Brawndo - The Thirst Mutilator

Brawndo is a fictional beverage, well, was a fictional beverage from the movie ‘Idiocracy’ by Mike Judge. And now Brawndo exists in real life. It’s not like those other drinks where they put sugar water and a drop of food coloring in a can and slap on a label from your favorite cartoon. Brawndo is a real energy drink, it’s tasty and sometimes gets me through the day, night, next day and sometime into next week. To quote some promotional Brawndo videos, drinking Brawndo is like shaving your chest with a lawnmower, riding a dinosaur attached to a rocket or sitting on a 300′ pony covered in chainsaws. You get the point.

What better way to show everyone a few beverage tricks of the trade than to shoot an ice cold, refreshing glass of my favorite beverage?

Read More…

Cook the Ambient

Last night I receive a call from my good friend Jenn and she says she needs a shot of her bike at night at an easily definable location. No problem, got time tonight? Sure.

Camera, 24-70mm and 10-22mm, Pocket Wizards, two flash units and my trusty voice activated light stand (Michelle) was over because we were going to go to the local camera club. On the way to the location I piece together the shot I want in my mind, what are my main challenges? Well it’s going to be dark so I need a flashlight to correctly focus on the subject. I’ll need to get low and possibly on the ground. I’ll also need to cook the ambient to balance flash with the lights in the background.

Well, at least I could do the last one. I forgot my trusty flashlight and I was still in my work clothes from earlier in the day. Thankfully we had cell phones that were bright enough to focus on and well, I might have ruined a set of pants laying on the asphalt.

Read More…

In this installment of About The Shot we’re going to touch on Flash and Ambient light. This is David, he is frozen in time and lit by studio strobes but everything else is blurred. How can that be?

Here’s the thing. Flash units are fast. Your camera syncs with them very slow. So what you know of as your fastest sync speed (1/125 or 1/250) is nothing compared to what the flash can do. But why are we stuck with a sync speed? That’s a whole new post in itself. But a quick description is your sync speed is the fastest shutter speed in which the whole sensor or film plane is exposed at one time. Your camera fakes much faster shutter speeds by opening one side of the shutter curtain and then shortly thereafter starts closing the other side. The whole sensor is never exposed and the flash is so quick that part of your image is bright and the other part is dark. Make sense?

So, we think our sync speed is 1/250 and we set up the shot, flash goes off and we have a nice exposure. What if the ambient lights are dim? What is keeping us from shooting at 1/125, 1/60, 1/30? Absolutely nothing. Remember that those shutter speeds are slower than your sync speed so the sensor or film is exposed whole.

Okay, WHY would we want to expose at say 1/60. Its all about ambient light. If you shoot at a slow speed you expose the frame to a quick flash and then guess what? The shutter stays open to soak in ambient light! Depending on your shutter speed you can take an otherwise dark scene in which your subject is perfectly lit and give your background time to come up in brightness.

Great, that’s a wonderful technique, but what if you add other elements? Lets say a rotate or a zoom. See above. Now to tie it all together in the point I wanted to make. The rotate or zooming technique depends on light and blur. When the flash unit bursts lets say it bursts at 1/10,000 of a second. I don’t know about you, but I am not fast enough to make a 1/10,000 of a second exposure blur. Now what happens? The portions of the image that the flash froze are rock solid. Ambient light is blurred.

What are the pitfalls in ambient light? Well, if you have a dark area of your subject you run the risk of ambient light polluting that darkness, but only if the ambient light is as bright or brighter as the place where they converge. If I had zoomed this image with lets say the bike as my center point, the ambient light would all converge into the center and right across his shirt and face. Bad image.

I don’t like to get my camera too wet. A few hundred thousand volts of lightning doesn’t tickle my fancy. Hail and Wind? Nah thanks. But damn, sometimes I risk it all for some lightning shots. A few weeks ago I was lucky. I have always heard photographic religious pondering about when its your time to take a shot, it will be presented to you. I believe this shot was ‘my time’.

Here I was, enjoying a calm Sunday afternoon and out of the blue the sky started getting dark and the wind started blowing. Ahhh great, yet another summer storm. We already had one the week before that took down a good 75-100′ tree. Literally picked it up, snapped it at the base and threw it 10′.

Lightning has got to be really spectacular for me to pick myself out of my chair (or hammock) and go in, grab my camera, tripod, cards, battery, lens and remote. Its just a pain. Towards the west was some really good lightning – so why not. Little do I know that I would have captured the image above.

I did get some good shots, nice clear bolts of cloud to ground strikes. I ventured further and further down the dock, taking shots along the way. If I were to get hit right now I hope once they pull the camera from my hands they can still recover an image or two. I made it to the end of the dock where a 25′ metal flagpole was the only thing taller than I was. I was exposing one shot when behind me I saw a strike right over the houses. It seems like the storm was now circling behind me. In one motion I turned around the tripod, composed my shot and started making exposures.

