Westcott Photo Shootout at PSW Vegas

One of the interesting aspects of the Photoshop World Expo is the Westcott Photo Shootout. The company sets up four sets with great design. They hire professional models and light them with their continuous lights – Spiderlite TD5 and some softboxes. Show attendees are welcome to shoot the models and this area gathers quite a crowd.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a fan of continuous lights. Having used these Spiderlites at various workshops, I’ve never found them to put out sufficient light or have the punch of flash or strobe lights. When combined with my favorite lens for portraits – the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8G VRI – and a moving model, it’s a recipe for fuzzy images.  Perhaps not every image is like that, but most of them are throw-away shots.

Still, the sets are beautiful, as are the models, and I figured that there must be a technique to getting decent shots. Other folks come away with some nice images and I want to do the same. I shot a few frames and chimped. Not bad, but let’s zoom in a bit. I have the center-button of my D700 programmed to quickly zoom so I can see what kind of quality I have in the shot.  Sure enough, most of them were fuzzy, like this one:

That’s just not going to cut it. I varied my settings trying to get a faster shutter speed – pumped the ISO to 3200, opened the aperture to 2/8, made sure the VR was turned on, etc. I was getting shutter speeds ranging from 1/40th to 1/160th of a second. A few shots here and there were sharp, but most still had no comparison to my experience using flash and strobes. I decided to go visit the Westcott booth and speak with one of the sales reps.

That decision turned into the most disturbing experience I’ve ever had with a vendor. I mentioned my problem and showed some examples.  His response was to burst into laughter and openly mock me right in front of everyone in his booth on the show floor.  Some of his comments included:

• You just don’t know what you’re doing.
• You don’t know how to hold a camera steady.
• Maybe you need a tripod.
• You think a strobe is going to help you get a sharp image? No, it’s your fault your pictures are fuzzy.

During this conversation, I just felt humiliated and insulted. However, I also had this out-of-body experience while he was mocking me. As I stood there, accepting his insults because he wouldn’t stop, I imagined that he thought I was one of the worst photographers in the world.  Simultaneously, I thought he must have been one of the worst salesmen in the world. Who mocks a potential customer?

Look, I’m not perfect. However, I know from experience that I’m not as bad as this guy was claiming and I have my own photos to prove it. As you can tell from the bullets above, he laughed at the idea that a flash will help retain sharpness and eliminate camera shake in an image. That’s when I realized I was dealing with someone who was either an idiot or was completely deluding himself.

It’s a matter of physics. Your camera captures a reflection of light. Your shutter speed determines the duration of that reflection. If your subject is moving during the time your shutter is open, then the reflection it captures will result in a blur on the resulting image.  Simple physics. If you cannot reduce the time your shutter is open in order to capture a correct exposure, then you need to reduce the duration of light reflecting on your subject. That’s what a flash or strobe does and that, my friends, is why it eliminates the appearance of camera shake on your image. Short duration is why some people spend thousands of dollars on Profoto lights rather than Alien Bees.  Light is light. You can correct a white balance issue in post, but duration of light is something you have to get right at the moment you click the shutter. If you want a sharp image, you have to stop the movement of that reflection.  Westcott Spiderlites simply cannot do this because they are continuous lights. The salesman’s comments aside, a strobe WILL help you get a sharp image.

Let me give you an example.

I shot this image using the same Nikon D700 and 70-200mm lens at ISO 200, F/8 and a shutter speed of 1/8 second. Why is this image sharp and the one posted above from the Westcott booth fuzzy? Because this one used a SB-900 flash in a Lastolite EzyBox to light the model. The reason I used such a slow shutter speed was to allow the ambient light time to creep into the exposure.  I knew that the flash would keep the details of the model sharp. This same image would fail with the Spiderite TD5 because of the duration of light on the model would show any movement she made, or any camera shake that I made. I tripod would help, but it’s cumbersome in a model shoot and still wouldn’t eliminate the model’s movements.

During the sessions at the Westcott Shootout booths, the models were moving nearly continuously.  That’s because there were always a dozen photographers or more. They had the odious task of trying to make everyone happy, make eye contact and change poses, etc. We can’t blame the models for the movement in this environment because they’re doing what they need to do. Basically, the only thing this shootout booth proved to me was how poor the Westcott Spiderlite TD5s are for portrait photography.

