Category Archives: portrait
Lighting geekery alert: I don’t typically get much into how I took a certain shot, but the mood struck today. Over the weekend, I received what I think will become one of my favorite accessories: a 24-foot long “off-camera” ETTL cord for Canon flashes. Basically, this means that I can place a flash that is hard wired to my camera over 20 feet away from me when I’m shooting. I didn’t even know they existed until Syl Arena mentioned it at a workshop I recently attended. So, for this image…I shot with a Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod & a Canon 24-105 Lens at 35mm, f/4, 1/200s, ISO 640. The key light, a Canon 580 EX II, was connected to the 5D hotshoe via the new cable and attached to a light stand at camera left, approx 12 feet from the subject. The key light was also gridded, gelled with a 1/2 CTB gel, and half-snooted (to prevent the wall from being illuminated by the key light).. all with Honl flash accessories (also worth their weight in gold). The key light was manually fired at 1/4 power. A second 580 EX II, gelled with a 1/4 CTO gel, was placed low, camera right to create the shadow on the wall and fired manually at 1/132 power. The whole thing took about 15 minutes of shooting and a little tweaking in Lightroom/CS5.
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Awesome! No words
(and I do not understand anything pass Mama said…)
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Johanne, I have one of those, too. But at $60 from FlashZebra, the new 24′ cord (which is not coiled like a telephone cord) really is a steal. They tend to drift out of stock pretty regularly, I’m told.
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I *love* it. I bought a 2-foot flash cord. Except it was built like a telephone wire, so the effective distance was maybe 1 foot. By the time I’d used it for one session of trying to stretch it longer than it could reach, the hot shoe housing broke (on the cord). I’ll have to look into this 24 foot thingy; gotta be cheaper than a pocket wizard.
This image of a woman lit by votives was taken in Stephansdom, a cathedral in Vienna, Austria. Although I was a bit conflicted about disrupting her moment of reflection and invading her privacy, it clearly wasn’t much of a deterrent. I took this image about 18 months ago but didn’t really think much of it until I was doing some image library housekeeping (which is never-ending) this weekend. Yet another example of something that really appeals to me now but not so much back then. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing the fact that I’m horrible at deleting images that clearly won’t ever see the light of day.
I don’t think I’d seem Lem since college. And I have only seen Sam once in the last 15 years. But this weekend the three of us got together in frigid Minneapolis. A gathering of the fellas to talk about…anything and everything. Both Lem and Sam were grad students whom I met as a freshman at Northwestern. They were great role models then and are even better ones now. Seeing Lem’s family (his wife was actually my freshman Chemistry TA) was especially fun, and you can see from the pics that none of his 3 kids is especially camera shy.
This weekend I attended a lighting workshop with Canon speedliter Syl Arena. Actually it was much more a seminar than a workshop in that I took exactly zero pictures. But it was great for reinforcing some of the stuff that I’d picked up about lighting over the past couple of years. My kit doesnt come close to scratching the surface of what Syl carries in his gearbag. Probably never will. But that didn’t stop me from coming home and trying to rig up some relatively elaborate (with my normal lighting scheme as the baseline) setup to get a shot that I had been thinking about since seeing reading Joe McNally’s book The Hot Shoe Diaries. Both Syl and McNally are lighting savants, and if I ever thought either would come within 100 mouseclicks of my blog, I wouldn’t dare attach his name to this attempt in any way. The image didn’t live up to the lofty goals I had for it when it was just in my head. But this is what you get when you have two speedlites with no wireless trigger and have to bounce a pre-flash signal around a corner and down a hallway with the help of reflectors, mirrors, and foamcore. I definitely had it coming.
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You captured me at “reflectors, mirrors and foamcore.” The dramatic lighting works for me. I’m still debating with myself who is after who. Sleeping with the lights on tonight for sure.
BTW, thanks for coming to the Speedliter’s Intensive.
I’ve always wanted to be called a “savant”… without the obligatory “idiot” in front of it. Thx for that too.
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Very nice! Now you have to post the setup shot for your signal bounce … reflectors, mirrors and foamcore? That’s commitment. 😉
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Should NOT have read this before going to bed. Please don’t have nightmares, please don’t have nightmares, please don’t … !!!
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