Lightning shots are best done at a stopped down aperture and at a few seconds shutter speed. A tripod is a must and a remote helps even more. I had the camera set at f/11 and 3.2 seconds. I stood there and hit my remote button.. Counted off three seconds. Shutter closed. Nothing hit. Again, three seconds. And again. On the fifth exposure there it was, a strike that made my heart skip a beat. I got it, I know I did. By then I came to my senses and realized that the wind was so strong I thought a quick burst could have knocked me over. I picked up the tripod, collapsed the legs and on the way up it started to rain, the wind whipping the drops in my face.

I get to the house and power was out. There goes actually seeing if I had gotten the shot. Well, I could tell what I had on the back of my camera, but how often have you seen something that looked great in camera that didn’t hold up on the screen? I patiently waited. Power was out for seven hours.

Since then, the photo has turned out to be a big hit in our neighborhood, online and amongst friends. Goes to show you – if you’re there and whatever religious figure decides to give you a show, you’ll capture it. This shot was pure luck. Besides knowing what to set the camera at and having the equipment to take the photo – this shot was 99.9% luck and I’m grateful for the opportunity to capture it.

Okay, its not really an outhouse – but here are two shots from an engagement session over the weekend. In the Orange Grove area of Patapsco State Park we found this little run-down shack, small about 6′ by 6′ and square. Normal shots were ok, sunlight reflected into their faces to lighten up the shadows. I wanted a little punch in the background and think the light really helps. See the before and after below.

What is different here? Just a strobe inside the shack, 1/4 power and triggered by a pocket wizard. You could have gotten away with an optical slave here as well. Think about your environment and don’t be afraid to experiment when you’re already sure you have the safe shots in the can. Here I took a few in the doorway of the shack without lighting and then turned on the flash and went that route. If I didn’t like them? I could have never shown them to the clients and they’d still be happy – they see the safe shots and that’s that.

In my opinion, 95% of the shots out there can be made with what we already have. Think about it – even if you have basic amateur camera gear you can use a little ingenuity and make the shot. Today’s ‘About the shot’ comes from that extra 5%. Welcome to high speed photography. I present to you – ‘The Claw’.

(Click to Enlarge)

The lost EXIF data on this shot shows 60mm, f/22, ISO 100 at two whole seconds of exposure. Two seconds – how can that be?

Let’s face it, this detail was created by stopping the action with more than our camera’s fastest shutter speed. So, understanding this, don’t let your camera stop the action, let your light stop it. The scene (in a dark room) was lit with three Vivitar 283 flash units shorted to provide the quickest burst of light possible. So the estimation is 1/30,000 on these 283’s and lets assume they all didn’t fire exactly simultaneously – so lets estimate 1/15,000-1/20,000 on the shot.

Read More…

Sometimes photographers are not known as the smartest of the bunch, to get a shot we’ll put our equipment and selves into some weird spots. A few months ago the Strobist blog linked a video of Dane’s Photo Minute which featured wedding photographer Mike Larson throwing away a perfectly good camera. Well, not exactly throwing it away, but it sounds much better than saying he threw it up.. Here, let me just show you.

(Click to Enlarge)

Let me first say, even though this shot was before insuring my equipment – I hope my insurance company doesn’t see this! The shot was taken with a Canon 20D, 10-22mm EF-S lens at 10mm. ISO 400, f/8. I had set the timer on the camera, at 2 seconds to go up it went about six to seven feet with a little spin to stabilize the camera. As hard as I try, when you’re throwing over a grand into the air you can’t help but have the dumb ‘what did I just do?’ look on your face.

Now, how in the world would you do this professionally? The concept is simple, Mike uses this technique to capture the members of a wedding party – standing in a circle. Below is the original Strobist post and a Flickr group on camera tossing. Even if you’re not into this technique, take a browse through the Flickr group as the slower shots blur light that just looks amazing!

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/08/this-will-literally-make-you-want-to.html
http://flickr.com/groups/cameratoss/

Here’s a shot that has been drawing some interest.

(Click to Enlarge, EXIF Data Intact)

This is a shot of two vintage airplanes. Perhaps World War I era. I was shooting the Maryland Surfing Championships in Ocean City on August 11th, 2007 and thankfully between groups of surf competitors these two came flying up the coast. I was talking on the phone at the time – the phone fell into the sand as I quickly slapped my 2X extender onto my 70-200 2.8 IS and took a rapid fire burst as they flew by. 400mm at f/5.6 at ISO 100 and this shot was born. I didn’t expect anything usable out of the shot because of how quickly it all happened but was delighted when I found this in with the others from the day. A little soft so I bumped up the contrast and then aged the photo with a little desaturation and some vignetting on the edges. I prefer to keep more traditional print sizes but this one really screamed panoramic print.

Be sure to pack light but keep what is needed in case you get an opportunity like this. Since my subjects were close to the shore (and I was kneeling at the waters’ edge) I shot with the 70-200mm most of the day and was sure glad I could get some extra reach with the help of the extender when this shot presented itself.

-John