fotofile

My photoblog has taken up residence at a new home as it was thought to be deserved of it’s own address.

You will find the continuation of this blog at www.jamesd.com.au

Click for a Bigger Version

So with all the broughaha over Chinese Pocket Wizards and Strobist I finally had a decent crack at this off camera lighting thing… The results are in, and they speak for themselves… If you want something to *look* like it does in your head you have to practice… and then practice some more. Im still working on the first round of practicing.
This shot was taken with two speedlights. One was “snooted” (is that a word) using a DL size heavy envelope and some elastic bands. The idea was to create that bright section behind the flower. The second Flash was on the right of the camera and had a sto-fen and Gobo on it…

Give it time and hopefully I’ll nail it, otherwise you don’t have to look.

So, I have a camera and a Speedlight, What next… Well as you saw earlier with my foray into the Chinese Pocket Wizards lighting off camera is my next goal and for that I have found THE resource…

Stobist is a seriously good resource for everything off camera flash… I started at the very first article and have been working my way through ever since.

Lizzie turned 21 and had Family and Friends around to celbrate. Needless to say I took my camera the results of which can be seen on the f2point8.net website in the Match Photo Database

With societies such as strobist gaining momentum in the online world I decided it was time to have a go off camera lighting. There is a wealth of information out there, and alot of it is free on the internet (starting with strobist) however any further steps are going to require money, and most of the time not just small amounts.

With Canon’s ETTL cord retailing at around $70 AUD I figured it wouldn’t be silly to look at the other options. Of course Pocket Wizards topped the charts and would be awesome fun (Remote camera anyone). However around $200 US each, a pair was way out of the question. My budget was pretty much the same $70 dollars for the cord, I only wanted to play around and see if I could get the feel for this off camera stuff so in the end it came down to two options. The aforementioned ETTL cord or a set of Chinese Pocketwizards (often called Ebay Remotes). $60 AUD would buy two recievers (PT-04 hotshoe recievers) and one trigger (RF-04) and included postage from “New World Manufacture Centre, China “ these can only be found on Ebay, hence the name. and are “berry well made”

Now please don’t mistake these for a high quality product, and don’t expect them to work perfectly straight out of the box! They need some tweaking, and thats why this article is here. And hold on! Before you go grabbing your soildering iron and digital multimeter, it ain’t that complex!!!
Firstly have a look at the internals of the reciever…

That vertical coppery bar is the antanne, the blue switches are the channel selection. The biggest problem with these devices is interference…
My speedlight, a Canon 430ex fitted snugly into the hotshoe on the top of the reciever. The metal bracket at the base of the unit attached solidly to a tripod and surprisigly there was enough friction in the thumbscrew joint to hold the flash at a variety of angles.
I had heard that if the trigger voltage or circuitry voltage was a little too high then you could fry the electrics in your camera and flash. So it was a slight sense of trepidation that I flicked the switch… Nothing happened. Phew!
That familiar whine started and the capacitor charged. The pilot light went red (good sign) and then POP, the flash went, charging whine again then POP, charging again then POP etc ad nauseum.
Aiming to put a stop to this I turned the flash down to 1/4 power, this only made the POP’s more frequent… Hmmm, seems to be a bit of a problem. Removing all forms of electronic devices from the area, then removing myself from the area seemed to have no effect.
The long and the short of it was at some point in the charging cycle the flash was producing just the right sort of interference to throw the trigger circuit. Hence the continuous popping of the flash. Having read up on these little remotes I remembered that some shielding had been effectivley used to stop another form of random popping due to a transmitter proximity problem.

Out came the AlFoil and tape… Gaffers tape would probably be overkill for this situation so I stuck to the sticky tape. After an hour or so of expirimentation and managing to shield the reciever so well that even the transmitters signal wouldn’t fire the flash a solution was found.

Now it dosen’t need to be that shape… I was just running out of AlFoil and had to use the offcuts from other designs. Basically it is 4 layers of foil covered in stickytape as to remove the chance of a short circuit. This was then stuffed into the gap above the battery and circuit boards like so:

The Idea being that it shields the circutry and the antanne enough to remove the interference from the flash head. It works quite well, most of the time I get no random pops and sometime one or two a minute most of which can be fixed by changing channels turining off and on etc. The effective range is around 20 feet and the sync is pretty steady at 1/200s.

So the ebay remotes are not perfect, but they do a decent job and will let you get your hands dirty before forking out hundreds for Pocket Wizards. Do be warned, they are not the highest quality devices nor are they likley to be approved for use in your country. One of mine even came with a soildering iron inflicted burn on the outside of the casing.

They are fun and do work well under controlled conditions. Just keep all this in mind if you do decide to buy some. However it isn’t all gloom and doom and off camera lighting is tremendous fun, they do work well most of the time and are compact enough to slip into an already overly filled camerabag.

