the 15 second DIY adjustable snoot!

Jun 282008

So I’ve done the cardboard snoot thing.  It’s cheap.  It works.  but I find they don’t last too long trashing around in a camera bag.   I really like the idea of a flexible snoot like the Honl speedsnoot, so I figured I’d try to make my own…

A quick trip down to Perl (art supply store) yielded the required materials.  2 9″x12″ sheets of “foamies” craft foam (it’s a thin, neoprene like foam material – flexible yet rigid enough to hold it’s shape) one white, one black and 4′ of velcro “wrap” (the velcro that has hooks on one side and loops on the other, so it can stick to itself if you wrap it around something)  The neat thing about the foamies sheets is that you can get them either plain or with one side covered in adhesive.   I opted for a plain black and an adhesive-backed white sheet.

total cost for materials: about $5 (the velcro was $3 and I think the foamies sheets were .59 each)

Once at home, I simply peeled the backing off the white adhesive side, and laid the black sheet on top.  Pressing firmly secured the 2 together.  They can bend and flex together without wrinkling or buckling.

I then cut 2 velcro wraps long enough to wrap around the flash head and secure it tightly.

TaDa!  instant snoot – total time to construct: about 15-30 seconds :-)

the best part about this snoot is that it is adjustable.  For a normal throw, wrap it into a cylinder shape, and secure each end with a wrap.   If you want a tighter throw, wrap it into a cone shape.  You can get a very tight dot of light this way.

Another added benifit is that it can be used as a bounce card – simple wrap one end around the flash head pointing up, and leave the other end free.  presto bounce card.

For five dollars and a minute of work, this is something that will have a permanent place in my camera bag!

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quick and dirty seamless backdrop for small subjects…

Jun 242008

Just a quick tip if you do a lot of product/small object shots and want them on a seamless background.  Instead of rolling out a whole huge backdrop, just use a piece of matboard.  If you do your own matting/framing, you’ve probably got some on hand.  It comes in nice 30″x40″ sheets, and it is rigid enough to stay in place on it’s own when propped against a vertical surface like a wall or chair pushed up agains a table.  It gives a nice smooth curve under it’s own weight, and provides a non-wrinkly insta-seamless-backdrop.  and when you are done, you can mat your pictures with it :-)

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the Nuts and Bolts of off-camera flash – part 2, manual flash

Jun 222008

note: this is the 2nd part in a 4 part series of articles – if you missed part 1, find it here

As we mentioned in part 1, manual flash is essentially a “dumb” flash mode- meaning that no flash metering is done by camera or strobe.  you simply adjust the power to whatever you want, and when the flash pops, it fires at that power, every time regardless.

now aside from the control and creative aspects of using manual flash, (for more on that check the strobist blog) one of the great things about it is that it gives you the greatest range of hardware to work with.  In essence, any strobe that has a manual setting will work with any camera capable of triggering a flash!  NOTE – one *large* caveat to this is that some older strobes use a high trigger voltage, which can fry the delicate electronics in newer digital cameras.  Just be careful if using old/used flashes and double check to make sure the voltage is safe for your camera.  This isn’t an issue with any current/modern strobes AFAIK.

Of course the downside to having such a wide variety of hardware to work with is that there is no real establish “standard” for hooking it all together!

So let’s take a step back for a moment.  Consider if you had a manual flash in your hotshoe, on camera.  How does it fire?  Well, as we discussed in part 1, to make it fire you just have to “close the circuit” in the “foot” to allow the capacitor to discharge, making the flash go pop.  So what happens when you push the shutter is that the camera sends a little pulse to the center pin in the hotshoe, which creates that circuit and allows the flash to fire.  Shutter clicks, flash goes pop, and voila – you got a flash exposure.   So now in order to do the same thing with the flash *off* camera we need some way of getting that same “FIRE” pulse from the camera to to the strobe when you click the shutter release.  That’s really it – all the various cables, pocketwizards, wireless trigger etc… are in essence doing the same, simple thing – providing a way of transferring the FIRE pulse from the camera to the strobe.

