A Night at the Gram­mys — © Copy­right 2010 by William Beem

Note: The image above was taken at the West­cott Shootout at Pho­to­shop World 2010 in Las Vegas. Scott Kelby wrote about it yes­ter­day on his blog.

Last week, I detailed a bad expe­ri­ence I had at the West­cott booth on the Pho­to­shop World con­fer­ence Expo floor. I waited about a week from the expe­ri­ence before I wrote about it because, quite hon­estly, I don’t like post­ing neg­a­tive reviews or expe­ri­ences. There’s absolutely no plea­sure in it, just as there was no plea­sure in my expe­ri­ence. I ulti­mately decided to write about it because it was a true part of my expe­ri­ence, and that’s what I share on this blog. I’m for­tu­nate that the major­ity of my expe­ri­ences are good, but I don’t want to just sug­ar­coat things. Some­times you need to share some­thing that doesn’t live up to expec­ta­tions. As a result, I received com­ments from other folks who men­tioned they also had neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences at the West­cott booth, one even dat­ing back to the pre­vi­ous year.

It turns out that West­cott folks paid atten­tion. I received an apol­ogy from the man in the booth and we exchanged a cou­ple of e-​mails dis­cussing var­i­ous issues. It seems that my post struck a nerve with him. Over the week­end, I also received an e-​mail from a VP at West­cott who was clearly con­cerned. The note men­tioned that West­cott prides itself on cus­tomer ser­vice and invited me to dis­cuss the sit­u­a­tion in more detail. I shared some infor­ma­tion regard­ing the apol­ogy I received. I’ve been assured by the VP that West­cott has learned from the expe­ri­ence and wants to insure this kind of issue doesn’t hap­pen again.

About the Spiderlites

Some­thing else came along with the ini­tial apol­ogy. It was the very infor­ma­tion that I wanted to get dur­ing PSW. With the per­mis­sion of the sales­man, I’d like to pro­vide that infor­ma­tion here. I’m going to edit any per­sonal details out and try to present only the per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion about light­ing and equip­ment, so I won’t promise this is word for word. How­ever, it’s knowl­edge that I didn’t have and am happy to share with others.

You brought up many good points in your post, and, me hav­ing been a shooter for over 40 years, can relate to every­thing you say. There is no doubt that elec­tronic flash does indeed make unsharp images due to cam­era shake and sub­ject move­ment almost non-​existent. And, the same can­not be said of continuous light.

The use of elec­tronic flash for long peri­ods of time brings a pho­tog­ra­pher a cer­tain level of com­fort with that light­ing source. You say you have never really liked our TD5’s because of the rea­sons you present. Cer­tainly, there is a range of pho­tog­ra­phers that never are, and never will be, com­fort­able with the tech­niques of shoot­ing with these types of lights.

Shoot­ing with con­tin­u­ous light is the same as shoot­ing out­doors with day­light. I have always prac­ticed the guide­line of shut­ter speed being equal to the focal length of lens being used as the opti­mum speed for hand held use. Hence, as a guide­line, the use of your 70 – 200 should give accept­able hand held results at 1/​200 sec. speed. I per­son­ally, have been able to suc­cess­fully hand hold at one or two lev­els below that, so, a 200mmm lens has me being fairly com­fort­able at 1/​60 sec. Although I do find that num­ber creep­ing up as I get older, and, cam­era shake is always a con­cern when hand holding…especially long lenses. To tell you the truth, when I use a long lens (I own a Sigma 70 – 200 f2.8), even when I’m using flash, I try to at least use a monopod.

I once had a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher that I respect greatly impart with me wis­dom that he got from his mentor…

“The dif­fer­ence between a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher and an ama­teur is that a pro uses a tripod.”

This pho­tog­ra­pher lives by that rule and always uses a tri­pod in his work. I asked him,

“What about when you are using strobe.…does that not mit­i­gate the chance of fuzzi­ness because of the short dura­tion of the flash of light?”

He responded that, to him, it did not mat­ter. He said that even when using flash, it does not pre­clude the slight move­ment of the cam­era when tak­ing an expo­sure. Besides the point that tri­pod use ensures pre­dictable com­po­si­tion and repeata­bil­ity. Cer­tainly, it stops the action of your sub­ject, but, in his opin­ion, tripods are king and, accord­ing to him, if you want to be sure of tack sharp images, use a tri­pod. Not a sur­prise that dur­ing my time rep­ping [redacted], I sold lit­er­ally mil­lions of $’s of very high end tripods. That was in the back of my mind when I spoke to you.

