Philosophy of a Shooter, or where are you on the ‘Now or Later’ scale

I just finished reading Joe McNally’s book “The Hot Shoe Diaries” which was recently put out in paperback, well, more like trade paperback.  For those of you who don’t know, Joe is a big-dog. A monster photographer who shoots and has shot for just about everybody. He’s also completely obsessed with speedlites.

Now a few notes about the book before I continue.  If you’re interested in expanding your knowledge of using speedlites to their fullest extent, and like to read about how other photographers think about tackling challenging shoots, then it’s a great book to read.  If you’re a big speedlite guy already and have read everything on the wonderful Strobist website by David Hobby, then you probably know most of what Joe is going to say.  Also, it’s a little too brand crazy for me.  I know he shoots Nikon and uses Lumadyne gear, but you don’t have to talk about everything by it’s model number.   You don’t have to say “I used a Lastolite Tri-fold to fill” every time.  Honestly, just say ‘gold reflector’ please.  Seriously, the book might as well say “Paid for by Nikon” in large friendly letters on the cover.  That’s not to take away from the content, which is great, but rather a style thing.  Maybe it’s because I’m a Canon guy.

Ok, now that that is out of the way. The one major thing I took away from the book is that Joe likes to get his pictures ‘in the camera’, and he does. If he’s got to setup 47 speedlites inside and around an Air Force transport plane, well, that’s what he’s gonna do. On environmental portraits, he’ll setup 2-3 speedlites on the subject, and then another in the tree to the left with a warming filter and then a 4th zoomed in to 200mm with a cooling filter coming from the window across the street to rim light the girl. Many times he mentions that this is so he doesn’t have to sit in front of a computer all day. He’s a ‘now’ guy, he want’s to get it right at the shoot and not have to ‘fix’ it later in photoshop. Maybe it’s because he used to shoot film where you HAD to get it right in the camera. Either way, it’s certainly a valid way to go and his results are first-class, but it got me thinking that I couldn’t be more different on the now-later scale.

When I’m at a shoot, mostly what I’m trying to get is good raw material. As you can see in the before/after photos of Phil from a couple days ago, It didn’t really matter to me that Phil was a stop or two darker than the background.  Or that the background was probably a stop hotter than I would have liked. As long as I could finagle with the RAW file to export one version with the background pulled back and another with Phil pulled up and then mask the two together, then I’m fine. Mixed light temperatures, no problem. As long as there is luminance data and nothing important blown out, I can work with it.  Now that’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to have it be better right out of the camera, everyone would.  But what I am saying is that I wouldn’t take the 5 or 10 minutes of my time in the middle of the shoot to setup multiple lights with correction gels and stands and line of sight to make the TTL signals work and everything else, just to make it easier for me later after the shoot.  I worry too much about losing Phil’s attention and altering the flow of the shoot. 

Maybe it’s because I tend to take (I hope) really intimate portraits. I want my subjects to let their guard down so I can capture something special. In fact today I got an email from a reader asking how I do just that. I told him it takes time, sometimes a lot of it. It’s talking and shooting and about the energy between the two of you. It’s a dance, and it takes time to earn your partners trust. That 5 minutes, hell, even a 10 second lens change, is sometimes enough to set me back with the subject.

Plus he carries like 6 speedlights and a truck-full of diffusers and
silks and c-stands with him.  To me that’s kinda defeating the idea of
a 3″x2″x7″ battery powered speedlite. Having my assistant shoot a
speedlite though a diffuser is fancy lighting for me on location most
of the time.

It may also have to do with the fact that I don’t mind sitting in front of the computer editing. I have much more control and none of the time pressure. I can go out, spend my time at the shoot interacting with the subject and then return home with the booty in the form of 3GB or so of RAW data that I then get to play with.  Also I’m usually not handing my clients a whole slew of images.  I select what I think are the best and those get the attention.  Maybe 5 out of 200, and I may take 2 hours or more playing with that single image to mold it into what I wanted it to be. I also will try to do 3-4 different setups in the 20 minutes I’ve got with the subject. I’m not sure that would be possible with these fancy setups, unless you had 48 lights and had them all setup from the get-go.  Damn, I think he actually DOES have 48 lights.

All of this said, I learned a lot in the book. It certainly makes me want to play with my speedlites more. I think some playtime is in order.  Maybe just maybe, I’d be better off if I were a little more towards the center of the scale than I am now.

