Film or Digital? Is this really still a question?

I could have sworn that I’d written a blog post about this topic, but I did a scan through my archives and came up empty, so here I go.  A few weeks ago while I was shooting futurist Ray Kurzweil, he asked me the question that most non-photographers end up asking me.  “Is that film or digital”.  And it surprises me that this is still in active rotation.  Maybe they ask it because it’s topical and they don’t know what else to say, or maybe they figure that even though amateur photography is about 98% digital at this point, maybe pros still shoot film.  

The answer is that yes, some of them do.  But it’s a minority by now and the population is shrinking. Whenever I meet a young photographer who’s dead-set on shooting only film, I just shake my head.  Maybe if you’re independently wealthy or are doing amazingly original art photography you could pull it off. Honestly though, unless you’re shooting only b/w tri-x, I wouldn’t trust that I’d be able to even buy my favorite film in 5 years.  In the short time that I’ve been shooting, I’ve said goodbye to a number of films that I loved to shoot. I still weep for Scala. The film counter at B&H is a third the size is was only couple years ago. And chemistry and darkroom gear which used to take up 4 rows of shelves is now relegated to the back wall next to the bathrooms.

Let me take a moment to say that I’m no hater of film.  I’ve got a Leica M4, and a Hasselblad and a big Cambo 4×5 that I occasionally take out for a spin.  In fact on my recent trip to Japan, I took only the Hasselblad and twenty-something rolls of film.  I love the way that great pictures from film look. It can be special, but that doesn’t mean it always is.  It also doesn’t mean that digital images can’t be special too.  They’re just different. It used to be that digital images lacked depth, resolution, and refinement. Here’s the thing though, digital keeps getting better while film stays the same.  And better it’s gotten by leaps and bounds.  My first digital camera, less than 10 years ago, was a 2MP little digicam whose images don’t even fill half of my current screen.  Now I’ve got a 21MP body whose images easily rival my medium format setup in overall quality. Does b/w film have a lot more dynamic range that digital?  Yes and by a few stops. But honestly, that’s the only truly objective measure where film is still killing digital.  And also the next place that digital will probably try to improve. 

In my humble opinion as a working photographer, the two are at least at parity. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but images of approximately the same quality. Much like analog and digital audio recording. Digital has gotten to the point where it’s advantages trump analog with all but the most ardent die-hards. And don’t forget the photoshop plug-ins that add grain or otherwise try to mimic the look of different film formulations.  I use fake grain occasionally, and it looks pretty good.  Another thing that gets me mad is film snobbery. Competitions which take only film-based entries for example, have no place. What does it matter how the image was made. Isn’t it the final image that matters?

Some digital haters like to point to the supposed over-use of digital manipulation, as something akin to a ‘purity of the game’ argument.  Well you don’t have to look hard to see the weaknesses of that.  Manipulation of images has been around since the medium was invented. Different development recipes, basic dodging and burning during printing, and don’t forget the heavy retouching of old negatives with what is essentially redrawing with a pencil.  Why do you think master print makers exist? At the recent Avedon exhibit at ICP there is a whole room full of working prints with his comments and direction. As well as a number of collages that I had looked at large prints of only 10 minutes earlier and had no idea they weren’t a single shot. Hell, even Dorthea Lange’s famous migrant mother photo is manipulated. 

As someone who shoots mostly digital and does a fair amount of manipulation to my images, I find the new technology to be liberating.  I could not make my portraits on film and have them look the way they do. To me it’s the final image that matters, not necessarily the steps you went through to get it.  Film is a pain in many ways.  You’re stuck with film speed and type for a whole roll, you’ve got to get it processed, most of the time you’ve got to scan it.  Plus it’s expensive.  My Japan pictures cost me about $400 in film and processing, plus 2 days of my time in scanning, color correcting, and retouching.

Maybe for some people that’s a good thing.  Some sort of perverse puritanical statement about pulling yourself up from your bootstraps.  ‘It’s supposed to be hard! Otherwise everybody would be doing it’.  You know what?  Everybody is.  Everybody has got a camera nowadays and they’re posting their images to flickr.  The thing is that you can still tell the good images from the bad.  Yes digital makes it easier for everybody, but it doesn’t make everyone good.  Tools are tools, nothing more.  Are things that are time-consuming automatically better?  Anyone who believes that can go clean their bathroom with a toothbrush.  Seriously though, if that were the case, then why are all these film people using plastic roll film instead of pouring their own Collodion plates and developing them over vapor before making albumen prints (which I would love to try at some point btw)?  Technology moves on, things change.