Now, let’s dis­cuss the actual expo­sure one can expect from day­light flu­o­res­cents. Yes, they do not come close to the raw light out­put of elec­tronic flash. That is why West­cott sells both con­tin­u­ous and elec­tronic flash prod­ucts. And, con­tin­u­ous light is not suit­able for all types of pho­tog­ra­phy. Fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, where one has to light up a large area, with a mov­ing tar­get, is one par­tic­u­lar type of pho­tog­ra­phy that screams for strobe.

The set-​up we used at Pho­to­shop World was one of those that we were stretch­ing the capa­bil­ity of con­tin­u­ous light because the sets were com­pli­cated, large, and depen­dent on the use of mod­els. As you noticed, it was per­fectly suited to have large num­bers of peo­ple shoot at the same time since sync­ing, the biggest neg­a­tive of strobe use, was not an issue.

Typ­i­cally using con­tin­u­ous light, espe­cially day­light flu­o­res­cent, it is at it’s best when you can put it nice and close to your sub­ject result­ing in beau­ti­ful soft light and, usu­ally, accept­able expo­sure. Like any light, when expo­sure is not suf­fi­cient, you have to add more light. Well said, too, that a shorter focal length will help ensure sharper pictures.

The great­est advan­tage to con­tin­u­ous light is that you see what you get. This is a huge thing to the more inex­pe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­pher. Expe­ri­enced pros like it because of the same rea­sons as it lend itself bet­ter to “paint­ing with light.”

Addi­tion­ally, the lack of a bright flash seems to trans­form a por­trait sit­ting from an emo­tional roller-​coaster where the sub­ject is wait­ing for each expo­sure, tens­ing up while wait­ing for that tell tale flash. Then, they relax. Most sub­jects are not pro­fes­sional mod­els expe­ri­enced in get­ting their pic­ture shot.

I also like the inher­ent soft­ness of day­light flu­o­res­cent, espe­cially as com­pared to the inher­ent harsh­ness of elec­tronic flash. This is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant when using a chip as opposed to film, where film, by it’s very nature, is a low con­trast medium, and the chip, by it’s very nature, is a more con­trasty sen­si­tive medium. Remem­ber the days of film when we reg­u­larly over­ex­posed to pick up “sat­u­ra­tion”? The use of strobe with an elec­tronic chip begs for blown out high­lights. We com­pen­sate for this by mov­ing a strobe fur­ther from the sub­ject and dif­fu­sion. Day­light flu­o­res­cents are the oppo­site in that they are inher­ently soft, and if used with the same amount of dif­fu­sion as in a soft box as a strobe, is very flat.

That is why we used shal­low, big soft boxes at the show, that use very thin front dif­fu­sion pan­els of only ¹⁄₄ stop, as com­pared to the dou­ble layer of ³⁄₄ stop dif­fu­sion com­mon with strobe. It is desir­able to put the lights closer to the sub­ject than we did at PSW, but then, we would make it harder for a group of peo­ple to shoot at once. So, you were using TD5’s in a man­ner that is dif­fer­ent than if you were the only one shoot­ing in your own studio.

Prod­uct pho­tog­ra­phy also is much eas­ier to accom­plish with continuous light.

All-​in-​all, the joys of shoot­ing out­doors is embod­ied in con­tin­u­ous light use. Cer­tainly, it may not be for you. But, I appre­ci­ate your attempt at using them with the set-​ups we pro­vided, at great effort, just so peo­ple had some­thing inter­est­ing to shoot, which is, at it’s very heart, a pho­tog­ra­phers lover’s show.

What it Means to Me

The sales­man con­tin­ued with an apol­ogy and also made a gen­er­ous offer to test some equip­ment, which I declined. Maybe that’s just me, but I didn’t feel this was the right cir­cum­stance to accept the offer. I’ve no doubt it was made in a spirit of con­tri­tion (as we dis­cussed in later mes­sages), but I replied that I didn’t write my account in hopes of any gain.

In fact, I said the one thing that almost any con­sumer advo­cate will tell you to never state — that I would never buy a prod­uct from this ven­dor again. I cer­tainly meant it because I was incensed and didn’t see any prob­lem at all by drop­ping a poten­tial provider from my gear list. Let’s face it; I’m a hob­by­ist. My own pur­chases are not going to affect their bot­tom line.

That’s why I respect the con­tact I’ve received from West­cott. They could have eas­ily writ­ten me off as another loud-​mouthed blog­ger. Instead, they real­ized that some­thing was wrong and reached out to cor­rect the issue. I’m still sort­ing out my own feel­ings about the issue, but I def­i­nitely respect the effort to con­tact me, apol­o­gize, and try to mend fences.