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BarCampCHS Session Wrap-Up

Group Photo of the BarCampCHS attendees

Yesterday was the 3rd annual BarCampCHS event, and like last year it was held over at the College of Charleston campus in downtown Charleston, SC. As mentioned in an earlier post, I held a session on Off-Camera Flash. Before I talk about the highlights of my presentation, I wanted to share a bit of the BarCamp experience.

30 Seconds To Pitch

After you register and get your bag o’ swag, the attendees gather in an auditorium and the people who plan on holding sessions get 30 seconds each to pitch their idea. As you tell everyone what you plan to do, a counter is counting down behind you (a few people did have to get the mic taken away from them mid-thought). In reality, you only got about 25 seconds to pitch since people started counting down the final 5 seconds. I found it quite entertaining, especially when some mouthy participant trying to hawk a couponing network-marketing scheme went over his 30 seconds and tried to continue without the mic. He was followed by @CaananTully who pitched a session on saving money at the supermarket without using coupons. The crowd applauded loudly. Afterward, the attendees lined up to vote on which sessions they’d like to attend.

With that, sessions began about a myriad of topics, although it was highly concentrated on computer programming. Some of the more popular sessions focused on geek culture, including a session about modifying old Nintendo Entertainment System games such as Super Mario Brothers.

Eugene Mah Flaunts His Bathrobe Style

Eugene Mah took a lot of great photos of the days events, and they can be seen here. There is a BarCampCHS Flickr Group to check out, as well as my full set of photos. Twitterer @Pataford has a Ustream channel with some video he took. If you have some content I missed, please let me know in the comments! Now, on to my creative session:

Off-Camera Flash 101 Session

Slides from my BarCampCHS presentation

I started off the presentation by a short introduction and recap of my session from last year on photo editing. I showed some of the photos we made and edited and started talking about the creative use of lighting in the shots. This led to a brief discussion on why you would want to use off-camera flash. I also touched a little on why you would ever use your on-camera flash, and showed an example of fill flash outdoors during a bright and sunny day.

Next, we talked about shooting in manual mode – both on the camera and on the flash. We talked about the benefits of TTL as well as its shortcomings and why it’s important to know how to use manual flash, especially when working with light modifiers. I explained how when dealing with off-camera flash, you can control your ambient light with your shutter speed and your flash power with your aperture settings. Someone asked about ISO settings, and I explained that you want to shoot in your camera’s native ISO when dealing with lighting to produce consistent and clean images.

The next part of the session dealt with the different methods of getting your flash off of your camera. The first method was using bounce flash. I explained that even though the flash is still technically on the camera, the light source is now whatever you are bouncing the flash off of, which is indeed off of the camera. @TheKingOfGames volunteered to be our model as we took some sample shots. We started with a shot with the flash on the camera to reference the difference.

Straight Flash on the Camera

As you can see, the shot is not all that flattering. Someone in the class said “It looks like something you might see on Facebook”. I then showed the differences when bouncing the flash off of the ceiling or wall. In the following shot, I used the projector screen to bounce off of, which was really bright and reflective:

Bounce Flash Off A Wall

You can immediately see the difference in the quality of light. I talked about the softness and direction of the light, which made for a more defined image whereas the straight flash shot was very flat.

Next we talked about using a wire to move the flash off of the camera. The benefit being reliability while being able to cheaply transmit TTL information, with the downside being limitations of the cable’s length. We briefly talked about the different standards in cables, including PC Cables, 1/8″ Audio-Style Cables, and TTL Cables. I had a TTL cable that I use with my bracket, so we took a test shot using the bare flash:

Bare Flash Using a TTL Wire

Since I only had a short cable, I was able to demonstrate the limitation of the distance I could place the flash away from the camera (about arm’s length).