While it may sound like I’m mostly knocking film, it’s not for political reasons, purely practical ones. I and I think most other photographers, would have a hard time making a living shooting film.  People expect their photographs in a few hours, not a few days. But mostly what I’m trying to say here is that there is room for both under the photographic tent. So if you like film or digital or both, it really doesn’t matter.  They’re just tools for making pretty things to look at, not religions in and of themselves regardless of what anybody says. So worry about the images, and certainly don’t judge them based on what was used to make them. 

Why I shoot RAW

Here’s a great example of why shooting RAW is a good idea.

Yesterday a magazine requested the image on the left.  It was very bright and in the middle of the afternoon with the sun to her back (this was an incidental test shot they really liked for some reason).  As it was, it wasn’t up to my standards and had I shot jpeg, there would be very little that could have been done about it.  Look how blown out the sky is, and how dark she is. How day-glow the grass is…

The image on the right is what I ended up with after an hour or so of fiddling.  Developing the RAW into two images, one for the sky and one for her blended together in photoshop along with a bunch of curves adds up to the final image on the right.  All that information is in there in that RAW file.  Most of the time it’s not necessary and we or the camera throw it away.  But damn if it isn’t handy in a pinch.

My i7 workstation and a SSD up in a tree…

Earlier today I received a package from newegg.com with a brand spankin’ new 80GB Intel SSD. Apparently this second generation just got recalled for a rare problem involving bios passwords (which I don’t use, so I’m going to ignore it). Because of that recall, everyone stopped shipping them on Friday, but somehow mine got out on Thursday night. Lucky me!

I have also taken this opportunity to install the final RTM build of Windows 7 64bit as well. It is standard procedure to only change one thing at a time if you’re trying to test it’s impact on system performance, but I’m not a product reviewer, so I’ll leave all of the hard core benchmarking to anandtech.com

The SSD itself is tiny, the size of a notebook hard drive, has no moving parts and gives of little to no heat. All of this means that it’s a little disconcerting to be booting your computer and hearing absolutely nothing, especially after we’ve all gotten so used to the sound of a thrashing hard drive over the past 25 years. Last night in preparation, I had copied the windows install files (per a web tutorial, there’s a little more to it than that) onto a usb keychain for faster install, so I plugged that in as well, told it to boot from USB and away I went. Installation was fast, though I’ve heard that the W7 install is fast anyway, so I have little to compare it to. Once I got to the desktop, it was just a matter of the rare driver it hadn’t found, and then applications.

Since the SSD I got is only 80GB I’ve decided to use my old 150GB Velociraptor as a Lightroom catalog, preview cache, and Photoshop scratch disk. That said, with 12GB of ram, Photoshop rarely if ever goes to it’s scratch. I had wanted to try the LR catalog on the SSD, but while the catalog itself is only a couple gigabytes, the preview cache on my old drive was almost 20GB. Not enough room on the SSD to be giving 20GB to preview images. I have tried to do some research but haven’t found a way to put the catalog on one drive and the previews on the other. It seems that Lightroom just keeps them in the same folder. If anyone has a way around this, please let me know.

Ok, so here’s my opinion. It’s quick. Very quick. All those people who talk about launching 3 apps at once and them all loading as if you had launched only one at a time are not lying. It’s just very very snappy. That said, I can’t be sure if that agility is the SSD or the brand new install of an operating system. This is a seriously fast system, so it’s not like Vista x64 was running slowly before, but so far this is much much smoother.

There is talk around the net about how these drives slow down over time, which people I trust have shown to be true, but in real world usage you’ll never hit the worst case scenario, which is still better than a traditional hard drive. It’s the incredibly low latency which makes it feel fast. All of those little 4k file reads and writes that happen almost instantaneously. On top of that, Windows 7 includes support for a new ATA command called TRIM which helps out this problem immensely. Intel is supposed to be releasing an updated drive firmware to turn on support for TRIM in the next couple months. In the meantime, I think I’ll be fine.
I wish is was bigger, but I don’t want to spend almost $500 for the 160GB drive, the $229 I paid for 80 was hard enough to swallow. Other than that, I’m very happy so far. Now if only I could afford one for my laptop…

In Search of the Goldilocks of Lights

I’ve got all kinds of light making devices.  I’ve got a couple Alien Bees, a B400 and a B800.  As well as the big White Lightning X3200 which I bought to use with Polaroid 55 on my 4×5 before it was discontinued since it’s negative is rated around ISO 25.  On top of all of these plug in strobes I’ve got a couple of Canon Speedlites, a 550EX and 580EXII which I’ve been using lately on indoor editorial shoots.  THEN, I’ve also got a ProFoto AcuteB which is a 600ws battery powered strobe for use when you don’t have a wall outlet.  

