Archive for February, 2008

Just a few posts ago I wrote about a very simple E27 slave flash.

I’ve just made a few test shots with it. Here are the best ones (you can guess how the rest looked ).

The flash bulb was on a tripod and fired through an umbrella as I purchased the whole set together. It was roughly 2 meters from my model (who was, by the way, me ) at full power, since this flash light cannot be adjusted at all. I triggered it by my camera’s built in flash which was set to manual mode and down at 1/128 power providing almost nothing but a barely visible fill light effect. The camera was at 4m from the model with these (manual) settings: ISO 100, shutter speed 1/200 sec and aperture of F8. To be completely precise there was some ambient available light as well, but relatively little. Towards the right hand side of the picture there was an almost white wall at about 2 meters that might have given some reflected light on the model’s back and shoulder.

I know that the aperture could have been opened up a bit letting in more light and the shutter could have been dragged down (McNally speak here) to, let say 1/30 to give more visibility to the background.

Verdict: not ideal flash for portraiture with the built-in pains of being relatively weak and not adjustable, but for such a bargain price you could start experiencing the magic of off camera lighting. I think it was not only purely marketing when the retailer mentioned that even pros had bought it to use it as a hair light.

I wouldn’t dare to say I know Joe McNally or even his photographic works. Surely, after reading about his new book on several sites and watching the video introduction to his book (shown also at the end of this article) I started noticing his name at various places like in Nikon brochures.
It happened when he started writing his blog in a tone that just captured me and doesn’t let me go since then. I decided to buy his book: The Moment It Clicks. I was checking my inbox regularly with anticipation and finally it arrived a few days ago. Yes, delivery to Hungary takes a couple of days.

And the book just sucked me in like a whirlpool. It started with Scott Kelby’s foreword and continued with Joe’s astonishing pictures and conversational writing. Reading the book and seeing those photographs just close out all the noises of the commuting train and I’m lucky that I have to get off the train only at the terminal, otherwise I would definitely miss my stop.
He is writing as if he is talking to a friend – in a colorful, sometimes funny, another times touching way with lot of humor and emotions.
When you are reading his stories on making the pictures you feel just like being there, seeing what he sees, worrying about what he is concerned about. Then he comes up with an new idea or some trade secret that he’s been practicing for ages and you reach for your dropped jaws and by the time you look back the situation has been resolved and the hero frame is already on the film or the memory card and will be published as a double truck or even double gratefold in National Geographic or as a frontpage of Life.

His photos are telling, powerful and beautiful. Cannot say more, I’m not the one who you should expect to judge Joe McNally’s photography.
Looking at the technical side, Joe has fallen in love with light many years ago and now he knows more about it than most us will ever know. The light of his strobes when he is using some look so natural, soft and subtle on his photos, that you hardly notice that there was a flash light when making that picture.

There was one thing that raised my eyebrow when reading – guess what – the acknowledgement at the beginning of the book. Apart from mentioning his family, professors, fellow photographers and other influencers of his photography, Joe says big thanks to his editors. He writes ‘Without good editors, as photographers we are lost.‘ Something that I’ve never thought of about photography. I suppose good editors must be like coaches. The golf club is in Tiger Woods’ hands, but even he has a coach.

For me The Moment It Clicks was and is worth every Hungarian forints deducted from my bank account by Amazon. It’s an amazing book. Joe’s passion for photography radiates from every page. If I hadn’t been earlier, now I definitely got infected by it.
If you buy the book, which I – needless to say – recommend, don’t forget to register it at Peachpit for an extra chapter.

And finally the intro video to the book:

It’s worth to read Strobist on a regular basis. Today I saw a video shared on David Hobby’s invaluable blog on off camera lighting from David Berman and his colleagues at Croydon Advertiser. The video is about lighting set ups with small speedlights stuffed with good British humor. Enjoy.

Partly as a consequence of a comment I received and posted here and also strongly influenced by Paul Indigo’s post on why technical knowledge is not that important I decided not buying any news pieces of photography gear for a while. It might not sound completely honest straight after my new flash post but that was the last one for some time. And while I won’t be spending money on equipment I’ll pay for something else: I enrolled into a portrait photography training course.

