Mapping The Cartographer – Part Three

It’s no secret that I abhor the use of a hotshoe. Even when using a single Speedlite, I typically move it off-camera on a long E-TTL cord (details here). I’ll admit, though, that there are situations where the hotshoe is a perfectly fine place for a Speedlite. My third location shoot with cartographer David Yun on the streets of downtown San Luis Obispo for San Louie magazine was one of them.

Sometimes you don’t have the time or room to light like you should. Between the traffic, the pedestrians, and an unusually hot day, this had to be a run-and-gun shoot. I did not have the time or the space to set up an off-camera Speedlite on a stand. The goal was to make a few quick portraits of David with his ultra-modern GPS system standing on top of a cluster of century-old solar tubes that illuminate a part of subterranean SLO. We had just a few minutes and then had to move on to our last location.  Read more

Mapping The Cartographer – Part Two

There are a lot of photographers who say sincerely, “I don’t need to use flash, I just turn the ISO up.” To these legions, I say “crappy light at ISO one million is still crappy light.” My second location shoot with cartographer David Yun is a good example of where I’m coming from. Read more

Mapping The Cartographer – Part One

My assignment yesterday, for the soon-to-be-launched San Louie Magazine, was to do an full-page portrait of David Yun, the head of Geographic Information Services for the city of San Luis Obispo. David supervises a team of mapmakers who plot everything from bicycle traffic and storm runoff to creating three-dimensional maps of all the buildings downtown. Like most of us, modern cartographers spend far more time at their computers that they do in the field. I was given carte blanche with a few loose guidelines… “think about layering of information, think about layering of the city.” I was given a rough draft of the story that my photo would accompany and David’s contact info.

So, in three parts, I’ll take you through the three different location shoots that we did over the course of three hours. Seems like three is today’s magic number. Read more

Moving The Light

In my view, a good portrait should express persona. I’ve come to accept that light and, as importantly, shadow are the keys to expressing persona. (OK…light, shadow, and the subtleties of expression and gesture. OK, well…light, shadow, subtleties of expression and gesture, and environment.) I did four shoots yesterday for the Speedliter’s Handbook. The shot above is my favorite of the day. It’s 100% Speedlite (actually two Speedlites and a bit of 1/2-cut CTO).

Read more

QQ&A #1

Welcome to Quick Questions & Answers #1

As I wrote recently (here), I’ve been buried for the past couple of months with my US seminar tour and the completion of the ‘Speedliter’s Handbook.’ Along the way, I’ve tried to answer the many questions that were emailed in directly. In an effort to share the knowlege, I’ve decided to start Quick Questions & Answers. These are not going to be well-polished thoughts or well-edited text. In fact, they will be more like stream-of-consciousness ramblings.

To submit your question, please email it (along with your name and city/country) to

I won’t be able to answer every question. I will try to answer the most interesting ones.

Radio Triggers and Manual Control

Just wondering: is there a particular combo of a radio trigger and a speedlite (off-brand, Canon, Nikon, whatever) that would allow me to set manual power levels from the camera (either using the trigger’s transmitter or through some other means). It’s a bit of a pain to hobble over to each speedlite to change power levels, especially when one of them is stuck in an Apollo softbox. I know you can probably do this with either the Radiopopper PZx or the PW ControlTL setups; any other options? I mean, what if you threw a studio strobe into the fray?
Thanks, Sohail – San Francsico

You have manual wireless control built into the Canon system. Switch the Master to Manual and the slaves will follow suit. This enables you to control each group A-B-C individually. It’s best to do this via the LCD on your camera. Read more

Catching Up

Thanks to all who have been in touch and inquired about where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing over the past two months.