So – there are basically 2 ways of getting that trigger pulse from your camera to your off-camera strobe.   You can use a wire that physically carries the signal directly from camera to flash (as if it were sitting in your hotshoe)  or you can use some flavor of wireless transmitter, which “carries” the signal wirelessly.  As the simplest (and likely cheapest) option, let’s talk about wires (or sync cables) first.   Pretty straightforward – it’s just a piece of wire!  One end connects to your camera, one end to the flash.  You click the shutter, the signal goes down the wire, and the flash pops.  Of course it’s the whole “connecting to camera and flash” that becomes confusing, since there are several different physical connectors that can be used!

Although the good news is that since there is no “communication” through the cable (remember all it is doing is physically transferring the “FIRE” pulse from the camera) the connectors are practically, if not physically, interchangeable.  Meaning if you have connector X on camera and Y on flash, you simply need a cable with X on one end and Y on the other (or an adapter that converts X to Y)

The second piece of good news is that for all practical purposes, there are only 4 types of connectors you have to worry about.  They are the “PC” connector, the “Household” or “HH” connector, the 1/4″ monoplug and the 1/8″ miniplug (shown below)


The PC connector is the closest thing there is to a “standard” for sync cables.   Note this has nothing to do with “personal computer” it is simply the type of cable connector.   Some flashes have built-in PC ports for a PC cable to plug into, and some camera bodies do as well.  (pic shows the PC socket on a canon 580ex II) If you are lucky enough to have both a camera and flash with PC sockets – congratulations, simply get a PC cord, plug one end into the camera, one end into the flash and voila!  your (manual) flash is now connected just as if it were in the hotshoe.   Of course not all flashes and camera bodies have built in PC sockets, so what happens when we want to connect PC-socket-less cameras and strobes together?

Well, the camera still has a hotshoe and the flash still has a foot with that center “firing pin” in it, so we get ourselves some adapters.  One sits in the camera’s hotshoe, and one connects to the flash’s foot (a hotshoe adapter)   We can get these adaptors in various “flavors” with different connectors.  The most straightforward ones will simply have a PC socket.  So in essence you are simply adding a PC socket to your camera and flash via the hotshoe/foot.  Connect the 2 adaptors with a PC cable, just as you would with built-in sockets and again you’re good to go.  The fire pulse goes from the camera’s hotshoe, through the adapter, down the PC cable, through the adapter on the flash’s foot connects with the center pin, and pop goes the weasel! The beauty of this is that it will work with any camera/flash combination since it is just making the connection through the hotshoe (on camera side) and foot (on flash side).  The camera doesnt care what flash you are using – it just sends it’s pulse regardless, and you can stick any flash you want in the shoe adapter at the other end, and it will fire since it’s just getting it signal through the foot just as it would on camera.  Here are a couple of examples of hotshoe adapters with male PC and femae 1/4″ phono receivers:


Now personally I *hate* the PC standard.  Hate it, hate it, hate it.  I think the connectors are badly designed, fragile, and have a tendency to get damaged/bent out of shape or come loose at inopportune times.   I dunno, maybe it’s just me. PC is generally the “accepted standard” so, if you are just starting out, it’s probably easiest to go with, since it’s rather ubiquitous.

The Household connector (HH) is an alternative to the PC cable.  It functions exactly the same, except the physical connectors are different.  The HH cables actually use the same 2 prong connector as a standard US electrical cord.  I feel this is a much more robust and reliable connection personally, but I know that is arguable.   The cool thing about the HH standard is that you can use ordinary household extension cords to extend/split your cable if needed.   The downside to them is that there are no cameras or flashes (AFAIK) that have a HH port built in so you always need an adaptor on your flash’s foot and camera’s hotshoe to provide the necessary connector.  I personally have a nice little HH cable that has a built in adaptor that fits into my camera’s hotshoe on one end and a standard HH prong on the other end.  I slide the former onto my camera and plug the latter into an adaptor for my flashes foot and I’m good to go.  (see below)

So when it really comes down to it, all you have to do to fire *any* flash off camera with a sync cable is:

  • stick an adapter in your camera’s hotshoe
  • stick an adapter on your flash’s foot
  • connect the two with a cable.

