OCF8 - Behind The Scenes Video

I know we're a little nerdy.  But we love this stuff!

20100615 - High Speed Flash Photography Behind the Scenes from Brian Lee on Vimeo.

OCF 9 - Tennis Action!

So we decided to pull drag our lighting gear one of the local tennis courts to play around.  Myron, Jason, and I showed up around 8pm to start setting up our lights.  For talent, Burgess and Judy were gracious enough to be models for us that night.  The nice part was that we had two courts all to ourselves in a fenced in area so we had some privacy and some security knowing all our gear was enclosed in one area.  We actually used both courts one to shoot, while we set-up on the other, and back and forth.  That is until someone came to play tennis...

Anyway, while doing some setup, I thought it'd be a good chance to get another OCF self portrait in.  I almost look like I can play, huh?  As far as strobist info:

-one SB24 camera left with 1/2 CTO gel

-one 580EXII camera right, bare flash

-Sun for a little back light, but was already set by the time we got everything set up

This was just a test shot for images we came up with later that evening:

OCF - Week 8 Ghetto High Speed Flash Photography - Behind the Scene

Now that I’ve had a couple days to digest what Myron, Jason, and I did this week I wanted to jot down a few things that came to mind.  Lessons learned:

-Preparation is KEY - I think we took about an hour to setup, maybe a little more.  Shot for probably 45 minutes to an hour, then took about 45 minutes to clean up.  In addition, we had talked about it a few times the week or two prior to wrap our heads around the idea and how best to capture the image.  We knew where we wanted all our lights, reflectors, and camera setup.  We had some minor adjustments, but that will almost always be the case.

-Having said that, I wished we improvised a little more.  Myron took some at different angles from different positions.  We gel’d some of the strobes in different colors.  If there’s an area I’d like to work on is being a little more creative with the materials and situation at hand.  Although, I'm pretty happy with the results, I always can't help but think we could've done more.

-On the technical side - Don’t get me wrong, I love my camera.  I think its a fantastic piece of photography machinery.  But here’s what happened when I shot with a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.

See the black band at the bottom of the image?  What the heck???  For those of you wondering what that is, the shutter closed before the light could get in.  Myron’s D300 sync’d just fine at 1/250th.  I didn’t notice it while we were shooting(it was dark out). Although Pocket Wizards and other flash triggers say the max sync speed is 1/250, I think the 5DMk2 handles is better at 1/200.  As a side note, editoral photographer Zack Arias says he goes all the way down to 1/60th to make sure he doesn’t get any banding with his 5DMk2.  Sheesh...

Here are some other images from our high speed flash photography shoot:

Another good one shot by Myron

Shot of the setup.  You can barely seen them, but there at two black lightstands on either side of me with SB24's at 1/16th power on each.  We stuck some gobo's on them to prevent flare.  That bigh silver stand you see is "The Beast", Myron's avenger stand.  There's a make-shift boom with another SB-24 flash hanging off it for some hairlight.  Just in front of me is a large white reflector disc.  I was shining a flashlight on myself to assist with the focus in the dark.

Here we tried it while putting red gel's on the two side lights.

Now again, with all strobes with red gels.  Spookier, huh?  Almost sinister, huh?

We didn't like the all red gel look, so we tried putting a blue gel on the hairlight.  It's a different look.  This is where the hairlight starting giving out on us.

Quite literally, a shot from behind the scene.  Here you can more clearly see the two gobo'd strobes on either side and the reflector in front.

And since Myron's a Nikon user, I'm just putting this up because he's shooting with my 5DMk2.  Yes, I'm wearing a rain jacket and yes I'm wearing my snowboard pants for this.

Now what should we do next time???