If you buy them, you will have fun!!

If you have any questions or comments email me.

Well, you may want to know whats been happening latley in the land of james’ camera… You may also not want to know. All that is beside the point as you are still reading, aren’t you, please?
Sillyness aside, swotvac and university are evil demons that hate your hobbies!! Have you noticed how things go awry when study starts… The obvious thing to do is combine the two. Take for example this photo:

Now by parking near the uni and walking the last 600 meters I was able to wander and take photos on the way to and from class, this Strelitzia Reginae just *happened* to be on the way to uni. At this point the word “way” is being used very generally and could probably be replaced with “15 minute wander around the general area”. But you all get the picture.

Secondly, swotvac is hard work, so at some point you need to take a well earned break, say at sunset after 10 hours of working. Atleast thats what I did, and headed for a hill. The fresh air is good for you and you could see something along the lines of:

That said on a clear night there is no need to go out at sunset, the nightime cityscape is just as impressive:

For those of you with nothing better to do than look at photos I have created a gallery of recent work, see here for more.

Ever wondered what this magical DOF people spoke about was, How about Bokeh…? lets start with the easy one…um

DOF as is commonly used on the interweb is yet another highly descriptive TLA (Three Letter Acronym) is stands for Depth of field and refers to the distance between the first point in focus and the last point in focus for a given picture. In what could become this photoblogger’s catch cry, lets have a look at this photo, (No explanations yet just have a look at it…)

If you look carefully at the photo photo above there is only one small region in focus, the front of the leaf is very blurry and the background is also blurry, however the bit in the middle, the subject is clear and we can see all the detail. In simple terms, the depth of field arises due to the inability of the lens to focus light from everywhere in the photo onto the razor thin photographic plane. Whilst framing this photo I focussed on the point where the two fronds meet and form a U shaped crux. The lens can then only focus the light from a certain distance either side of that point. This means that everywhere else in the photo the light coming from a single point is focused to slightly different places on the ‘film’ plane and hence the area is out of focus. This creates a nice blurry effect called Bokeh.

Now we can get around having such a shallow depth of field as it is simply a function of the focal length distance to subject and the aperture. Stopping down, or increasing the aperture (by decreasing the entrance pupil diameter) will result in a wider (deeper) Depth of field. This ofcourse has flow on effects with respect to shutter speed etc…

In what he may have later reflected on as a somewhat silly time of life, Ansell Adams was a founding member of the f64 group. A ‘gaggle’ of landscape photographers who only shot at f64. This was achieved using a pinhole type lens on bellows with a large format film camera, the resulting exposure times were measured in minutes and hours and everything in the photo was in focus, the depth of field was approximatley infinite.

However, Depth of field is a tool and one that is used very commonly to isolate your subject matter…

In the photo above i have isolated the heart of the dandelion’s head by having a very shallow depth of field. The result is almost a crossectional view of the dandilion. Looking carefully you can see that the front and rear of the dandilion are effectivley out of focus, thus the depth of field is around 1cm , compare that to the photo below with a depth of field around 3cm and the effect is markedly different.

Not to play favourites but the first photo is mine…

So have a play, it’s the only way to learn.

“Whats a photo Blog?” I was asked. The answer is not that dissimilar to a normal blog. Just that instead of pulling material from inordinate day to day life this ‘photo blog’ will concentrate on photos (surprise surprise) and what went on before I hit the shutter release. Even if a picture tells a thousand words sometimes it might be worth another couple of hundred just to find out what went on behind the lens.
For example, lets have a look at this photo, (No explanations yet just have a look at it…)

Personally I am not one to add lengthy captions to the base of each photo, in the galleries you will find a fairly short caption stating that this photo was taken in “Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia” followed by shutter speed, aperture etc… all the things you really want to know. But those things really don’t tell you how the photo was taken do they?

I could have had much the same result with double the shutter speed and one stop larger aperture (*more details on this to come). Look closer, at the horizon now… yes slightly skew isn’t it… how did that happen you may ask, artistic licence?, optical effect due to the hills on the right? or was it something more sinister? In this case it was a dirty great lamb kebab I was munching on which meant that only one hand was capable of holding my camera. So after all that when you probably expected tripod, ND filter and careful exposure meetering all the photo really came down to was. Which buttons can i reach without getting tzatziki all over the expensive end of my camera.

Which leaves us with the real caption:
Byron Bay Sunset as seen looking north from ‘Hippie Rocks’, Captured on a Canon 350D with patented Lamb Kebab lens support, New South Wales, Australia.

So welcome to my photo blog.

Welcome to WordPress.

Yes I succumbed, It is swot vac but going one up on Will is always fun!