The course will consist of eight occasions, one occasion every Sunday throughout eight weeks starting on the 2nd March. The instructor is going to be Martin Szipal. Martin Szipal is a Hungarian photographer, now in his eighties, having decades of experience in photography. He used to work in Hollywood photographing celebrities, however you can hardly find any track of that on the Internet. He’s not an active photographer today.
The topics of the course are:

1. Introduction – the way to see shapes and forms
2. Contemporary art
3. Composition
4. Portraiture in general
5. Female portraiture
6. Male portraiture
7. Group photos
8. Figural photos

Technical aspects like lenses, aperture and shutter speed settings, lighting gear and others are explicitly not covered on the course. Participants are advised to take their gear with themselves because there will be possibilities to practice shooting on real models.

I’m very excited about this thing. I expect to learn a lot for roughly the price of an SB-800 speedlight.

I’m planning to post my experiences about the course, so stay tuned.

Update: The class started. Read about it here:
Portrait Photography Class – Session #1
Portrait Photography Class – Session #2
Portrait Photography Class – Session #3
Portrait Photography Class – Session #4

I’ve subscribed some time ago to receive the regular newsletter of a local photography shop.

They surprised me a few days ago with an offer of a light-bulb looking slave flash packed together with a light stand and white semi-transparent umbrella with a diameter of 60cm and a combined E27 cap - umbrella adaptor too. The flash has a guide number of 28 and a nominal power of 45W, can be fired by a synch cable (included) and the light of any other flash (it even has a test button). The whole thing costs the Hungarian equivalent of roughly 66 USD. I thought it’s worth the price and grabbed one. (And was somewhat pissed off noticing the same flash bulb for as little as 5 bucks on eBay. OK, that one does not include the light stand and the rest, but it’s annoying anyway. This is similar to other pieces of photography equipment as well: prices in Hungary are always at least 20% higher than in the US.)

The power of the flash cannot be adjusted: it fires or not. Its sensor is sensitive enough to capture the light of the built-in flash of my Nikon D80 even if it’s dialled down to 1/128 power. However one thing is important to note: no TTL can be used if you want to control the light bulb flash by light, because it captures the pre-flashes of the TTL mode and fires before the shutter opens.

It is clearly made in China and it’s branded as a part of the Mettle Studio Lighting.

It’s said that this bulb flash slave can be used for photographing small products or even as a fill or rim light in portraiture. Test images will come later.

Was I stupid to buy it?

Update: I made some test shots with this flash.

I’m writing today about a few new things on my blog for those who might be reading my articles only through their feed readers.

The first thing is that now I have a logo. Have a look at the guy on top left corner. Not a big thing, I know, but a felt such a strong desire for it. The way I got it was that one day it came to my mind that I still had a few credits on www.stockxpert.com which is a stock photo and graphics site. I entered “camera drawing” into the search box and selected a few of the results. Not being able to decide on which one to choose I started a thread on the forum of Freelanceswitch.com- and incredible blog with tips, tools and lots of other things for freelancers: writers, designers, photographers or programmers – asking for advice. Members of the forum helped me and I implemented their suggestion.

The second thing is related to my About page. I put a photo of myself on it. It is a common wisdom amongst bloggers that it helps being personal on your blog if you are not hiding yourself completely behind your writing. And I also put there a profile widget – provided by bighugelabs.com – of my Flickr photos.

A somewhat technical thing is that I installed a Wordpress plugin called Feedburner Feedsmith. The plugin redirects all requests for RSS feeds of my blog entries and comments to feedburner.com enabling me to keep a track of the number of my dearest subscribers (feed readers). (Did you know, by the way, that Google has acquired FeedBurner?) Believe me it is really heart warming to see a number of subscribers above 300. Keep me happy and subscribe.

And finally I added a contact form to my blog helping my readers sending me notes. I really enjoy receiving suggestions, comments from anyone interested in photography.