We then talked about wireless flash. I covered the three main methods of shooting wireless: Optical, Infrared, & Radio. We discussed the benefits and issues with each method. Optical is cheap but unreliable. Infrared can transmit TTL information, can be cheap depending on the hardware you already own (it also can be quite expensive if your camera doesn’t support it), and how you can control the flash settings from the camera. It’s also limited to line of sight and is very unreliable outdoors. I took a test shot using the pop-up flash on my D90 in commander mode to fire an SB-600 on a mini tripod to camera right:

IR Wireless Flash Test Shot Using an OmniBounce Diffuser

I spent the most time on radio triggers. I talked about the Pocket Wizards and Chinese knock-offs. I explained that you can buy about six Cactus v5 triggers for the price of one Pocket Wizard Plus II and according to many reviews and tests, the Cactus v5 is more reliable! I also touched on the newer Pocket Wizards and Radio Poppers that are able to transmit TTL information. I explained that for the cost of that convenience, you could be investing in some great lights! Sure it would be nice to justify having the top of the line triggers, but there’s no shame in buying a set of reliable knock-offs when you can achieve the same end-result for a fraction of the cost.

Photo by Daniel Vice @sharpstick on Twitter

I started doing some shots using an umbrella. I demonstrated how to control the flash power by changing the aperture, and then mixing ambient light with flash by adjusting the shutter speed. I showed how to match the ambient florescent lighting and flash lighting by gelling the flash with a green gel and setting the white balance in the camera to florescent.

Umbrella Look

I also talked about sync speed. I demonstrated what happens when you shoot faster than your sync speed:

Shooting Faster Than Your Sync Speed

I then changed the umbrella and set it up as a shoot-through umbrella and showed how it created a different look.

Photo by Daniel Vice @sharpstick on Twitter

I took a few shots as I moved the light around to get a softer look.

Shoot-Through Umbrella Look

I also altered the model’s position a bit and added another flash onto my camera at its lowest power setting to try and achieve a small catchlight in his eyes. This was our final result, which will hopefully make for a nicer Facebook profile pic than what we started with 😉

Final Shot

We did some Q&A, and I shared some resources for learning about camera lighting. Here’s my list:

joemcnally.com – Joe McNally
strobist.com – David Hobby
zackarias.com – Zack Arias
kelbytraining.com -Scott Kelby

I also wanted to add a pair of new eBooks by Piet Van den Eynde on Craft & Vision. You can pick up each of the two eBooks for $5 each, or buy them both at the same time for only $8. He’s done an excellent and thorough job in the first book of introducing the reader to off-camera flash, and takes you much further in the second one. I think it’s definitely worth more than $8!

Tech Specs For My Presentation

Gear:
Camera: Nikon D90
Lens: Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 VC
Flash: Nikon SB-600
Light Stand: Manfrotto 5001B
Umbrella: Photek Softliter II
Wireless Triggers: Cactus v5
Gels: Cokin Photogels
Mini Tripod: Jobi GorillaPod

I ran the presentation on an iPad hooked up through a projector using Keynote for the slides and Photosnitch for the live demo. I used an EyeFi wireless SD card to transmit the photos to the iPad sans cables.

The Fall Is Awesome!

Day 251 - Sullivan's Island Lighthouse Sunset

This is the best time of year to capture sunsets here in the Charleston area. The weather is beautiful and the sky seems to catch on fire for a brief moment. There’s also no shortage of fun stuff coming up, such as corn mazes, haunted house attractions, hayrides, and pumpkin picking. Halloween just might be my favorite holiday ever – it brings people together. What other holiday makes you go out and ring on your neighbor’s doorbell so they can give you treats?

I have a busy month ahead of me as well. One of the highlights include a wedding shoot this weekend on Folly Beach. I’m pretty stoked about getting some sunset portraits of the happy couple. October 22nd is BarCamp! If you remember, I did a session last year on photo editing (you can check out the post about that here). This year I’ve proposed a session called “Off-Camera Flash 101”

If you’ve never been to or heard of BarCamp, it unfortunately has nothing to do with alcohol. It’s a conference where the attendees are the attraction. Basically anybody who attends can pitch a session to teach. It’s really fun and you get a kick-ass T-Shirt. It costs a mere $10 to participate – get a ticket now!

Next up, I’m doing a photo booth for the Summerville Ghost Walk/ Harvest Fest/ Harvest Moon Hayride sponsored by DREAM and Summerville JSL. That’s on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011 from 6:00PM-9:00PM. I’ll be on the side of the Prudential Southern Coast office at 112 W Doty Ave in Summerville, SC. I hear that Mistress Mira will be doing some fortune telling as well 😉

October 27th-November 5th is the return of the Coastal Carolina Fair. Check out my recap rom last year. I just ordered my prints for the Photography Contest. This year they have changed the rules slightly from last year as you can only submit 3 photos now. I guess the contest has grown a bit! You can see the official rules here.