So basically I’ve got every option from a little tap of light to a huge ‘you just shorted out the neighborhood’ POW!  However I often find myself questioning which I should bring or use in any particular situation. Lately I’ve been using the speedlites with the wireless controller more in a quasi TTL mode where I’m playing with flash exposure compensation on the flashes themselves.  I know that the infrared controller can do ratios between flashes, but I’ve found that it rarely actually does what I want it to.  I could also use them in manual mode with pocket wizards like they suggest on Strobist, but for some reason, I can’t get myself to use them that way.  If I’m using little flashes, I want it to be more automatic, if I want a pain in the ass manual setup, then I feel like I’ll use big guys. Maybe that’s short sighted.

Also with the speedlites, I never get the same quality of light as I do with the big guys.  The way they’re shaped and how they sit and point into the umbrella from their bracket doesn’t seem to give the same spread as a centered studio strobe would.  I haven’t done any definitive experiments, and maybe there are better brackets out there, but the one I’ve got just doesn’t do it for me.  The light source ends up skewed way to one side if you’re using any reasonably sized umbrella, and I can’t imagine you get a nice even light that way.

Anyway, on tues I went and shot my delightful friend Tia at her restaurant.  It’s a big space with high ceilings and I was going to use a big 60″ softlighter, so I thought I needed a big strobe.  The power plug on my B800 is cracked (keep meaning to get it fixed) and I didn’t think the B400 would be enough, so I borrowed one of Meg’s B1600.  Well, long story short, it was way too much light and I ended up with it almost all the way down the whole time.  The moral of the story is that the B400 would have been fine, if not even less.  It’s one of those things where if you’re there and you don’t have enough power for what you want to do, you’re screwed, so you pack big and then you end up with too much.

As for the ProFoto, I haven’t used it nearly as much as I would have liked or would have though. In fact I need to make a point of using it more. To that goal, I brought it up on the roof with me when I was shooting Brie last week (see post below) along with the small 30 something inch softlighter.  It’s not the most powerful thing out there and if you’re fighting the sun, you’ve got to know your limits. Last year at one point I tried it into the 60″ softlighter in afternoon sun and at full power it didn’t have quite enough oomph to get the job done.  You see, if you’re using a big strobe outside in the daytime with a digital SLR you’re limited when it comes to your shutter speed.  Most of these cameras will only sync with an external strobe up to about 1/200th of a second (The reason why is a long explanation that I’ll just link out to instead of reinventing the wheel  http://dptnt.com/2007/10/flash-sync-speed/) The practical upshot of this relatively slow shutter speed is that even at iso 100 your aperture is going to have to be stopped way down to get the exposure right, let’s say something like f/13 or so.  So now your strobe has to put out enough light to handle f/13 with the modifiers and distances you’re working with. And that’s only to have the strobe equal the sun.  If you want to pull down the ambient, you’re looking at f/16 or f/22 into a big softbox, and that requires a lot of power. This is why people use giant generators and 2400w/s packs in those big outdoor shoots people like Annie do.

As a quick aside, Pocket Wizards just released their latest triggers that do some timing magic to get some cameras to sync at higher speeds, up to something like 1/500th of a second max. This would allow you to use a wider aperture and theoretically need less power on your strobe.  The thing is that really it only buys you about a stop of light, and from what I’ve read it can cost a little power on the light because of the way it fires the strobe slightly early in order for it to line up.  So as far as power goes it might be a wash, but I need to do some more research on it.

The other option outside is to use a speedlight on high-speed- sync.  Basically the light emits an even low-power buzz of light that is on while the shutter is open, thus making it work at any shutter speed.  I personally haven’t tried it through any softening modifiers in afternoon sunlight, so I don’t know if this is the answer, but you could for example throw the shutter speed up to 1/4000th and open up the lens to f/3.2 or so.  You’d end up with a blurred background while still using an additional light.

