The Goals and Practice of Travel Photography

I’ll admit right off the bat, that I’m not a very good travel photographer.  I don’t take many ‘memory’ photos of myself and friends having a good time, and I sometimes can’t see the forest for all the trees as it were, giving too much attention to looking through the viewfinder instead of just experiencing the place for it’s own sake.  I think John Mayer said it well in 3×5:

didn’t have a camera by my side this time
hoping I would see the world through both my eyes
maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m
in the mood to lose my way with words

I’m currently in the planning stages for a 2 week trip to Japan late next month, and think it’ll be quite the experience. I like being other places but I hate getting there, so that 14 hour flight is going to suck, and I’m not big on local cuisine, so it’ll be noodles for me. That said, I can’t wait just to see some of these places and experience these cities.  I’ve always wanted to visit Hiroshima, so that’s going to be quite special.

I’ve been feeling a bit depressed and burnt out lately, so part of me was actually considering taking a break from photographer and just not bringing a camera at all.   <gasp!> I know!   But, maybe what I need is to see the world with both my eyes. But then I think about the visual opportunities over there and I just can’t help myself. I don’t take travel pics as a record of my trip though, for me it’s about taking pretty pictures along the way.

Now, there’s also the question of equipment.  You want to be able to carry it all day long while walking around, but you also don’t want to forgo quality.  Again, I’m not much of a cellphone snapshot for facebook kind of guy.  There was an article on Luminous Landscape recently where a guy said he ended up using his Canon G9 much more than his Leica M8, because it was always in his pocket.  And that he was astounded with the quality when he had decent light.

For my many trips to europe in the last 5 years I went with both digital and medium format film. Say my 5D body, 28mm prime, 50mm prime, the 24-104L that I once owned.  And then my Hasselblad with a dozen or so rolls of film.  I really love the Hasselblad for travel. It folds up small, the quality is unassailable, you take your time when shooting so each shot counts more, and the images just ‘feel’ like memories.  Chromes especially; looking at my slides from Paris on a light table at Duggal a couple years ago was one of those sublime moments. That said, dealing with film when flying can be a giant pain in the ass.  Security people who don’t speak your language don’t always have the same idea of the importance of not putting your film through the x-ray machine as you do.

My current idea is to bring the 5D2 with a couple primes (35? 50?) and then borrow Meg’s 24-104 as a general walk around lens.  It’s got IS and the 5D2 is great at high iso, but f/4 is not exactly a lot of light coming in, so that worries me a bit.  But I don’t want to leave myself stuck with 50mm as my longest, and the extra weight and annoyance of swapping glass.

Or maybe I should go the LL route and bring a little pocket camera and don’t make a big stink out of it all.  People really love that Panasonic LX3. Damn, this should be easier.  At least I have a few weeks to think about it and collect your thoughts.  So if anyone has any experience in Japan and would like to give me some advise, please do.

Damn, now I’m looking through photos from paris and am thinking of doing just the hasselblad. <sigh>

Margot Stevenson Update

Those of you who used to watch my 365 Portraits project may remember a woman I shot on her 95th birthday 2 years ago named Margot Stevenson.  A lovely and greatly accomplished actress who was one of my, and seemingly everyone I talk to about the projects’, favorite subjects of the year. Well yesterday was her 97th birthday and her daughter had people over to visit.  She’s confined to her bed now and still sightless, but still as conversant and adorable as ever.  Figured I’d give everyone an update.

Funny thing about this profession is that in the end it’s the moments and experiences with other people that make it worthwhile and interesting.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that simple fact while you’re living it. And sometimes when I see people around me aging, frankly it can be depressing, but not in this case, this time it’s got me up at 5:30AM to write about it.

On the way back from the store to get a juice just now I was thinking about counterfeit money (long story, had a $10 fake in my wallet yesterday), which led me to think about the end of Catch Me If You Can where they talk about how Frank now helps banks make better checks, which led me to think about Steven Spielberg working on the film, which led me to think about what I’d feel like if Mr Spielberg were to die today (very sad is the answer), and finally that made me think about the fact that all that I can leave is the work that I can do when I’m alive.  That goes for Steven’s directing career, Margot’s acting, and my photography.  It can be a difficult goal and a lot of pressure to put on yourself to try to constantly make photos that are your life’s best. And often disappointing because they can’t all live up.  But then again, if that’s not your goal, then what is?

Noise, and why it’s not a big deal anymore.

