilizer is designed to minimize blur caused by hand-shake at slow shutter speeds. If your shutter speed is slow enough that even the subtle shaking of your hand will blur the image, then your hockey players skating around at full speed will be blurred regardless of whether your lens is capable of compensating for the jitters in your hand from the three cups of coffee you drank to keep yourself awake in a frigid hockey arena at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

The best lenses for sports are those that not only have a high focal length, but also have bright apertures. It’s the bright aperture that will allow you to freeze action, not the stabilizer. A wider aperture allows more light in, which means you can shoot with faster shutter speeds. A shutter speed fast enough to freeze hockey players is also more than fast enough to eliminate motion blur from your hands shaking. Given the choice between a lens with a stabilizer and a fairly small aperture (especially a variable aperture, in the case of zoom lenses) and a lens with no stabilizer but a wider opening, the brighter lens is the clear choice. It will usually also provide better image quality and faster focusing, which are also desirable.

You’re also going to want to have your camera on full manual exposure mode if you know how to use it. The reason for this is quite simple: your lighting, more often than not, won’t change. So there’s no reason for your exposure to change. If you put the camera in auto-exposure mode, the exposure will keep changing depending on the brightness of the objects in the scene. Two football players wearing dark uniforms, for example, will cause the camera to have a completely different exposure from two players in bright uniforms under identical lighting. One shot will be significantly less exposed than the other. If you find a proper exposure before-hand and set that as your manual exposure, you won’t have to worry about having shots that are all over the map in terms of brightness.

As for the part about predicting the future: you need to develop the ability to follow your subjects and predict what they’re about to do. In the case of sports, this will be easy to do if you know the game and especially if you’ve played it before. The reason for this is that if you wait until you see the shot you want happening, you’ve already missed it. From the time it takes for your eyes to see the shot, send the image to your brain, your brain to process the signal, decide that you should push the button now, send the signal to your hands, and your hands to react and push the button, the shot you want is long gone. What you need to do is to predict what you think is going to happen, and decide on the best moment JUST BEFORE the shot you’re waiting for to push the button. If your camera is capable of firing a large burst in a short period of time (around 5 frames per second or more), you also need to know when to stop shooting. If you shoot too long a sequence, your camera’s buffer will fill up and you may miss other shots because your camera is too busy writing photos from the previous burst to the card.

The best way to develop this psychic ability to predict the future is, of course, PRACTICE. You’re not going to take Sports Illustrated-calibre photos on your first try. But if you shoot your nephew’s hockey game every week for an entire season, you will see improvement from beginning to end.

Know your game and you'll be able to see the shot coming.

Over the years I’ve heard countless people say how flashes make photos look terrible. The subjects are always blasted with contrasty light that makes big background shadows if they’re against a wall, or leaves a black nothingness if they aren’t. It makes reflections in glasses and causes a red glow in peoples’ eyes. The images look completely without depth and very contrasty. And these people are right. Flash makes their photos look terrible, because they don’t know how to use it properly.

Truth be told, when a flash is used properly you don’t even know it’s there. If you shine a small, powerful and direct light directly into your subject’s faces from a few feet away it obviously creates all the undesirable effects I mentioned before, regardless of whether it’s from a flash or a constant light. But this isn’t exactly the most professional kind of lighting, is it? The idea is to try and use a flash in order to compensate for extremely low or poor-quality ambient light in order to create a photo that looks natural, which a direct on-camera light source almost never does.

So the big secret? Get the silly flash off the camera (or at least keep it from firing directly towards your subjects)! That’s the first step. Once you change the direction of your light source so that it isn’t blasting directly into your subject’s face, you’ve already made a huge improvement in lighting quality. If you don’t have an off-camera sync cable for your flash or some sort of wireless trigger system, then bounce your flash off the wall or ceiling. Remember that it’s the direction of the light that matters, not necessarily the location of the device producing the light. If the flash is pointed upwards, then the light source is effectively coming straight down from above the subject. No more red eyes, no more hotspots in glasses, no more hard-edged background shadows (no more shadows at all, in fact) and no flat, depthless feel to the photos.

Ideally, the best thing to do is actually move the flash off the camera. Once you have a way of triggering the flash without having it connected to the camera, it opens up a whole world of possibilities. You can now have your light come from any direction and angle. The light is still contrasty, of course, but now that we’re playing with off-camera flash, why stop at just one? If you’re not worried about moving around a lot, such as when you’re taking somewhat-formal portraits, why not add another flash?

To reduce contrast and bring out detail in the shadows, a second flash can be used at a weaker intensity from the main light to fill in the shadows so they don’t go completely black. Suddenly you’ve gone from amateurish, direct and harsh lighting to something resembling a professionally-lit portrait setup and all it took was the ability to change the direction of your lighting and a little creativity. If you aren’t comfortable with controlling the intensity of your flashes then you can even use the wireless TTL system of your camera if the camera you’re using supports this function. Just let the camera control your flashes based on the instructions you gave it.