One other idea that some people forget is just using the modeling light from your strobes at open apertures.  Sometimes I do this when I want a really thin plane of focus that gives the effect of something like a large-format close-up.  Just get a fast prime and shoot at f/1.4 in Av with the modeling lights.  The only real problem I have with this is that I need to get or make some strip boxes to get the effect I’m really after.

As you can see, lots of options and lots of lights, but they all fill some kind of niche.  It’s like different wrenches, they all look similar, but they’ve all got different jobs to do.  Please comment and add your own tip and experiences.

PhotoChallenge Interview

There’s a recent interview with me posted on Photo Challenge.

I go into all kinds of random photo info, so if you’re interested in how I think about all of this, it might be an interesting read.

http://www.photochallenge.org/2009/06/interview-bill-wadman/

Highlights, Skintones, and Newly Minted Doctors

An old friend came over this afternoon for some portraits. She just yesterday successfully defended her dissertation, so now I have to call her Dr Pillsbury.  It’s all very intimidating, but huge congratulations go her way and I’ve very proud of my friend.

Anyway, while kerfutzing with the results, I thought it was about time to talk about some of my problems. Or rather, bring up some of the walls I find myself pushing against in my work and to start a discussion of how to overcome or at the very least difuse them.

My main problem lately is that I don’t like how digital renders highlights, and this is especially true when I’m shooting simple single light portraits like the one below. The image on the left is the mostly untouched RAW file, and on the right, my finished image. So now, let’s walk through this step by step as I did.

First I say, the original shot is overexposed, or at least it looks like it on her forehead. However using the eyedropper you can check and see that it’s no blown-out.  In fact none of the channels are above 80% or so (I’ll use lightroom percentages instead of exact photoshop numbers just for simplicity).  One could argue that the problem is my light, or more specifially that I need a fill on the other side so that the range isn’t as wide for the sensor. But that’s not really the problem.  I’ve got plenty of detail in the shadows for my liking and again, the highlights aren’t blown. But somehow they look like crap.

The one thing that I constantly miss about film is the fact that it fights back. The same thing was true of analog tape in my recording days, try to push too much level onto it and it pushed back, effectively compressing the signal.  Film does the same thing in highlights, regular negative film is pretty hard to get to blow-out. What you get is a compression of the highlights that leads to a much more pleasing, much more smooth transition. In digital, even when not blown, I find myself adding in a curves layer with a mask to try to give skin some contrast instead of it not being just a big block of almost solid color as it is on her forehead in the first image.

What I want is something like the image on the right. The kind of light you see people like Annie Leibovitz getting in her Vanity Fair portraits.  It’s smooth and contrasty, but not harsh.  I think that this would be much easier to obtain in the film days, but I know Annie shoots digital now, so it must be possible.  So far what I’ve come up with and need to experiment more with, is the idea of underexposing and bring it up. Now I know that it’s counter to every rule about exposing to the right and then pulling back that you’ve ever read, but somehow my skintones don’t look as much like shit when I under and pull up.  Essentially this is what that Highlight Tone Priority stuff does on these new Canon cameras.  Lately I’ve been shooting with that on for just that reason, but shut it off today because the shadow noise was bothering me and to me the images look more crunchy and ‘digital’ with it on. Loosing a lot of that Canon CMOS smoothness.  I’ve got to do more experimenting to really bear this out.

Today however, I had the raw files I had and you’ve got to work with what you got.  So I started by using an adjustment brush in Lightroom with an exposure -1 stop or so.  I used this to paint in the blown-out looking (but not really blown out) sections on her face, in an attempt to bring them back in line with the rest.  I then added another adjustment brush with a +.25 exposure to add a little light to her eyes.  Even still, the whole thing had that flat look, so I pulled up the ‘fill light’ slider a bit and the main exposure down a half stop or so and moved the contrast up a tad.  What I ended up with it is basically what’s on the right.  There was some hair and minor curves work in Photoshop, but the heavy lifting was in Lightroom, which I’ve been doing more with lately in an attempt to tie my hands a little bit and not do as much post.  I find that the adjustment brushes are sometimes hard to control and not nearly as responsive as brushes in photoshop, and I’m on a really fast machine.