Look at any review of the latest digital camera and you’ll see at least a page or two of 100% crops of noise at different ISO speeds, and endless comparisons with 23 other cameras.  At this point I think it’s fair to say that the engineers have successfully slayed the noise dragon. Both Canon and Nikon have full-frame cameras that are comfortable at 6400 and higher (notice I say “comfortable”, that’s actually usable and not just in special circumstances.)

One side note I’d like to make about those noise comparisons before I go on. They’re not at all real world.  Usually they’ll shoot the same scene on a tripod with the same lighting. All very scientific and objective, but most people are not sports shooters who need fast shutter speeds and so up their ISO when they’ve got decent light. Most people are like me and up the ISO when they don’t have enough light and thus high-iso noise is accentuated buy dark tones and shadow. That’s why I said 6400 is comfortable.  Ok, done with my mini-rant, now on with the show.

My old 5D was for a long time the leader in the noise race, then the Nikon 12MP cameras came out and upped the ante, then the 5DII came out with similar noise but twice the dots, etc.  The thing is, the noise we’re dealing with now is leaps and bounds better than on film at the equivalent speeds.  Last year I was walking around with my sister carrying my Leica filled with a roll of Portra 800 and when I got home and scanned it, I was very surprised how much grain there was. Here’s an example to the right, and that’s a 50% crop (here’s a link to the whole image in a post from last year).  I’d say it’s the equivalent of at least 3200 or even 6400 on my current digital.  That’s at least a two to three stop advantage.

Yes that’s 35mm, and medium format and large format are better when it comes to grain.  I’ve shot the Ilford 3200 speed film on my Hasselblad when traveling and loved it.  The grain however was definitely there.  Medium format film compared to 35mm digital, I’d give the edge to digital.  Don’t even try to talk about 4×5, what was the last time anyone shot anything over 400 speed film.  I’ll agree large format is amazing, but it couldn’t be further from 35mm digital in workflow or convenience.

You could also argue the differences between digital noise and film grain.  Sure, I’ll agree that as a general rule of thumb I’d rather have film grain.  But noise has been getting better looking, and as resolution goes up, it gets smaller relative to the pixels.  Which is something that people who compare the relative noise of the D3 with the 5DII rarely mention.

Here’s the kicker though: Lately I’ve been adding grain to my images, especially ones shot at 100-400 ISO.  That’s right, I’ll open the image up in 32bit Photoshop (yuck!) and create a layer of medium gray and run the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in to add film grain to it (I choose the 120 size grain).  Then I change the blending mode to overlay and opacity to taste. Now, you might ask, “Why in God’s name would you want to ADD fake film grain to a clean digital image!?”.  Well to answer that, I’m going to have to take you on a quick little ride down my memory lane.

I went to school for music and not visual arts and did a lot of production work where I soaked up just about everything I could get my hands on about digital audio.  I could write for days about how different aspects of the digital/analog battle in audio correlates to the digital/film battle in photography, but for the moment we’ll keep it to one facet, and that’s dither.

The process of analog to digital conversion in audio is much like a A/D converter in a camera.  Most importantly in that the louder or brighter the signal, the more information that is used to capture it.  So in audio that means that really quiet things down near the noise floor tend to flirt between being on or being off. For example, if the scale of loudness, for the sake of our conversation, goes from 1-100 (100 being clipping) then there will be some really really quiet sounds (or overtones and harmonics within other sounds) that sometimes register a 1 and sometimes register a 0.  Basically coming in and out of existence as far as the recording goes.  This shows itself as all kinds of low level distortions and some people say it’s audible, blah blah blah.

The point is that recording people decided a long time ago that if you added really quiet noise to the signal, those quiet sounds wouldn’t go from on to off, but would rather go from audible to being lost in this very quiet noise floor which sounds much like hiss on an analog tape (remember that stuff?)  The crazy thing is that listening tests showed that adding this noise, or dither, actually made the recordings sound better, even though technically, you were making them less perfect.

So, how does this effect photography.  Well I guess is does in two ways.  The 1 to 1 corresponding  effect would be to add grain to a digital images which has a lot of dark tones which have “blocked up”.  That is, that there aren’t enough numbers in the data to describe enough levels in the darkest stop of the image right next to black.  By adding grain, you’ll make the transitions between those levels less noticeable because the differences will get lost in the randomness of the noise pattern instead of being an obvious line between black and one level above black.  You might be losing ultimate image quality, but you’ll end up with a more visually appealing photograph to the viewer.