Of course, I’ve saved the best for last. Just read my rundown of last year’s CupcakeCamp event. It was the single most amazing event ever conceived. All you can eat free cupcakes, no questions asked. If you don’t want to go to this, you’re not human. CupcakeCamp will be on November 5, 2011 3:00PM-5:00PM at Spirit Moves. Check out the Facebook event page here. Look at the sweetness:

One Of A Kind

Taken on my iPhone in Best Buy seconds after I got the phone call from my wife that Steve Jobs passed away

Where to begin? What to say? I guess the only way to express how I feel about the man behind Apple is to share my own relationship with his contributions to modern life as I know it.

I didn’t grow up with computers. Sure, my brother had a Commodore VIC20 that we would hook up to a small black & white TV that we had in our bedroom, but other than that I grew up with minimal technology. I was an art and music nerd in my teenage years. I cared more for Gibson guitars and Marshall stacks than this AOL phenomenon my other less artsy friends were into. When I first attempted to go to college right out of high school, it was for graphic design. It was the first time I laid my hands on a Power Macintosh. I found it threatening. I spent all of my free time playing scales and writing lyrics, how would I ever have time to learn how to use a computer? Needless to say, I failed at that first attempt at higher education within the first semester when I dropped out to go on tour with my band.

Fast-forward 5 years and the band was winding down. I got married and my wife, unlike me, grew up with computers. The first major purchase we made together was an iMac in glorious translucent green. It only took a couple of days before I was a full fledged, card-carrying Apple fanboy. In fact, I was so engaged by the iMac that I wanted to learn as much as I could about computers in general. I went back to school to do just that. I built PC’s and talked endlessly about the latest technology with anyone who would listen. I was baptized in the “Steve Jobs reality distortion field”. Some people think that phrase is an insult, I think it is the ultimate term of endearment for the one man who could bend what we think of as possible into something we could feel in our soul.

I’ve made a living from technology and it has provided my family with almost everything we have today. I can’t think of another company that could have transformed this music lover into a technologist. Steve Jobs is a man who changed the world as we know it, and more importantly to me, his contributions to the world changed me.

Thanks, man.

Grandparents Day

This past Friday, I was asked to shoot portraits at my son’s school for their annual Grandparents Day event. I had less than two hours to shoot group portraits, and 87 families that wanted to get their picture taken! Needless to say, that is not a lot of time to pose, set lights, and make sure people were happy with the results.

Luckily, I had a spectacular assistant to take care of payments, paperwork, and keeping the line moving (my wonderful wife, Amy). I can’t imagine doing something like that alone! I did have one frightening moment with one family when my photos were coming out completely unlit. It’s easy to panic when you have a long line of people waiting for you to get to them, and a family in front of you holding a pose and you can’t get the photo. I changed the batteries on my main flash, but that didn’t help. I contemplated switching my lights, or bringing out my other camera, but I decided to first go through my settings checklist that I had made on my laptop prior to the shoot. Sure enough, I had accidentally bumped my shutter speed just past my camera’s sync speed. Yikes! It really only took about 90 seconds for the whole ordeal to get resolved, but it felt like an eternity in my mind.

The lighting setup was pretty simple. I used two Nikon SB-600’s and a reflector. The main light was in the Softlighter II on the right and it was set to 1/2 power. The fill light was in a Westcott Apollo on top of a boom stand and was set to 1/8th power. I had a circular reflector clamped onto my tripod in front and a little to the left to fill in some light. I was shooting at 200th of a second at F/7.1 and ISO 200. I shot everything in manual, except for my white balance. Lesson learned, as I had to correct the white balance on all of the photos afterward. Never trust auto!

If you’re one of the families that are visiting to find your photo, please visit this gallery. I had a blast spending the morning with these families and look forward to shooting more events at the school!