Any thoughts or experience that should come to bear would be appreciated.
And here’s the final image bigger.

The Canon 5D Mark II – Pros and Cons

I’ve been using the 5d2 as my primary body for the past 6 month or so, and I thought it was about time to give you an update.  Some of this will be obvious or a rehash of things people have said in early reviews, but I think it’s still relevant as an actual photographer actually using the thing instead of a lot of photos of charts and graphs.  Please keep in mind that my conclusions are based on my shooting style, which is mostly environmental portraits. I also use mostly high-end primes too, so lenses are not the limiting factor in most of my work. Ok, first the stuff I like.  

The resolution is great. Very similar to the 1Ds3 which I had last year. Which makes sense as they’re the same resolution and it’s probably just a newer revision of the sensor. Sometimes I look at the 100% images and think that they don’t look ‘quite’ as good as the 1Ds, but I think that might just be in my head.  I haven’t yet tried getting a really big print, like 30×45″ to see how it holds up.  My guess is, pretty well.  

Colors are fantastic most of the time, as long as you get the WB right.  Auto WB still sucks much of the time as it has for Canon cameras for years.  It’s weird, some of the time it’s right on and other times it leaves you shaking your head.

Noise is reduced from the old 5D, though that camera was no slouch in noise either. I find myself comfortably using 1600 and 3200 iso with the new camera, where I’d usually try to top out at 800 on the old one. The thing is that which 6400 and up are usable, that’s really only true when you’ve got enough light. And when you don’t have enough light is when you usually move to a higher iso.  I love all the noise tests and advertising images (like that motorcycle shot Nikon used to sell the D3) which show these high-iso images looking great.  Well sure they’re going to look great when you shot them outside in the middle of the day.  Go shoot at 12k in a dark bar with a wide open prime and then come back to me.  Perhaps it’s really useful for sports guys who need crazy shutter speeds in middling light.

Ok, then there are the negatives, beginning with the screen. The resolution is great and colors are good and the new menu system is a big step up, but the brightness levels are killing me.  The new camera’s got a light sensor, so you can set brightness to auto and it’s supposed to turn it up when it’s bright and down with it’s dark, so that you can get a good approximation of the photo you just took.  No matter what auto settings I use, or the manual ones for that matter, I can never get it right.  Most of the time it’s too bright and my images look somewhat blown out on the screen when they’re perfectly fine. I’d say it’s usually a stop too bright, but if I manually set it lower, then half the time it’s way too dark.  I’ve been checking my histogram as my safety blanket, but I’d rather just be able to trust the damn screen.   I never had that problem with the old 5D.  Maybe there’s a trick I’m unaware of.

The brightness problem is only compounded by the fact that I find the auto-exposure very inconsistent, especially when you’re using E-TTL flashes.  I haven’t found the reason for this either but there are times when it’s so annoying I just go 100% manual to at least give me some stability.

Tests have shown that the dynamic range of the sensor is a bit better than the original 5D, but I don’t feel that it is.  There have been a few times where I felt that my old camera would have done a better job, but I can’t measure that, or at least not easily. In the past week I’ve been playing with the “Highlight Tone Priority” setting and been quite impressed.  It very much helps the dynamic range and highlight problem, you can pull back highlights in RAW that were “No way in Hell” before, but does result in more noise in the shadows and even in the mid-tones.  Especially for a photographer like me who does a lot of post processing.  There is definitely more noise. Whether or not that’s a problem is a picture by picture question.  Certainly a good tool though, I’m going to leave it on most of the time now.

Then the silly things.  A camera at this level should have a 100% viewfinder.  Sony’s camera has one,  and it’s the one big thing I miss from the 1Ds3. That’s not true, I also liked not having a mode wheel that gets easily knocked into the wrong position when you let the camera dangle around your neck while you fix a light.  Also, there should be more control over bracketing.  The 1D and Nikon’s high-end bodies can do 3, 5, or 7 images over a +-4 stop range. This is an easy thing to fix in software and would make the body fantastic for HDR work, especially landscape use which is one of this cameras fortes anyway.  Oh and sometimes the camera locks up on me.  Not all the time, but I’ll be shooting shooting shooting and then all of a sudden the lens stops autofocusing.  Cycling the power quick has always worked, but it’s still disconcerting.