So how do you work with this lights to eliminate camera shake? The answer is to reduce your focal length. The axiom is that you need a shutter speed equal or faster than your focal length to eliminate camera shake. Since I liked to shoot at 200mm, I needed a shutter speed faster than 1/200th of a second.  That just wasn’t going to happen here unless I bumped up to ISO 6400, which introduced noise and eliminated sharpness and detail.

Another way to eliminate shake is to have more light. That wasn’t going to happen at the Westcott shootout because of the low power of the Spiderlites.  However, my D700 and 70-200 can get some sharp images in challenging light.  I know because I did it earlier that morning at the PSW Keynote:

It’s not a model portrait, but I find it interesting that I got more detail in a concert setting than I did using a vendor’s lighting gear. For this shot, the stage lights put out enough to get 1/320th of a second. Felix is waving his arms from side to head and moving around for the show, and yet this image is sharper than most of the ones taken with Spiderlites. So is this image of Scott Kelby that I shared yesterday.

Fortunately, I didn’t allow the encounter with the obnoxious Westcott rep to dissuade me from trying to resolve my problem. I went up to my room and exchanged my 70-200 for my 24-70. It worked much better, as illustrated by this image I’m now showing for the third day in a row.

Here’s what I learned from my experience with these continuous lights. You need to work with shorter focal lengths because they lack the power and duration capabilities of flash and strobe. The benefit of these lights is you can see exactly where the light falls on your subject prior to the shoot. The drawbacks, however, are unacceptable to me. I like using my 70-200 because of the way longer focal lengths compress the subject. It’s a more pleasing result. If I have to use a shorter focal length to eliminate camera shake issues, then I sacrifice some creative choices. It also means I may have to work much closer to my subject or accept some other distortion issues caused by wide angle lenses.

Other photographers who were at these sets posted some really nice photos.  When I dig into those photos a little closer, I generally find two things.  Either they were shot with a shorter focal length (e.g., 50mm) or they don’t post a very large image. That latter issue is likely because the photo looks acceptable at a small resolution, but the imperfections begin to show up in larger sizes.

I have Nikon flashes and Elinchrom strobes.  I’m quite pleased with both. Though I thought there may also be room for some continuous lights in my arsenal, I now know that this is a product I won’t purchase because of its drawbacks. Perhaps I could use them for still life images, but the gear I already have will do that just as well. There is just one more piece of this story that convinced me to never purchase from Westcott again.

After I exchanged my lenses and tried using the 24-70, I encountered the same Westcott salesman again. I was at one of the model booths down on a knee with my camera to my face trying to compose an image. That’s when the sales guy deliberately walked right over to me, stood right in front of my, and spent a little time snapping some shots on his iPhone. All I could see was his ass in front of my lens for a minute or two.

Come on, this wasn’t some misunderstanding or accident. When you walk toward someone and you see them composing a shot, and then you stop with your butt right in front of them, it’s intentional. He turned around and walked off without a word or acknowledgement, though he looked right down at me.

Money goes where it’s treat well.  I’ve had excellent experiences with other vendors at the Photoshop World Expo. Mark Astmann at the Manfrotto booth has helped me a number of times and that’s why I buy Elinchrom lights, modifiers and other gear from his company. Hoodman USA makes great products and treats me with respect, so I’ve bought cards from them at every PSW. The nice folks at Artistic Photo Canvas have also earned my business and I plan on repeating with them plenty of times. My NAPP membership is due for renewal in a couple of months and they will most definitely get my return business.

It disappoints me to end up writing a negative review. I wanted to find to learn how to work with these lights, so I wrote a short note to Terry White asking when he was doing his demo.  He responded with the time and I expected to show up, ask a few questions and learn from a man who uses the product. However, I didn’t see a point in attending after my conversation with the salesman. When you mock me, berate me and show me your ass just because I came to you trying to succeed with your product, it’s not a path to earn my business. I will never, ever buy a product from F.J. Westcott again.