In late April, I fell down Alice’s rabbit hole and grabbed onto a whirlwind. Here’s a quick summary of my journeys:

• April 26, San Jose — TWIP / Smugmug meet-up presentation
• May 1, San Francisco — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar
• May 2, Mountain View — Speedliting workshop at Google
• May 3, Petaluma — co-host TWIP with Frederic Van from TWIT cottage
• May 8-9, Bethesda — two Speedliter’s Intensive seminars
• May 15, Los Angeles — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar
• May 22-24, Atlanta — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar + workshop
• May 29, Paso Robles — photo walks for Festival of the Arts
• June 5, Houston — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar
• June 12, Chicago — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar
• June 14, New York — Speedliter’s Intensive seminar
• June 15, Lake Success — Speedliting research shoot at Canon USA

If you are counting, that’s four hops across and around the county. Yes, I now have gold status with US Airways’ frequent flier program.

Update: Speedliter’s Handbook

During my spring travels, I wrote the last 200+ pages for the Speedliter’s Handbook. Since returning home (for more than 5 days at a stretch), I’ve finished the preliminary layout of all 432 pages. Now, I just have to shoot several hundred pix for the book over the next four weeks (the book will have close to 1,000 pix and illustrations) and get them placed.

I’m now working 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, on wrapping the Handbook. It’s become my own personal Mt. Everest, except that I don’t have sherpas or bottled oxygen (really wish I had some extra oxygen). The Handbook contains far more information than I ever thought I had to share…which is why it will have taken nine solid months to produce. Anyway, I assure you, the wait will be worth it.

New Feature On Speedliting — QQ&A

A ton of people have been emailing questions about Speedliting. I’ve been doing my best to answer them as I can. I’ve decided to start posting questions and answers as a new series on Speedliting’s How-To. So, on Monday, you’ll see the debut of QQ&A — Quick Questions & Answers.

If you would like to submit a question about Speedliting, email it to QQA (at) Speedliting -dot- com. No promises on my end that I’ll be able to answer every one, but I will do my best to post the most interesting questions.

Fall Tour — UK, USA & maybe Denmark

I will unveil my fall tour dates soon. Canon UK is close to finalizing the details for eight Speedliting events during the first two weeks of September. A few Danish Canonistas are trying to organize a couple of workshops in Copenhagen for 17-19 September. My US tour will resume in October and run into early November. If you’d like to get announcements on any of these events, be sure you are on the Speedliting mailing list — subscribe here.

Here are two dates certain for the fall

• Speedliting 5-day workshop, Paso Robles, Oct. 11-15 (details here)
• Speedliter’s Intensive, NYC – Sunday, October 24

Likely cities for Speedliter’s Intensives this fall are: Austin, Boston, Orange County-CA, Philly, Portland-OR, and Seattle.

Consider ZOOM To Be A Speedlite Modifier

When in Auto mode, the ZOOM function on your Speedlite was intended to make flash photography simple for people who don’t know what they are doing. When paired with a compatible lens, your Speedlite will reposition the flashtube so that the its angle of coverage is matched to what the lens sees. The range, on a full-sensor camera is 24mm to 105mm. Then, if you pull out the flip-down Wide-Angle Diffusion Panel on a 580EX/EXII, the angle of coverage expands to 14mm (with a 3-stop loss of light, see the end for details).

The idea is that if you are shooting a 50mm lens, then there is no point in lighting the area covered by a 28mm lens. For on-the-fly photojournalism, Auto Zoom is a good feature—even if you know what you are doing. From my perspective as a creative Speedliter, the ZOOM button is a built-in modifier that I can use to change the look of the flash to fit to my vision.

Brightness Concentrates

The effect of the Speedlite zooming to a longer focal length, it is it concentrates the light. So, at the center of the frame, the Speedlite is brighter when zoomed to 105mm that it is when zoomed out to 24mm. You can see this effect in the frames below. They are all shot with the Speedlite’s power in Manual at 1/1.