But after all that explanation, that’s not how I’ve been using the film grain lately.  Mostly I’m using it to hide my mistakes, primarily in skin.  Using the clone tool and healing brushes most of us can handle a few blemishes and wrinkles. But if the need for cloning is extensive or you’ve got to clone out a big chunk of hair from in front of someone’s face, it’s not as easy to make it look natural and blend with the skin around it in a believable way.  Film grain to the rescue. By adding the grain you’re bringing back some of the texture that too much 25% opacity cloning can smudge, as well as blend different work areas into each other.  Plus, I think that our eyes do find film grain a pleasing artifact.

Here’s a 100% example from yesterday’s image.  First is the original RAW file, second is hair removed and skin smoothed, and third is the a layer of film grain added.  Pretty cool eh?

When is ‘Done’?

All artists have the issue of when to consider their work ‘done’ and leave well enough alone. Painters, composers, architects, writers, they all have to deal with it.  And some, like sculptors, only get one chance to go too far. You can’t add marble back very easily. In some ways, photographers have it better than most because by nature our art is much more structured if you want it to be. Press the shutter and be done with it, creating the negative is their final creative decision, the Cartier-Bresson way.  Then again he was a prissy, french, rich boy.

Further down the scale are those people that used to mess in the dark room.  It being an analog process, every print is different so there are a lot of decisions to be made in that process.  Chemical and paper choices, dodging and burning, print size, etc.  Now of course, most of us play in the virtual darkroom of PhotoShop.  Anyone whose seen my work knows that I’m not immune. I’ll often spend 2 hours or more on an image.  Playing with curves and color correction, saving and walking away.  Only to come back and tweak half the stuff I did.  Refine it in an iterative process.

For me, I work on getting it the way I want and then at a certain point I switch and start looking for flaws in my work to fix by cleaning up sloppily drawn masks or tweaking curves to blend better.  The point at which I’m happy is when my pictures look like my work, but at the same time look like they couldn’t be any other way.  I know it’s ethereal and gray, but it’s the best I can put into words.  My workflow has been this way for a while now, but my standards have certainly gotten more strict.  The cleaning up stage has gotten longer and more anal.  I recently entered a competition and in the process of choosing and prepping my images, I spent hours refining post-production that I had considered “done” back when I shot them.  The older they were, the more work they needed to look finished in my mind. And we’re talking 8 months for the oldest, not 2-3 years.

So, the question is, how do you know when you’re done? When to back away and say, “I’m finished, this is the final product”?  I realize that this is a subjective question; I am looking for opinions.  Also, is it ok and/or right to go back and refine them?  Should you leave well enough alone?  Did Picasso go back and add paint to a 10 year old canvas?  And if you do go back, do you make a copy of the original and consider the new one a different version?  Interesting stuff.

Frustration

I went to B&H today to pick up a few things and was really frustrated by both of the salespeople  I dealt with.  Usually the people that work there are fast, efficient, and know more about the products than I do. They make more money that way. Not today.  

Asked the first guy for a 6×7′ Photek background in a bag, black.  He spent 5 minutes on their website looking for the sku and then he got to the right page and I had to stop him and say “That one, that’s what I want” before he clicked past it.  To which he replied “Oh, you wanted a black Photek background in a bag?  I completely misunderstood what you were asking for”  I gave him a completely blank look, as I had asked for exactly that.  Not sure how I could have been more clear or specific or direct.  Plus it’s not like I was asking for some obscure do-dad from a 15 year old camera.  They have to sell these all the time. <shakes head>

Oh and why do Pocket Wizards cost so much? Seriously?  I use them, like everyone else, and they work great.  But $190 each?  For a little radio transceiver?  If they cost $5 to make I’d be surprised.  And then they charge you $15 for a tiny 1/8″ to 1/8″ cable to connect it to the strobe.  Look, for $190, they should include all of the little cables.

On my way out I thought I’d pick up some 4×5″ black and white film to try my new Karsh look I’m going to work on.  So I go up to the film counter and ask for Fuji b/w Quickload, as I couldn’t remember the name of the Fuji b/w film (Which I know remember is Neopan, by the way).  He spent 3 minutes, yes I counted, looking for it on the website.  Pulls up some Quickload Velia page and asks, “Is this it?”.  No, silly man, that’s decidedly NOT it. Velvia couldn’t be further from b/w negative film if you tried really hard. And how the hell did you get seated at the film counter if you know nothing about film?  It was so painful that I just gave up when he said they didn’t have it.  Of course, I got home and did a search for neopan 4×5 and it came right up.  In stock.  I’m out of frustration and into resignation.