The 1/8″ and 1/4″ connectors are generally used with wireless transmitters, so now lets talk a bit about wireless transmitters and manual flash.

The good news is that if you get the whole business with the adapters/cables this will be easy.  Wireless transmitters are accomplishing the exact same thing (getting the “fire” pulse from camera to flash) they just do it a bit differently.  There are a number of transmitters out there, the primary ones being the ubiquitious pocketwizards, along with the elichrom skyports and the so-called “ebay triggers”.  The thing is *they all do the exact same thing*  In essence there is no difference between the $200 pocketwizard and the $25 ebay trigger other than range reliablity (although that is a big difference – once you’ve torn your hair out after having 50% of your shots not fire due to a flakey ebay trigger, $200 will seem like a small price to pay for rock-solid reliablity) (16 channel ebay trigger shown: note the contact on the transmitter that connects to the center pin of the cameras hotshoe)

But I digress… in essence they way all wireless triggers work is that there is a transmitter that attaches to your camera and a recieciever that attaches to your flash.  Just as with a cable, when you click the trigger your camera still sends that “fire” pulse – only this time it goes into the wireless transmitter.  The transmitter says “aha, I see a “fire” pulse” and sends a RF (radiowave) signal to the reciever (attached to the flash).  The reciever gets this signal, and goes “aha, the transmitter told me that the camera just sent a “fire” pulse” and then the reciever generates it’s own pulse, which goes to the flash.  The flash pops, and bob’s your uncle…  (this all happens in milliseconds).

Of course the “gotcha” with the wireless is that just like a cable, they need some way of connecting to your strobe.  Generally the wireless transmitter (whether pocketwizard, skyport or ebay) sits directly in the hotshoe of your camera, and connects directly to the center pin, so there is generally nothing needed on that end.  The receiver, however needs to be connected to the flash somehow.  Fear not, though – it’s basically the same procedure as with a cable.  You simply need a short cable that goes from the wireless to either the PC port directly (if your flash has one) or a hotshoe adaptor with a PC port in it.   Pocketwizards and Skyports have a 1/8″miniplug connector (same as a normal headphone jack on a portable audio device), and actually come with a little 1/8″ to PC cord (meaning a 1/8″ miniplug on one and and a PC connector on the other – See below)  in that case all you need is a hotshoe adaptor for the flash foot that has a PC socket and you’re good to go.  I didn’t have a pocketwizard to illustrate, but the 16ch ebay transmitter happens to have the same socket as a PW, so just pretend it’s a pocketwizard in the picture!

The ebay triggers are slightly different – they come in 2 flavors, the 4 channel and the 16 channel.  The 4 channel have the advantage of actually having a hotshoe built in, so they attach straight to the flash foot, no cables required!  The 16 channel use a 1/4″ phono plug connector, but they also have a PC socket on the back (which tends to be kind of flakey) so you can either connect them to a hotshoe adapter with a pc socket (using a short PC cable) or you can get a hotshoe adaptor that takes a 1/4″ phono plug directly.  Best place I’ve found is www.flashzebra.com.  The guy who runs it, Lon, is a really fantastic guy and has pretty much any adapter you can think of for conecting cameras and strobes, particularly “specialty” ones like the 1/4″ phono hotshoe adapter for use with the 16 channel ebay triggers.  (direct link to product here).  Check it out for all your crazy flash-connecting needs.

16ch ebay receiver and hotshoe adapter with 1/4″ phono from flashzebra:

Anyway, that’s pretty much it – hope that clears up some of the confusion regarding hooking up strobes for manual flash!  Stay tuned for next time when we will talk about wireless TTL!