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Addendum: 
Just found this Canon/Nikon TTL system comparison.  Might be handy for some people:  http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2009/03/25/ttl-flash-canon-and-nikon/

Distances

When you say “portrait lens” to a photographer, usually they’re talking about so-called ‘longer’ lenses. That is, lenses whose focal length is generally in the 85-130mm range (on 35mm cameras at least).  You’ll read about how longer lenses flatten perspective and are generally more flattering to the subject.  On the other end of the spectrum they’ll say that wide angle lenses are not to be used for portraiture because they distort or at least exaggerate people’s features.  Making big noses bigger and that kind of thing.

The thing is, most of this is either misleading or wrong.  It’s really all a matter of distances, not focal length which causes these effects. Focal length comes into play because it effects your field of view, that’s the amount of the scene left to right you capture with it, usually represented by an angle.

So for our discussion, let’s imagine that your 5 feet from a friend of yours. To really visualize it,  go get a friend and a decent range wide to telephoto zoom lens and try it.  Being 5 feet away from them, your perspective of them is about as normal as can be.  They’re 3 dimensional without looking distorted. If you had a 50mm lens on your camera and took a picture, you’d get pretty much what you’re seeing right now. That’s why they call 50mm lenses ‘normal’. It would probably be a pretty boring waist to head portrait.

Now if you wanted a photo of just their head and shoulders you have two options, either you can zoom your camera up to 85mm or so, or you can ‘zoom with your feet’ and get closer with the 50mm focal length.  If you did both of these you’d see that they look different from each other. But that’s not because of the focal length, but rather because you got closer with the 50mm to get the same framing. In fact, if you took your original waist up shot from the last paragraph and cropped it to the same framing as the zoomed in 85mm shot you’d see that they’re identical.  

So if you want take a head and shoulders shot zoomed out to 28mm or so, you’ll notice that you have to get REALLY close to the subject to fill the frame. It’s this closeness that causes the distortion of close-up wide-angle portraits.  You can even see this without a camera; Just cover one eye and get a few inches from your friend’s face, it’ll look distorted, just like the 28mm lens.

Ok Bill, so what’s your point?  Well it’s just that any lens can be a portrait lens where the person looks normal and not distorted. It really just depends on how much of their surroundings that you want to include in the picture. Go back to 5 feet away from your friend, look through your camera and zoom in and out and see how the framing changes.  Maybe the wood paneling behind and that flower pot next to them are really interesting elements in the composition. If so, maybe shooting wide-angle works, or maybe it’s all distracting and so you zoom in and shoot something tighter.  Maybe somewhere in between.  The point is that it’s not about one focal length being ‘better’ for portraits. They all can be, it’s really up to you.

Personally I love more environmental wide-angle portraits.  I like seeing and working with the space the subject is in.  I think it makes portraits more interesting. You can tell this by looking at my work as well as my lens compliment. 28mm, 35mm, 50mm primes.   I recently bought an 85mm traditional ‘portrait’ lens and when I take pictures with it I feel like it’s speaking a different language than me.  It obviously got potential as it’s painfully sharp, and all the way open at f/1.2 the depth of field is awesomely narrow.  It’s just going to take a little getting used to, but working outside your comfort zone is always a good exercise.  So if you like long lenses, go walk around with something wide this weekend, or the other way around. Either way you’ll probably come up with something different than your norm.

Intel i7 Photoshop/Lightroom Workstation – Part Three “The Juice”

So I waited at my place all day for UPS to deliver the two fans that will complete my machine and let me close up the side and make all of the wires pretty, but alas it was on a truck for delivery from 4am this morning and yet at 8PM they claimed they couldn’t deliver due to the weather.  Sounds like a “Dog ate my homework” to me.

Anyway. In The Girl Next Door one of the characters says “Make sure the juice is worth the squeeze”.  I did get a chance to actually USE the computer since the last post and so far so yummy. Seriously, it’s delightful. For example, in photoshop (which launches in half the time), if you were using a healing brush to remove a hair across someones face, on my old machine the computer would take a second or so to calculate before refreshing.  Now it’s instantaneous. When I lift the pen off the tablet, it’s done.  Super.  It’s like drawing on paper instead of a computer, it’s become that much more transparent. The same goes for most of the filters that I use, much improvement. I plan to do some real shooting tomorrow, so we’ll see how it holds up with that kind of abuse. So far I’m very happy with the upgrade. Definitely worth the squeeze.

Here’s the result from a raw file I took a couple weeks ago:

Intel i7 Photoshop/Lightroom Workstation – Part Two

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few days.  I, along with my lovely assistant HA, spent them doing computer stuff and getting my new i7 machine built. I thought I’d share a couple of photos and some observations of the process for those that are interested.