Labor Day at Folly Beach

What better place to spend a national holiday than at the beach? Luckily we’ve got some of America’s best beaches right here in the Charleston, SC area. Unfortunately, the Folly Beach State Park was closed due to erosion from Hurricane Irene (yeah we did have some damage, regardless of my own personal experience – I’m feeling quite sad for my northern friends and family that got it much worse than us). The beach was still a blast anyway.

We headed to “The Burnout”, which is what I call the side of the beach to the right of Folly Road opposite to the ever-so-popular surf spot, “The Washout”. There were quite a lot of surfers out on this side of the Folly Pier. Not to mention body boarders, including my two kids.

I brought my trusty old Nikon D40, and stood in the water getting sloshed around. Even though it got splashed quite a bit, it kept shooting without fail. That little camera has been through a lot with me, and it’s nice to bring it out every once in a while.

I have nothing clever, witty, or necessarily insightful to say about the day. It was just plain awesome to have a day to relax, hang out in the waves, and snap some shots of the kids having fun. I hope your day was at least half as enjoyable as ours was.

Hurricane Irene In SC

I woke up yesterday much like every other day. Late in the morning I got the phone call from my wife, “They’re closing the schools down” she said. It seemed like Irene was going to hit us and destroy life as we knew it (well, that is what they told us if you had read any news websites or looked at one of the many 24 hour news channels on the old fashioned TV).

Low and behold, the rain came down pretty hard for about 5 minutes as I drove through the Charleston area. The wind was blowing enough to make some palm fronds and grass bow down (although they pretty much always do that at the coast – they’re very amiable to swift breezes).

On the porch of one apartment complex in Mount Pleasant, a toad took refuge in a corner. You know it’s bad when the frogs are out.

The destruction was imminent. Just look at what this demolition site at the old Navy Base looked like during the heart of the storm. It was quite frightening, even though it has looked like this for months now – how long does it take to tear down a building anyway?

Not knowing what to do, I hurried home (after I was done working) and evacuated my house. I left the dogs though because someone had to guard my stuff. My wife and I dropped the kids off at a friend’s house and we did what most upstanding citizens would do during a hurricane – we went out for drinks at Taps. We had to forage for food though, so I walked across the parking lot and got some Mexican food from Senor Tequila. While I was walking, I noticed that the sky was on fire, so I took out my iPhone and snapped this:

After quite a few rounds of hoppy dark goodness, my wife dragged me home. The next thing I knew, I was waking up this morning with a slight headache. I quickly ran to the medicine cabinet and downed some Aleve. The dogs wanted to go outside because they tend to do that, and to my horror I saw the destruction Irene left in my yard.

It’s gonna take me minutes to clean up these leaves. Oh, the humanity. The rain even filled my children’s wagon (well, it did earlier this week from one of those late summer storms – I just never got around to dumping it). A leaf even made it’s way in there as well – Mother nature is not one to be fucked with.

Photo-Centric Social Media Explosion

I’ve been quite a busy bee lately, and unfortunately I’ve been neglecting you fine readers. One of the things I’ve been doing in my spare time (which is sparse) is checking out some of the newest social media sites. The one that’s been most intriguing to me has been Google’s Google+ (or Google Plus).

With it’s fair stance on content ownership, which basically reads that what you post is yours, not their’s, a large amount of Facebook-hating photogs have rushed to the new platform. There’s even a nifty Google Spreadsheet of thousands of photographers that are currently using the site. This is a very vibrant community that is still in Beta, and so far I find it a lot more fun and interactive than Facebook. It’s like a cross between Facebook and Twitter in that you can follow strangers/celebrities, but better because you can share only with specific groups of people as you see fit. I’m interested to see what happens when Google opens it up to the masses. Hit me up in the comments if you need an invite, as I usually have some in my account.

The next site I’ve been messing around on is 500px.com

500px.com started as a LiveJournal community back in the early oughts by two photographers, Ian Sobolev & Oleg Gutsol. The name came from early limitations the group set on photo sizes due to CRT monitors and slow internet connections. The original idea was to have a place for photographers to receive constructive criticism on their work. The site still aims at commentary by your peers, and it differentiates itself from Flickr by attracting artistic work instead of being a dumping ground for your cell phone shots or last night’s party pics. I find it very inspiring to browse the site’s most popular photos.