Though it’s got obvious strengths over the old 5D, for some reason it’s not nearly as satisfying a picture making tool to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going back as the resolution alone will keep me here, but the old camera had a rock solid feel to it.  I trusted it more than I do the new camera. The 5D felt like an old friend that never let me down.  Now, I always feel like I’m second guessing things with the Mark II and often I find that it was for good reason.  I’m not sure if I’ve got a bad copy, or if the stuff that bothers me will get fixed in a software update or even if anyone else is seeing the same things I have.  The one thing I’m certain of though, is that there are readers who will disagree with me on some or most of this.

Skin Tones, Color, and Custom Camera Profiles

Being a portrait photographer and a mostly environmental one at that, skin tones are very important to me.  Most of the time I don’t have complete control over the direction, intensity, and color of the light I use. It might be a tungsten bulb from the lamp next the guy in a room with florescents, and then I bring in a daylight balanced strobe to try to make something nice out of it.  It’s a nightmare in post to get all of those lights to merge.  Usually involving multiple exports of the RAW file at different white balances, and then masking them together in Photoshop.

The thing is, being ‘right’ isn’t always enough.  Sure, I could use a gray card and eye-dropper to color correct, but it doesn’t always work as well in reality as in theory.  Sometimes neutral is a little TOO neutral. Or, just because you’re outside in the afternoon doesn’t mean that the daylight WB setting is right on, there is a fair amount of variation. For example, I think the cloudy setting on Canon camera’s is way too warm, and auto WB sucks at tungsten lights which change temp over time.

And since different lights have different spectrums as well as different colors, you can’t guarantee that you can get correct colors out of some lights, no matter how hard you try playing with white balance and tint.  I tend to find this the most annoying when working with photos of people with pale skin, as the color is usually very subtle and difficult to capture.

There are people on both sides of the big camera debate that’ll say that Nikon or Canon has better skin tones, or that to make it work you’ve got to use the manufacturers RAW converter because Adobe and Apple can only reverse engineer the curves and they only get it right some of the time, and not at all in others.  I’m a Lightroom user, so the ACR engine is my tool of choice. With the release of Lightroom 2, Adobe installed custom camera profiles for Canon and Nikon models which simulate the look of the built in ‘picture styles’ and theoretically level the playing field between ACR and the manufacturer’s software.  I can’t verify if that’s the case since I don’t even have the Canon stuff installed, but it seems people think it’s about right.

I however, have not had the greatest luck with any of them.  They’re better than the adobe defaults from Lightroom 1 to be sure, but they’re just averages of a few different examples of each camera that Adobe tested, not necessarily yours.  So last night I was looking about on the net and found the DNG Profile editor that Adobe has released, which lets you create custom profiles for your camera.  All you need is a Gretag-Macbeth Colorchecker (too expensive for what they are, but very handy to own) and a couple minutes of your time.  Take a photo of the color checker in nice even light (I used a daylight-balanced profoto strobe), feed it into the editor and it’ll create a custom profile based on YOUR camera.  You then export it and it’ll show up in Lightroom’s Camera Calibration profiles list. It’s early on, but so far I’ve been pleased with the colors it’s giving me.  Closer to what I want than the canned profiles, especially in the skin tones where it counts.

Here’s a link to the editor: DNG Profile Editor
So give it a try yourself.  Worth the few minutes if it’ll make your color work that much better in the future.

Also, more questions from anyone that’s got them.  Would love to answer some more.

Speedlights Impressed

Earlier this week I had a couple of days of shoots for a magazine article. 3 people over two days in three very different settings.  Day one was two people in midtown Manhattan, and then a third on day two in White Plains. Due to the time between the shoots on Monday and the travel on Tuesday, I wanted to travel as light as possible.  So in the end, Meg and I went on these shoots with just a couple of speedlights for lighting.  Those, plus a travel stand, 32″ softlighter, 36″ reflector/diffuser, and the IR controller, all fit very nicely into the backpack Meg carried.  Much smaller and lighter than the AcuteB setup would have been. Maybe McNally’s book from last week also fed into my decision, but I wanted to see what I could do with the little guys.  To be honest, I’m pretty impressed.

First shoot was outside in a shaded courtyard. Cool skylight was coming down from between the tall buildings so fill wasn’t too much of an issue.  So I had Meg shoot the 580EX through the diffuser to the subjects right hand side to give the shots a little drama.  Now, I know this is no big deal, but for a guy like me who usually uses available light or a single big source to mimic sunlight, I was ‘getting fancy’.  This worked well, though we did have to fiddle a bit with the FEC to get the output of the flash at the right level, a stop or so above the ambient.