I’m still installing everything and testing and whatnot, but at first glance, this thing is FAST. I’ve overclocked the processor from it’s nominal speed of 2.66GHz up to 3.6GHz. So basically it’s faster than the $1000 high-end processor at stock speeds. I could go higher, in fact it seemed stable at 3.8 and even 4.0, but I decided I’d rather back off and give it some room to breathe. I ran prime95 for a while on it and with all 8 cores (4 real cores, each split in 2 by hyper-threading) the temperatures max out a little below 80 degrees.  That’s hot, but absolute worst case scenario and there were no crashes or blue screens or anything like that.  And this is with 12GB of ram installed.  Had to reseat the heatsink and reapply thermal paste a couple of times to get the right amount and the right placement, as this is still a black art, people come up with completely contradictory advise on the online forums at anandtech.com and others.

With the case all closed up, the fan on the power supply really speeds up to try to deal with the heat buildup. It’s a small case and I’m installing 2 more fans when they come tomorrow. One 92mm to push air into the front and over the hard drives, and another 120mm in the back to expel the air by the cpu cooler.  Also, I think I can lower the CPU voltage a bit and still keep it stable.  I’ll play with that this week.

I’ve got three hard drives in there right now. A little WD Velociraptor as a boot drive and a couple of Seagate 1.5TB drives in a raid 1 array for storage. All of them are mounted in elastic bands as you can see in the photo.  The Antec Solo case I used comes with the bands stock, the only one I know of. It’s a silent pc dorky person trick to keep the drive vibrations from amplifying through the case.

Last night and today I moved my images from my old arrays to the new one by mounting one drive of each of the old arrays in my eSATA dock.  Very handy and relatively quick (still took hours, it is a TRILLION bytes afterall.  That’s 1,000,000,000,000 bytes).  I had a bit of a scare when one of the drives died while transferring.  Just locked up and won’t do much but click now. Luckily I had the other drive from the raid pair, and was able to get everything off of that one. Both were the 1TB seagate drives which have a firmware issue.  Looking up there serial numbers on the Seagate site showed that they both have the problem.  I had no idea, very scary timebomb.  This is to say, “Go back up your images, right now!”

So now it’s time to use it for a while and see how it drives.  By the way, anyone who was thinking of building their own machine based on my previous posts and just got scared reading this, I was overclocking and doing fancy things to squeeze performance out of the system. A stock system would have none of that craziness and would still be very fast. More to come.
 

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?

Marketing Q&A

More questions from Dwayne, along with my answers, of course…

Question #1 – Do you have a rep? If so why did you feel you needed one and if not why don’t you feel you need one?

I don’t currently have a rep, but I do have some pots on the fire.  In my opinion a rep is a double-edged sword.  They find you work, but they take a cut.  Then again, you probably would not have had the work if they hadn’t gotten if for you.  I also worry a bit about losing control over the direction of my career and the jobs I do, but I think that’s just spliting the hairs of my deep nerosyis.  I’m doing ok with the editorial work, but I would like to do more ad work and that’s where a rep would help.

Question #2 –  How do you estimate pricing for jobs, corporate and portrait work?

Oh, that’s very very tough and I’m terrible at it.  Some people like to use that software, quotepro or something like that.  Living in NYC, the numbers are not always right from my limited exposure with it.  For editorial work, most publications have standard rates that you’ve got to work within, and personal portraiture is a gray area between how much you want the shoot and how much your time is worth.  Personally, I’d rather shoot people I want to shoot and charge them a little to use the photos rather than have them pay me for real and then I’m tied to making them happy.

Question #3 –  What type of marketing do you do?

Not nearly enough.  My friend Meg printed and sent out hand numbered postcards a couple weeks ago.  I need to be much more like her.  I do however hear mixed messages on whether mailers work.  Some people get so many they just throw them out and say they prefer to be able to just click on a link to a website.  Others want something they can pin up on their wall if they like it. Art buyers offices are like mini-museums in this respect. On top of all this, I’ve found that people in this industry move around so much that address lists are out of date and 20% of your stuff bounces back.

I guess you could say that my 365 Portraits thing was marketing, though I didn’t mean it as such.  You could consider this blog marketing, though most of the people who read it are photographers themselves, so I guess that’s a moot point.  Marketing is expensive and I’m a procrastinator, and that’s probably a bad combination.  I’ve also got a weird opinion of my own work. At my worst, I’m almost embarrased to send it out for people to look at.  I don’t want to waste their time.  That is a really bad situation.  I need to buck up and be prepared to look like an ass for my art.  I’m working on it.

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By the way, I like this question/answer stuff.  If anyone has any particular questions, feel free to email me at bill at billwadman.com

File Workflow Q&A

A reader named Dwayne sent me an email this morning asking some questions about my file workflow.  I figured that other people might be interested in the answers, so I’ve turned it into a post.

