I attended Photoshop World for the first time a couple of weeks ago. One of the pre-conference events was a Photo Safari with Moose Peterson and Joe McNally. Laurie Excell was also there (unofficially) helping out. We had roughly 65 people in the group that loaded up on two buses and rode an hour out of Las Vegas to El Dorado Canyon, which is just beyond Nelson and a bit southeast of Las Vegas.
What we found was essentially a bunch of rustic old crap that nobody else wants, which made it pretty cool for a group of photographers. Moose & Joe turned us loose for about two hours to grab some frames, though they were available for questions, advice, etc. I knew I wanted to take advantage of their knowledge and experience, but I didn’t want to ask a question just for the purpose of asking questions. That’s when I decided that I needed a challenge to figure out. This was one of ‘em. I found an old building partly covered with shade, and yet the background was very bright. I wanted to even out the lighting a bit.
I played with a few exposure settings and the normal problems happened. If I exposed for the background, the building was too dark. If I exposed for the building, the background was blown out. I needed to expose for the background and toss some light on the building, but all I had with me was a single SB-800 flash. I tried a couple of frames, but it was clear that I needed more light. The first thought in my head was to zoom the flash out for more directional light.
I don’t vary my flash settings often, so I brought the manual with me. It seemed straight forward enough. Press the buttons on one side to zoom the flash out, another side to zoom in a bit. So that’s why I was confused that the damn thing wasn’t doing what the manual told me to do. That brought up a question for Joe, who happened to be standing nearby. He started the same as I did, pushing the buttons and nothing happened. Then he remembered something that I probably would’ve wasted a day trying to find in the manual. I still had the diffuser cap on the flash. It won’t zoom while that cap is on. Take it off and everything works fine. I tried shooting a few more frames. It’s different, but it’s still not overcoming my problem. Clearly (I think), this little flash doesn’t have the power to do what I need. I walked off grumbling something and wonder if Joe thinks I’m losing it.
Shortly after that, Moose gathers some folks around for a demonstration of Auto FP High-Speed Sync. Basically, that’s a flash mode for fill-flash under bright conditions. The typical top shutter speed for flash sync is 1/250th of a second on Nikons, which was way too slow. I was getting some meter readings for my background exposure that were up in the 1/2000th of a second range. With Auto FP High-Speed Sync (who names this stuff?), the flash fires for the duration of the shutter curtain. Moose showed us a couple shots in this mode by getting his assistant (Stephanie Cross) to jump off a rock multiple times. Hey, it worked. You could see the light on her from the flash even though he was in bright mid-day sunlight and had a high shutter speed.
So then it clicked in my head to give it a shot with my shaded barn. This is what I got.
That was enough to satisfy me for this field trip. You can still see an outline of the shadow on the building, but I’m happy enough with the result for a guy who was standing in the desert with a camera in on hand and a flash in the other trying to shoot the broad side of a barn while dodging rattlesnakes (yes, they warned us about them being there). I tried creating a few other lighting exercises for myself, including a few shots of some crappy old cars.
It turned out to be a great pre-conference choice. As the light started falling, Moose & Joe both provided some lighting demonstrations with the models who came along. It was great to watch them try different things and work through their challenges until they had the exposure just as they wanted it. While those lectures were informative and even entertaining, the real value I got out of the day was trying to work out a problem within the time they allowed for us to shoot on our own, so it created a bit of deadline pressure. Moose, Joe, and Laurie all helped me with different pieces of information that played into resolving it, but none of them ever tried to come out and say “this is how you do it.” That’s great, because I wanted to solve the problem on my own, but I didn’t mind asking for some how-to information to provide tools that I could use on the problem. Ultimately, I have to learn on my own terms. It’s more enjoyable that way.