Finally, its a very quirky social experience that my wife turned me onto, Pinterest.com.

When my wife first told me about it, I thought Pinterest was going to be another bookmark site like Delicious.com. Once I looked at the site it reminded me more of Tumblr.com if it exploded all over your screen. It’s actually quite addicting, albeit hard to describe properly. The best advice I could give you is to go there and sign up (or hit me up for an invite in the comments). My first impression was that it was very feminine, but I quickly realized that it is what you make it by who you follow and what you post. Much like Delicious.com, they encourage you to create a “Pin It” link in your browser’s favorites to easily add any content you come across on the web to your “boards” (which are virtual cork boards that you can categorize your “pins” with).

Let me know if there are any other cool social sites for photographers that you use. Here’s my current list:

Flickr
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Google+
500px
Pinterest

Gear Porn

Photography is all about capturing moments, interpreting scenes, and showing images of the world with your own unique vision. Lets face it though, every once in a while you just like to drool over some technological smut.

I’ve been talking so much about my new Nikon Coolpix P7000 lately that I thought I’d share some pics of it. Here it is all tricked out with a Nikon SB-400 Sppedlight and a Joby Gorillapod Tripod.

The diffuser on the SB-400 is a Sto-Fen Omnibounce. That flash/diffuser combo works so well indoors that I use it more than my SB-600 for indoor on-camera flash!

I love the addition of the optical viewfinder. When it’s sunny outside that thing is a life saver! The level is pretty cool, and so is the built-in ND filter effect. You can see that I have a very busy LCD screen, but that’s no problem because all I have to do is press the shutter halfway and it goes away. Alternatively, I can press a button and it shows me just the scene I’m framing.

The physical dials and buttons are what makes the camera truly attractive to me. I like being able to control the settings while I’m composing, not before. Every movement of the camera alters the exposure because the direction, volume, and quality of light changes, and I don’t want the camera to make all of the decisions for me all of the time. If I have to go into the software of the camera to change important settings, the moment will most likely be lost!

I also recently ordered the Nikon case for the camera. While I was shooting at the Archers of Loaf show a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the effect of dirt on the lens covers – they get stuck! This case lets you use the camera’s straps (I use the Domke Gripper strap) and is quite minimal – something I cherish with this camera.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Gear Porn! No SD Cards were harmed in the making of this post.

It’s Not The Camera

It’s who you know. But that’s not just what I’m talking about. Good pictures don’t care about hardware, they care about the intention and execution of the person conceiving and/or capturing them. Sure a camera’s lack of abilities can hinder you from getting a shot you envision, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a good shot with a poor camera! Once you realize this, it’s a matter of exploiting what the camera can do, and not wasting your time griping about what it can’t do.

The photo above was made at the Archers of Loaf concert in Brooklyn, NY this past Saturday. I made it on my iPhone using the app Camera+. I shot it, converted it to B&W, and immediately shared it on Facebook. The next day, a writer for L Magazine (who is an old friend) saw it and asked to use it for his review of the concert. So yes, it is mostly a case of who you know. I did offer up some technically better shots taken with a better camera, but he liked the iPhone one enough and it works in spite of the fact that it was made on a cell phone.

I’ll be sure to share more shots of the shows I attended this weekend that I made on my newest camera when I review it. I also have all of my vacation shots sorted out – just need to title and tag them, so that will be up this week also.

The Big Man Sleeps Tonight

When the change was made uptown
And the big man joined the band
From the coastline to the city
All the little pretties raise their hands
Im gonna sit back right easy and laugh
When scooter and the big man bust this city in half
With a tenth avenue freeze-out

RIP Mr. Clemons, you’re a legend on so many fronts – the artistic world has suffered a great loss, but you’ll inspire many generations to come.

Here is a fantastic interview from Ron Bennington Interviews. Check out the part where Ron asks him about his health challenges, and Clarence responds with “I don’t see them as challenges, they’re opportunities”.

Here’s the Big Man’s latest commercial collaboration with Lady Gaga:

I know this is not photographically related post (never got to shoot the E Street Band, but I did see them at the Meadowlands years ago), but music is one of the most important art forms and it has given me so much in my life. Thanks for reading.

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