I think my biggest problem is that I ask for competence in the people around me.  For example, if you’re in the film dept at the biggest camera store in America, is it too much to ask that you know something about film? 

Sorry, I just had to rant.

Photographer: Yousef Karsh

One of the nice things about being self-taught and a relative newcomer to photography is that I’m constantly learning about famous photographers I never knew existed.  I’m sure that if I had gone to some fancy photo school I would have had history classes where I learned all this stuff.  But I had those in music school, and soon realized that force feeding a ton of different artists down your throat each week is exhausting and really not the way to do it.  Happening upon them is much more fun.  I’m going to make the point of pointing out people I discover in the future.

So I was up in Boston and saw a show of prints from portrait photographer Yousef Karsh (which incidentally my mother mentioned tonight on the phone is the same last name as the doctor that delivered me).  Karsh died in 2002 at the ripe old age of 93, but in the years between the 1930’s and the 1990’s he had the occasion to take portraits of just about everyone who was anyone.  His Wikipedia page mentions that of the 100 most notable people of the century, named by the  Who’s Who in 2000, Karsh had photographed 51.  Not too shabby.

His portraits are very formal, no snapshots here and shot with an 8×10 camera. They had one of his cameras there at the exhibit, along with the wooden box it traveled in, complete with Concorde flight tags. It was very cool.  His photographs are almost universally black and white, and meticulously lit, I found it almost painful how good they were.  Makes me want to get better NOW and also quit because I suck, almost simultaneously.  You can tell that they took a lot of time.  That his sittings were about making one or two finished portraits, not shooting 300 shots.

I’m reading the book from the exhibition now called “Regarding Heroes”  It doesn’t seem to be available on amazon or else I’d force you all to buy it.  In the book the author mentions that on one of the shots he used 6 lights, and I think he used hot lights.  Spotlights to be exact, though I can’t be sure without more research.  He had a way of overlapping the lights so that while there were shadows, they all filled each other in somehow to give this midrange of gray that’s just perfect.

In some of the images there is a great dynamic range of detailed highlights and shadow, some lit by window light or through and open door.  The first thing I though was, “There’s no way you could do that with current digital.  The minute you stopped down enough to not blow those highlights, you’d have no data in the shadows”.  Film, especially B/W still has a big advantage in dynamic range.

Monday was the last day of the show in Boston, but I have a feeling it’s a traveling exhibition, so keep an eye out.  The prints themselves were masterfully done. The overall tone of the them was really breathtaking. They were at the same time contrasty and not.  Again, the mid-tones were something I’m going to strive to achieve. Times change and progress and all that, but hand printing is soon going to be a lost art.  I was watching the beginning of a documentary on Cartier-Bresson the other day on Netflix and the scene behind the opening credits is some guy printing one of the photos.  Making what looked like shadow puppets to control the light and burn parts of the image.  It was amazing.

So go take a look at his work.  Here’s a link to a site where I found a bunch of his stuff.  Personally what I’m going to take from this is that now I’ve got a new goal of excellence.  I get a rush from looking at other people’s work and trying to figure out how they did it, to try to get inside their head and add a style to my creative toolbox.  I’ve got to get all my lights out and see what I can do.

Reality?

I do a lot of post-production to my images.  Lately, however I wonder where the line is between an image of reality and something more akin to art.  You could argue that aperture and shutter speed and white balance and framing and image selection all warp reality enough that the question is meaningless.  Sure, that’s true, but what about the more deliberate stuff and how it effects the ethical side of things.

Way back when I remember that National Geographic got in trouble for moving the pyramids closer together for a cover image.  Everyone got really upset, and to think that was before photoshop, so some guy did it in the darkroom.  Almost every year there’s some scandal or another about some AP photographer doctoring a war image or some such.  I tend to agree with the critics there, war is one place where there is no room for photoshop.  I want to see what was in front of the lens, and that’s it.  Altering in that instance, even if well intentioned, has too much power to distort the situation and is too likely to be used for propaganda and other nefarious purposes.