As you can see, the is a distinct difference in the light on Tony’s face between the top frame (zoom = 24mm) and the last frame (zoom = 105mm). I think the first is slightly underexposed and the last is definitly overexposed. To my eye, the optimal exposure happened when the head was zoomed to 50mm. Again, for these demo pix, the only thing that is changing from frame to frame is the zoom setting. In a real shoot, I would have first found the vignette that I wanted and then dialed the power up or down. Read more

Dimming The Sun With High-Speed Sync: Part Two

When teaching new Speeliters how to dim the sun with High-Speed Sync (which I wrote about here in Part One), the question is often asked “why not just shoot at the normal sync speed with a really small aperture so that you can use regular flash?” My response is “you should go out and try.” [This article, by the way, also applies to all types of flash that won't work with your camera in High-Speed Sync: third-party speedlights, monolights and location/studio strobes.]

As a reminder, here’s the short version of sync speed: it is the fastest shutter speed at which you can nornally shoot flash. In a DSLR, the sync speed is limited to 1/200″ or so because the shutter is comprised of two curtains in front of the sensor—the first-curtain being fully closed and the second-curtain being fully open when the camera is ready to fire. In order for the flash to illuminate the entire sensor, it has to fire after the first-curtain has completely opened and before the second-curtain begins to close. That defines the sync speed. If you shoot faster than the sync speed, then the second-curtain will be covering some of the sensor and you’ll have a dark bar along one edge of the frame.

So, if you want to stay in normal flash mode, your shutter speed is limited to the sync speed. On my 5DM2, that’s 1/200″. Unless you are shooting a 1D-series camera, your sync speed is probably 1/200″ too.

If your shutter speed is capped by the sync speed, then you can only dim the ambient light via the aperture. O.K., so how dark will it be if I shoot at 1/200″ and f/22. Let’s head outside at high noon and see what it looks like. Read more

Dimming The Sun With High-Speed Sync: Part One

High-Speed Sync above / ambient sunlight light below.

High-speed Sync is, without a doubt, the feature that sets dedicated small flash apart from all other types of flash. By “dedicated small flash” I mean that if you are a Canonista, then you are shooting with Canon Speedlites, and if you are a Nikonian, then you are shooting with Nikon Speedlights. By “all other types of flash” I mean , 3rd-party speedlights (like Vivitar and Sunpak), monolights (like Alien Bees) and portable/studio strobes (like an Elincrhom Ranger RX or Profoto Pro-8). You have to have a dedicated Speedlite to shoot in High-Speed Sync.

If you’re not familiar with High-Speed Sync, the short version is that it is a special flash mode in which the Speedlite fires an ultra-fast series of flashes rather than one big pop. The pulse is so fast, topping 30,000 cycles per second, that it appears as a regular pop to us. What High-Speed Sync does is turn your Speedlite into a continuous light source so that you can shoot at virtually any shutter speed. When firing in normal mode, the maximum shutter speed on your camera for flash work is in the vicinity of 1/200″. [For more details on the basics of High-Speed Sync, read my article Simple Truths About High-Speed Sync over on PixSylated.] Thanks to High-Speed Sync, I can use super-fast shutter speeds to dim the ambient light (the sun) and selectively light my subject with a Speedlite. In short, High-Speed Sync gives me the ability to create images that I otherwise could not shoot.

So, here’s where I started: mid-afternoon sun coming straight at the camera. The first shot I always take is with my camera in Tv (shutter-priority automatic) at or close to the sync speed for my camera. I want to see how the camera sees the ambient light. There is no flash in the following shot.

Starting out: Shutter-priority automatic, 1/160", f/7.1, ambient only, no flash

Read more

Speedliting Interview on This Week in Photography

TWIP Podcast #131 – Photographing Olympians

INTERVIEW WITH SYL ARENA

This week, Fred interviews Syl Arena about the strobist movement, his new site devoted to Canon Speedlites, and his thoughts on working with off-camera flash. Syl also answers questions about small flash from TWiP listeners. You can learn more about Syl by visiting his website, following him on Twitter, and checking out his new site devoted to Canon Speedliting.