But there’s another use for a flash that often confuses and confounds people when they first hear of it, as the concept doesn’t seem to make sense to them: using it in broad daylight. “Flash in daylight? Why would you want to do that? Isn’t a flash supposed to be used when you’re indoors, in the dark?” Not quite… one of the problems you have when shooting photos of people in daylight is the strength of the sun. If your subjects are facing it, they’re usually squinting. So we just have to put the sun at their backs, right? That creates another common problem, especially for automatic cameras: backlighting. You end up with a silhouette of your subject. If we intentionally overexpose to lighten up the person, then the background gets washed out. The same thing happens if we place the subject in the shade.

The solution? Use a flash. Now you can expose for the background so that it doesn’t wash out, and have the flash throw some light onto your subject’s face to balance out the brightness so that the subject is properly lit as well. The best part of the fill-flash technique is that you don’t even need to know anything about photography to use it. Even the simplest snapshot camera will allow its user to force the flash so that it will fire even in bright light.

A brief review of the Sigma EF530DG Super flash, which I got the chance to test out at a wedding last Friday. My initial impression was that it doesn’t feel like a very solid construction. The body feels less solid than my Canon 550EX and 580EX flashes do, and the control layout doesn’t look as nice either. Also missing are the PC-sync found on the 580EX II (but absent from the 580EX and 550EX) and the white reflector card.

That having been said, the actual features of this flash make it well worth the money. It has near the power output of the high-end Canon flash (53 to the Canon’s 58) and almost all of the features: tilt and swivel head, stroboscopic mode, manual output control in fractions of power (1/1, 1/2, 1/4, etc…), and even full compatibility with Canon’s wireless E-TTL system (a feature I took full advantage of during the wedding). It even has a feature the Canon lacks: a regular optical slave mode.

During my test, the flash was used only as an off-camera slave triggered by my 580EX, never on camera. During the ceremony I had it on a light stand around 10 feet in the air, off to the right of the couple. The idea was for it to provide an accent light when shooting from certain angles. Because it was set to E-TTL slave mode, it was very easy for me to make sure it didn’t fire when I didn’t need it by simply flipping the switch on my 580EX between regular mode and master. This allowed me to make sure the flash would only fire when I wanted it without having to physically adjust it myself.

Later in the day, I used it as the only light for an assembly-line type of photo booth. The couple wanted shots individually with each of their guests, so I placed it on a light stand with an 11×14 softbox that I hadn’t used in over 6 years but finally decided to dust off and use. The on-camera 580EX was set to be a transmitter only. I found the exposures from the Sigma flash to be generally pretty accurate, with very little variance from shot to shot until the batteries started to die.

Overall, I found the flash to be fairly simple to use once you get used to the menu (which is only moderately user-friendly) and the manual (not exactly a literary masterpiece.) The construction leaves much to be desired when compared to a 580EX II or Nikon SB900, and it wouldn’t be the best choice for an event or news photographer who is rough on equipment to use as a main flash. But for those of us who work in more controlled circumstances such as wedding ceremonies or location portrait shoots and want to use multiple strobes but keep the gear light, then you can get as many as 3 Sigma flashes for the price of one 580EX II or SB900, depending on where you get them.

It seems that most people who only started shooting in the digital age have never actually used a hand-held light meter. They think of it as a relic from the past, like film, viewfinders and MySpace. “Why would I want a light meter when I can just look at the back of my camera?”

While in-camera metering is nothing new and does a perfectly good job outside, it amazes me that people who shoot with studio strobes are perfectly content to just take test shot after test shot, checking the histogram after each photo to see if they’ve got the right exposure yet. If only there were some magic device that could tell you exactly what exposure you should use with just one press of a button… oh wait…

The simple fact is that when working in a studio you simply can’t go without a light meter. First off, you can have your exposure handed to you right away instead of the constant guesswork that accompanies the trial-and-error method of histogram-chimping. Second (and most important), how do you tell how strong your lights are in relation to each other? Are you really going to turn on one light, fire off a thousand test shots until you get the strength you want, then turn it off and move on to the next one? All you really need to do is meter each light individually with a meter and adjust accordingly.

Histograms won’t give you exact numbers either, just a graph that is open to interpretation. What if you want your fill light to be one stop weaker than your main? How will you judge that from a histogram? Your hand-held light meter will tell you exactly the difference between the two lights, down to 1/10 of a stop in many cases. The photographer doesn’t even need to turn the camera on until he’s ready to shoot.

In short, to answer the “why would you” question… why wouldn’t you?