Now, as a portrait photographer, I’m in the propaganda business. My job is not just to capture the subject in front of me, but to convey beauty, or power, or grace, or strength, or frailty, or a hundred other adjectives. So where is my line supposed to be?  I can remove a wrinkle or blemish  and still sleep at night.  And there are plenty of times that I’ll clone out a leaf of a plant that’s distractingly coming into frame.

But here’s the thing that’s got me thinking. Say I’m shooting for Newsweek; A portrait of a guy out on the street, normal fare. Now, if I want to make the subject look lonely out there (let’s say he just got divorced and it was part of the story) and in the background a random person walked into the perfect frame, am I allowed to photoshop them out?  I’m shooting for a ‘news’ magazine, yes, but my portrait isn’t exactly news or current events, it’s a photo of a guy on the street.  What’s my obligation to reality in a situation like this.

I haven’t really come up with an answer yet, and I’m sure the line could sit anywhere inside a big gray area, but it’s an interesting question.  You could claim that I’ve got to use the image as is, but we all play with contrast and saturation.  Pixels are never just pixels.  Plus what if I did something like blur out a photo of the guys family on his desk for security reasons?  Is that ok?

Tough stuff.  So I thought I’d open it up to discussion.

Little Cameras

I have this fantasy about little cameras. And by little cameras I mean point and shoot stuff.  Anything from the camera in my iPhone to a little tiny $129 Powershot to a G10 (in the Canon world at least).  I always think that I’ll actually use one if I have one.  Then I buy one and it sits in my closet until it’s completely outdated.  It’s sad really.

My friend Meg bought a G10 last month (she seems to like it, we’ll have to get her to write up her thoughts.) and I’ve gotten to play with it a bit.  The screen is nice, the size and weight are more Canonet than you’d expect in a modern camera, and that’s a good thing mind you.  It’s got good physical detented knobs for a lot of functions, including exposure compensation right on the top left.  -2 < > +2  Sweet!  As you can see, I lust for it.

In the end however it’s got the same problems that all such cameras have.  I don’t shoot like need you to.  That is, in good light, at lower iso, or with a flash.  Those are all limitations of the size of the sensor (smaller than your pinkie) and their type (CCD). Maybe I have to stop thinking about them as a replacement for bigger more capable cameras and instead shoot to their strengths.  I’ve tried this once or twice, usually get back home and look at the images on screen and think, “Man I wish I had my 5D on me instead”.  I’m just not a ‘see a cool thing on the street and snap a photo of it” kind of photographer.

Those little Sigma cameras are pretty sweet looking.  But a 4MP Foveon image just isn’t enough for me no matter now good their adherents say they are.  I’m even cool with the prime lens they’ve got permanently in place.  It’s the $600 price that turns me off as well.

There’s rumors of Nikon or Canon coming out with a CMOS (that’s the good kind of sensor that’s in most modern DSLR) which could give much closer to dSLR performance in a smaller package.  When we can get Rebels and D40’s for $550 on sale, the manufacturers really need to think about getting a nice camera in the $400-$500 price range that doesn’t have just as many limitations as the $125 number.

From the research I’ve done, it’s Panasonic that holds the camera to get title in this category, I think it’s called the LX3.  Apparently it’s got lower noise and a faster lens (f/2) that it’s competitors and doesn’t try to push it’s megapixel rating for the sake of marketing.  I think it’s 10MP.  Plus it’s got modes to shoot 16×9 and I think 4×5 ratios, plus RAW.  

It’s funny, a lot of the time when I want to have a camera with me when I’m walking around, I choose my 40 year old Leica M4.  It’s bigger than a point and shoot for sure, and you’ve got to carry a meter with mine, but I’m not skimping on image quality.  On the contrary, you might say that I’m gaining quality.  That led me to think about a used M8, but the cropped sensor just pisses me off, and it’s too rich for my blood anyway.

To be sure, I see images all the time taken by people who use a G9 as their main camera and they’re gorgeous.  Makes me massively envious that they can do so much with them and I can’t. Maybe, that’s the reason for having one.  Like a cyclist training on one of those one gear direct drive bikes.  Limited, and hard, but massively efficient if you want to get better faster.

The Glossy/Matte Debate

It’s kind of funny actually, it used to be that photographers had an opinion one way or the other about the paper their images were printed on.  The older matte, more modern glossy, or a satin that was somewhere in between. Incidentally I prefer satin for reasons I’ll explain in a bit.  What’s funny is that not only has this argument become even more clouded with the explosion of inkjet photo paper options, but now it’s expanded to computer screens as well.

