my [JOE] blog: the dailies of a portrait & documentary photographer. who doesn't take pictures.

Out takes and other things from Father’s Day

Posted by jOe

So, this Father's Day was pretty unique.  Uhh, Dad bought his own present and didn't tell any of us what it was until he opened it.  Eh.. It worked.  And it was kind of funny.

As he pulled out the "Paul C. Bluff" packaging Will said with a certain drollness, "it must be camera stuff because Joe is the only one excited."  It was.  An AlienBee 800 strobe, so's ya know.

And since I was already planning on doing pictures with the fam that afternoon, this made for a most welcomed complement.  We had lots of fun, and that was even before the gun.

I did tag this post as a just for photographers because I wanted to touch on some of the technical stuff as well.  Everything from this point down I did with one light, no reflectors, in Mom and Dad's living room.  The ambient light was a little low, but not dark.  I was shooting between f/9 - f/14 @ 1/250 (ISO 50) with the AB800 around 50%.

As you can see above, I was using a shutter speed of 1/320 (max is around 1/200 - 1/250), and it puts a black bar on the side (this is the shutter curtain encroaching on the exposure, cutting out the light from the strobe).  I played around with it on purpose to give a leaner composition before I totally washed out all ambient light.

Also, you can see that my background was showing.  I was still finding "black" (f I recall, at this point I was around f/7 with a higher ISO, 400 maybe, and lower strobe power).

We didn't use an umbrella or softbox to modify the light from the strobe for one main reason: the room was too small and the spillover light was lighting the background making it impossible to "black" it out.

Instead, we used a grid spot on our strobe (flat round thing with a honeycomb patter that concentrates the light pattern). It gives it a hard, classic Hollywood feel. I liked that. And a note, for one model we used either a 10 or 20 degree grid, but for two models, it was just too narrow so we had to expand to either a 30 or 40. Any bigger would have started to give us a little too much spill-over.

Also, I've sprinkled in some pictures out of order, because this IS also an out-takes post.
All of this lighting is "one-light" where only a key light is used. It tends to have a dramatic, low-key (dark) feel to it. So, not always acceptable, depending on what you're going for. In this scenario, it really helped me get rid of all the distracting background lines and shapes. Plus, I can get studio looking images without actually having a studio.
After playing with it a bit, I began to get a good idea about the pros and cons of using a strobe as opposed to small flash.

Pros: Faster recycle time (more pictures per second); greater range of power (this can be useful when overpowering the Sun or other harsh conditions); in my opinion the controls are easier to adjust in action--they're not designed to be on autopilot like small flashes; and lastly, there are more and "better" modifiers for them.  Only recently have some form of softbox been made available for small flashes.  Before that, you either had to make your own (good luck) or get a big strobe if you wanted to use these kinds of light modifiers.

Cons: You need either a battery pack (and these can cost as much as the strobes) or an extension cord/wall outlet.  Not a problem, just need to plan ahead.  They take up more room when you're transporting / storing them.  Again, not a big thing, just different if you're coming from small flashes.  Also, they cost more.

Verdict: I primarily work in natural or available light for a few reasons I won't go into here, but I am looking forward to incorporating these more. I like this much better than small flashes.

Mucho funo.The last challenge was to not have the black, matte finish gun disappear into the black background.  Solution: we simply angled it to capture the specular highlights, and since it was a matte finish, we never had a problem with it reflecting too much light back.

As you can see in the very last image of Care and me playing around, we weren't really considering this, and the gun almost disappears. That could be a big factor when, like the two images immediacy below, you're using the gun purposely as a compositional element.