Later that afternoon we shot subject number two in his office.  I was told that the office was nice.  It really wasn’t.  Not terrible, but certainly not interesting from a photo perspective, and quite dark with a very warm wood tone to everything.  So we did setup the 580EX on the stand inside the softlighter as a key, with Meg off to the side again with the 550EX shooting through the diffuser as a kicker.  I was pleasantly surprised to have the 580 talk to the camera from even inside the softlighter (it was the only way we could get it to setup)  I guess the fabric was thin enough to let the IR beam in.  Getting the ratio between the two lights too some more fiddling.  On the Canon system, you can control the ratio between the two lights on different channels from 8:1 all the way to 1:8.  In the end though, I found it much easier to just have Meg manually bump the light up or down from the flash itself using exposure compensation.

The third shoot was in a very modern office with some bright orange textured walls and frosted glass.  Using a similar setup to the last, we used one light on the stand with Meg coming in from the side or back. This setting however, was more conducive to photos, so I was probably most happy with this third set of pictures.  The orange wall made a nice backdrop, and the indirect window light in his office made for some nice classic shots.

All in all, I think I’m sold on the speedlights. There are limits of course.  If you need a lot of light or a bigger source, then you’re talking the big guns.  If I were outside and want to shoot into a 60″ softlighter for example, then I’ll bring the AcuteB.  But for this kind on thing inside where you can control the ambient, and shoot at iso 400 or 800 so that you don’t need too much power from the flashes, it’s ideal.  Color temp is an issue.  So I think I’m going to look into buying a set of gels like they use on strobist all the time.  I’m not totally psyched by how they attach, the whole thing sounds a bit kludgy and messy to me, but I’ll learn to deal.  I was also impressed with the STE2 Speedlight controller.  We didn’t have too much trouble with the flashes not firing.  It’s not ideal outside in wide-open spaces in direct sunlight, but if you’re in shadow with line-of-sight or inside where the beam can bounce around a bit, it’s pretty perfect.  I was looking at those new pocket wizards (on backorder at B&H) which do TTL. Basically, the same thing we did, except via radio instead of IR.  But I’m not sure I need them right now.  On the rare occasion that I’m out in sun with speedlights, I can just use my current wizards and manually set the flash power.

Also of interest is the fact that when I came home and started messing with the files, I found myself doing less processing. Or more precisely, I did my normal stuff and then backed off a lot on the opacity.  Not sure if it was because of the more dramatic lighting on-site or what, but it’s an interesting development for me.  We’ll see where it leads.

Storage – eSATA

If you use external storage and you have the option, choose eSATA.  Basically the same thing as an internal SATA drive as far as speed goes, so it’s fast. Get it, the E is for External. Substantially faster than your USB or Firewire drives.  For desktop machines you can buy inexpensive expansion cards to add the ports if you don’t have them (Shame on you Apple, for not adding them to the new Mac Pro), or use an ExpressCard adapter for the MacBook Pro or similar laptop.  Imac and Macbook users are out of luck. Many 3.5″ external drives and enclosures are available and tend do cost just a bit more than the USB only ones, but totally worth the upgrade if you’re doing any heavy lifting or saving big files.

There are also so-called port multiplier enclosures which allow you to plus 2 or 4 or even 8 hard drives to your computer using one cable (most 8 drive cases use two connections).  You can even setup RAID arrays with these drives to act as one giant speedy volume.  That’s what serious video guys do. This crossing of streams ‘could’ of course saturate even an SATA connection, as you’re trying to throw 4 drives worth of data down the cable designed for 1, though you shouldn’t notice that limitation most of the time unless you’re editing multiple streets of uncompressed video.  Hey, some people do.

The only thing I don’t like about eSATA is the damn connectors and cables. In a word, they suck. The cables are not very flexible and worst of all, they fall out all the time because the connectors don’t grab each other.  It’s really surprising to me that this went all the way through the development and engineering stage without someone, or many a whole bunch of people, saying “Hey, maybe we should work on this connector a bit more. It kinda sucks”.  Is there a trick I’m not getting?  As it is, my cables come loose if I touch the drives and they won’t mount.  Annoying.