For those who don’t follow the debate, many photographers and graphic designers and some normal crazy people don’t like the glossy screens on many recent laptops. Sony and HP and Apple have been doing this for a while.  Currently, all of the latest Macs come with glossy screens as standard.  This includes the 13″, 15″ and now 17″ laptops as well as the iMac and the latest Cinema Display.  Up until this last revision in October, Apple gave the buyers of the MacBook an option to build the laptops with a matte screen, but now they don’t (I know the new 17″ has a matte option, but who wants to carry around a 7lb computer).

Well, a lot of people seem to be very upset about this and since I have two heads like Zaphod Beeblebrox, I’m willing to put one of them in the lion’s mouth.  I don’t see what the big problem is with glossy, unless you’re working outside all day. Especially with the bright LED back-lights in today’s displays which can overpower bright outdoor sun. Are there reflections?  Sure there are, but there were with matte screens too, they just got blurred and subdued and smeared so you couldn’t tell what was a brightness difference from a reflection and what was from the screen itself.

I had a 15″ MacBook Pro from late 2006 with a matte screen and I didn’t like editing on that at all.  I gave it to my sister a couple months ago and replaced it with a new 13″ MacBook. I wish it had the better screen of the Air, but I don’t do color correction on this thing anyway, it’s just for sitting on my bed writing blog posts and taking it on set to dump images to during a shoot. I have yet to have a reflection problem that couldn’t be fixed by turning the laptop 5 degrees or tilting the screen a bit.

And on the plus side, the glossy screen has much blacker blacks, and side by side with an identical machine with a matte screen in the store, the glossy screen is a closer match to my calibrated Eizo and NEC desktop LCDs.  Others may feel differently, but I don’t know many people who have gone glossy and then gone back. In my mind, it’s a whole lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt out there. Maybe fear of change. 

Oh and for what it’s worth, I like satin finish paper for the best of both worlds. Not too shiny, but with much richer blacks and more saturated color than matte paper.  I used to print my portfolio on matte and then one day I did a side by side with a satin print.  No contest, I reprinted my whole book that very night.  To be specific, Red River Arctic Polar Satin is my favorite and reasonably priced.

Let the onslaught begin.

My Current Kit

As you’ve noticed, I’ve been cleaning out my shelves of gear. Trying to get down to a nice tight setup that does everything I want it to do at least 95% of the time.  Or course there are time when I’ll need something special, but usually jobs like that will have budgets that I can rent.  

So when I get the call to shoot and I grab my bag.  This is what I currently grab.

Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 50mm/1.2L
Canon 35mm/1.4L
Canon 28mm/1.8

Crazy, not a lens longer than 50mm and I call myself a portrait photographer. How dare I!  <grin>   I used the 85mm/1.2L on an ad shoot a couple months ago.  It was amazing and I totally want one, but I think I’ll have to save up for it or try to find one used. $1800 is a little too rich for my blood at the moment.  

The new 50 is great so far.  The bokeh on it is better than the 1.4 and the overall contrast on the images is better.  Though you’re paying for that in 4x the cost and about 3x the weight and bulk.

I still love the 28, but it’s not quite sharp enough to use wide open on a 21MP sensor, or at least my copy isn’t, so I tend to stop it down to 2.2 at least.  

I bought the 35 recently to take the place of the 28.  I figured it’s faster, sharper, less distortion, etc.  At first I didn’t like the focal length, somehow I just didn’t see that way, it didn’t fit.  But I’ve come to start appreciating it now. Getting use to the ‘not quite so wide’ look.

On top of the lenses I usually grab some accessories:

Canon 580EX speedlight
Gary Fong Lightsphere (the original hard bulky one)
Coiled flash cable
36″ 5-in-one reflector

I shoot the speedlight through the diffuser section of the 5/1 as a make-shift softbox a lot.  With an assistant holding that stuff obviously, I’ve only got 2 hands.

So all of this fits into my small Crumpler backpack if you do it right.  Very small, very tight, very flexible and amazing image quality if you get all the technical stuff right.  You can trade the reflector for a little laptop if you want too.  Usually there are two bags going along under those circumstances though.

Finally I’ve put in an order for the ProFoto AcuteB pack and head, so that’ll be the optional bag when I don’t want to pack up an Alien Bee when I need a real strobe.  That’ll open up the option to shoot outside too which is kind of exciting.

If anyone’s got any questions, let me know.