P.S.  I should also mention that there is a 3rd way to trigger a manual flash, namely “Optical slave mode”  Not all flashes have this capability but for those that do it basically means that the strobe will fire whenver it “sees” another flash with it’s optical sensor.  This can be useful for example if you fire one flash with a camera and have a second one in optical slave mode.  The second flash will “see” the flash from the first one and fire itself. The dowsides to this are 1) it will fire whenever it sees *any* flash so if there are other folks around using cameras with flash, they will be setting it off as well 2) it requires the strobe be able to “see” the burst of light from the first flash, so it becomes unreliable in bright sunlight and finally 3) it will not work in combination with wireless TTL flashes (more on that in part 3)

CONTINUE WITH PART 3 HERE

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post processing…

Jun 202008

I have a confession: I’m not a post processor.  I guess coming from a B&W film/wet printing background, to me the concept of “post process” means: “adjust exposure/contrast and dodge&burn”.

and it’s funny that even now when I shoot 99% digital, in my head post processing still means “adjust exposure/contrast and dodge&burn” :-)   Oh, I do the plenty of b/w conversions, and skin touchups/etc… when shooting a model, but I really havent explored too far into the territory of *creative* post processing – using photoshop and lightroom to actually alter the picture to realize a specific creative vision.  Even my “sunshine in the rain” series (which generally evokes the reaction “wow was that photoshopped?”) was done 99% in camera.  The only adjustments were, you guessed it: exposure/contrast adjustment and some selective dodging and burning!

However, I’m going to change this.  Frankly I’m not one of those grumbly “it’s only real photography if it’s 100% in camera” purists.  In my book, any tool that helps you realize a creative/artistic vision is fine by me.  so to that end, I’ve resolved to work on my “creative post processing skills”.  I’ve started building a texture library, and plan on playing with incorporating textures into some of my work.  I’m also experimenting with cross-process and split tone effects in lightroom, as I have always loved that aesthetic.  (for some really cool cross process work, check Brian Auer’s blog, particularly this: 10 reasons to love cross-process film) Here’s a new split tone preset I have been playing with in lightroom.  I like it’s aesthetic, particularly in this shot:

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The Nuts and Bolts of off-camera flash – Part 1, Basics

Jun 182008

So unless you’ve been living under a rock (photographically speaking) for the past year or so, you’ve probably heard of David Hobby, AKA The Strobist.  The strobist blog has been singlehandedly responsible for introducing a whole new wave of photographers to the beauty and mystery that is: off camera lighting!

The problem is – a lot of this stuff is still confusing.  Heck, I didn’t “get it” the first time I read through lighting101.  Or the second.  Or probably not even the third.  And a lot of the time, the problem isn’t conceptual, it often comes down to the “nuts-and-bolts” issues – eg, things like “what works with what”, “how do I connect x to y” and “why is there a black bar across my image when I use my flash off camera but not on camera”

What I am going to do in this series of articles, is break down, step-by-step the various hardware and methods needed to get your flash off camera and firing properly.  We’re not going to worry about lighting theory or anything like that – just the “nuts and bolts”.

  • In par 1 (here) we’re going to talk about the basics of how a flash works, and the different modes you can use it in.
  • In part 2 we will discuss options for manual triggering.
  • In part 3 we will discuss wireless ttl flash
  • and finally in part 4 we will deal with some miscellaneous topics, such as x-sync, HSS, rear-curtain sync etc…

So without further ado, lets talk about getting your flash out of the hotshoe and into the wild where it belongs!

Now first of all it is important to understand how a flash actually fires.  In actuality it is quite simple – if you look at the bottom of your flash (or “foot”) there is an electrical contact, the center pin.  If you have a newer “system” flash, it may have other pins as well, but they all have the one center pin.  Now if you look at the inner sides of the foot, they are also metal.   When a connection is made between the center pin and the sides of the foot, the flash fires.

That’s it.  You could make your flash fire by connecting these two contacts with a paperclip even. (although I wouldn’t recommend it and am not responsible if you electrocute yourself trying it!)

So in essence, triggering your flash is simply a matter of making the connection that allows it to release it’s charge as a burst of light.   The catch, of course, is *how we make this connection*.

Now let’s step back for a minute.  Before we think about triggering the flash lets look at the primary “modes” of the flash.   In essence, a flash only has 1 adjustment – power.  In other words, “how much light does it put out when it pops”.  However, there are several ways of *calculating* how much power is needed or desired for a particular situation.