Question #1 – Your using a raid 1, so do all of your working files as well as backup files live there?

Yes and no, my RAW and PSD files exist on my RAID 1 array (one of two arrays to be specific)  That way they’re always available to me.  I’m not the type of guy who shoots 10GB a day, so I can fit everything I’ve ever shot and kept on a couple 1TB drive arrays.

I also backup to external discs as well.  In the past few days I’ve started using Microsoft’s free Sync Toy utility (I’m a Windows user) to keep copies of everything on an external drive. Currently that’s a bare 1.5TB Seagate in an eSata drive dock.  I keep the bare drives in a waterproof Pelican case which I can grab if I need to leave my place in a hurry.

Question #2 – Do you at some point delete your working files and only keep the edited ones and backups on your raid?

Nope, I’ve set up my system so that I never have to ‘archive’ anything.  I like having it all available all the time.  You never know when you’re going to need to go dig something up.  There may be a time when it gets impractical, but drive sizes and file sizes seem to double at about the same rate, so I think I’ll be ok into the forseeable future.

Oh and there isn’t a difference between my ‘working’ and ‘edited’ files.  I export my RAW to PhotoShop as a 16bit – ProPhoto RGB file and then save it with all the layers as a PSD which is my final file. They’re big and unwieldy at times, but I like the quality and also keep my editing options open.  I do export my ‘finished’ image (whatever that means artistically) to a jpeg file which gets sent up into the cloud using JungleDisk as a last ditch backup in case my neighborhood gets arsoned, but I consider the psd the final file. Unless I have to flatten a copy for delivery to a client of course.

Question #3 – Do you backup your raw straight from camera files to dvd?

No, I don’t backup to DVD. The capacity just isn’t there for me and it takes too much time. Plus then you’ve got books and books of burned DVDs to deal with. 

I prefer to backup to external drives.  When I get home from a shoot I’ll copy the RAW images to my internal RAID as well as a couple external drives just in case.  If I had my laptop on site, my assistant or I will often copy them onto it’s internal drive drive and maybe an little 2.5″ external if I’m feeling anal.  On really serious shoots I’ll send these external drives home with other people (my assistant and producer usually).

If anyone has any questions or if I was unclear anywhere, let me know and I’ll do my best to clarify.

I’m a Pinhead

You guys know I talk about how important good lenses are, right?  Like all the time.  Well take a look at this picture and see if you can tell me what kind of glass I used…

Ah ha, trick question.  I used no glass at all.  I took that photograph with a pinhole camera.  Or rather, a modified body cap on my 5DII.

Basically you drill a hole in the middle of a body cap. Then cover the hole on the inside of the cap with a piece of foil. Then make as small of a hole as you can in the middle of the foil with a pin.  Stick it on your camera and shoot.

This is actually the most simple a lens can possibly get. Basically it goes all the way back to the camera obscura.

Here are more detailed instructions for and a much better built example of what I did.  The smaller and more perfectly you make the hole the foil the better, but I just played until it worked.  Actually I found those instructions after I had, through a number of lesser iterations, come to the same configuration myself independantly.  Like I said though, his is much better.

I’m certainly not going to give up my L glass, but it was fun to experiment for an hour or so.

Ann Diptych

A delightful woman named Ann came over to sit for me today and towards the end of the shoot I thought I’d try some close-up portraits of her face with her hair pulled back.  Ideally for what I was trying to do, I’d have some strip boxes, basically a narrow (6-10″) softbox that lets you have a soft band of light that you can control more easily.  I don’t have one, so this setup was thrown together.  On her left was a White Lightning strobe with a 60″ softliter, and on her right was a small alien bee 400 with a large softbox.  It was the best I could do.

Ok, so this is an example of the differences that light choices and camera settings and post processing can make to a very simple image.

The image on the left was shot with just the While Lightning firing.  Even at it’s lowest power and me at iso 100, I had to stop down to f/3.5 or something like that.

For the shot on the right I used only the modelling lamps on the the two strobes.  Basically using them as low power hot lights with 250W bulbs in them. It was shot at iso 400 wide open at f/1.2.  It’s hard to tell in the small web size, but nothing save her eyes and lips are in focus. There was window light coming into the apartment too, illuminating the gray paper behind her.  The upshot of this is that when you set the white balance for the tungsten color on her face, it shifts the sunlit gray paper to blue. Pretty cool, eh?

I was trying to finish this up by stating which one I prefer, but I end up going back and forth. They’re different, and I’m sure people will have their preference.  I thought we might as well talk some specifics of technique here while we’re at it.

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.