  1. manual.  Back in the day, all flashes were manual, meaning they were essentially “dumb”  *you* set the power output by hand, based on what you calculated was needed.
  2. auto.  auto flash is basically a way that the flash itself measures the amount of light needed based on settings you input.  We will not talk be talking much about auto-flash since I believe manual or ttl are more useful 99% of the time.
  3. TTL.  Stands for “Through The Lens”, and is a method where the camera and flash “talk” to each other and calculate the appropriate amount of flash automatically based on the camera settings and a meter reading.

For purposes of this discussion, we are just going to talk about manual and ttl flash, as I think they are the most useful.    The point to all this is that, despite having the same outcome (firing the flash) the *methods* for triggering your flash are very different depending on whether you will be using manual mode or TTL.

In part 2 we will talk about options for triggering your flash in manual mode, what kind of hardware you need for each, and pros and cons for each option.  Stay tuned!

UPDATE:  part 2 is now up – find it here

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F/1.0 turns 1!

Jun 132008

well, officially not till tomorrow – but I’m going to be out of town, so we’ll celebrate a day early!

1 year ago today, I embarked on this strange experiment of “blogging” that all the kids are doing nowadays.   And I kind of like it.  I know I’ve broken pretty much all the rules of writing a “proper” blog (particularly not posting on a regular schedule), but cut me some slack, I’m still a n00b.

As such, my primary resolution for this blog for the upcoming year is to maintain a regular 3x/week posting schedule – probably sun/tue/thur.  We’ll see how it goes!

Also, since it’s only been recently that I’ve started to get any kind of real traffic, I’m going to be reposting some of my earlier articles, for those new to the blog who may have missed them.

A big thanks to all my readers and commenters, and I’m looking forward to another great year!

-Ed

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Quick tip – keep track of your charged/uncharged batteries!

Jun 072008

If you are like me, you probably have a *lot* of batteries.  Particularly on location with a couple of strobes.  You’ve got a bucket full of AAs, and maybe 3 or 4 batteries for your SLR.  All well and good up until you start changing batteries in the field.  Maybe it’s just me, but once I start swapping batteries, when I get home it they are generally all jumbled up and I have no idea which are still charged, which are dead and which may have been partially used, but still need a “top off”.   To solve this I came up with a rather simple solution – when I charge my batteries, as they are charged I put a rubber band around them.  This serves two purposes – 1) it keeps each set of AAs together in a nice neat group of 4, but more importantly it “marks” them.  Since I obviously have to take the rubber band off before using the battery, at the end of the day, I know that any battery with no band has at least been used, and the ones still banded are fresh.  Then I simply charge the loose ones and re-band them.  Works with both AAs and SLR batteries, quick and easy.

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Philly Strobist meetup – 6/1/08

Jun 042008

Had a fantastic strobist meetup this past weekend in old city. Buncha fellow strobists showed up – Myself, Dan, Peter, Eddie, Eric, Ryan, Ray, and Gino (I think that’s everyone, if I left anyone out email me!)

And of course, our wonderful models who endured our shenanigans with poise and humor for almost 5hrs, Stephanie, Marina, Svitlana, and Elitka.

We met at my studio on in old city, and after assembling (along with tons of gear) we ventured out into the wilds of independence park
We started off at a the nice “cobblestone-y” area around the Ritz, and used a set of beautiful curved staircases for backdrops, with wide angle lenses to practice balancing flash/sky exposure. Got some nice shots, and then moved over to the picturesque little alley next to the old city tavern.

We then moved over to the steps of the first bank of the US, where we proceded to take over the sidewalk (and even the street!)

One of the best surprises of the evening came around 7:15 – we were still shooting on the steps, when the sun hit just the right spot in the sky, turning the glass building across the street into one giant reflector, throwing this beautiful *intense* warm light everywhere! We did a bunch of non-strobed shots, taking advantage of the spectacular natural light. It’s these little surprises that really make an event like this!

We wound down the evening in the park, doing some shots with greenery etc… and then to Buffalo Billiards for the survivors for the celebratory post-shoot beer (the most important part of any shoot). All in all a great time, and I’m looking forward to doing it again.

And of course the results: check the FLICKR THREAD as we post our shots from the meet! Looks like some really great stuff!

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