Adventures in High Speed Sync

Just back from a weekend in Chicago where I shot the river being dyed green and the St. Patrick's Day parade. I changed things up a little this time around, relying more on the cameras to make exposure decisions; a little bit outside my comfort zone!

For gear, I kept it (relatively) simple - Canon 5D and 1D Mark IIn bodies, 17-40 f4 and 70-200 f4 lenses and one 580EXII flash with TTL cable. I knew that I'd want to get wide shots of the river dyeing and close-ups of the boats, so the lenses were in the right ranges. Looking back, an even longer zoom would have been useful, but I don't need one enough to have bought one!

Normally, Chicago is cold and overcast in March for the river dyeing. This means one has to bundle up against the cold, but the lighting is soft and even - perfect for shooting the river. This year, however, Chicago was sunny and warm - great for being outside, but the harsh sunlight cast shadows across the river. The Mark IIn made short work of this, however. Instead of my usual Manual exposure mode, I switched it to Aperture Priority at f4 (and ISO 200 for a faster shutter speed) and AI Servo mode for focusing. The camera was in its element, capturing perfectly exposed and in-focus shots in both sunlight and shade at 8 frames per second. It was almost too easy!



For the parade shots, I wanted to use the flash to single out people and their outfits and under-expose the ambient. In bright sunlight, that means high shutter speeds and a fill flash with High Speed Sync. High Speed Sync lets you shoot flash above the usual sync speed. It comes at the cost of 1 to 2 stops of light as it uses pulses of light instead of a single flash, but the 580 EX II has enough power for most situations. I put the flash on the TTL cord so I could aim it at the subject and set the exposure in Manual mode to under-expose the sky by about 2 stops. This ended up being about 1/2000th at f4 (ISO 100). Shooting at 17mm meant the flash would only cover a portion of the frame, which is what I wanted. In fact, I zoomed in the flash a little, to 50mm, which made the flash coverage even smaller but gained a little more output. I shot into the sun, using it as a rim light and filling in the shadow with flash.


My friend James had a similar idea, it seems. He and shot the parade on Greenville Ave in Dallas. In his photos, he kept his 580 EXII on the hotshoe with a Sto-fen Omnibounce and shot in Aperture Priority mode at f2. He set exposure compensation at -1EV which underexposed the ambient and made the flash-filled subject stand out. The softened flash blended well with the soft ambient - he had the benefit of cloud cover for his shots! At f2, focus can be tricky, but the background will blur nicely and James used this to great advantage, particularly in his close-up portraits.

Interestingly, if James had been shooting Nikon, this setting wouldn't have given him the same results. Nikon couples the ambient and flash exposures, so a -1EV setting in aperture-priority mode would under-expose both the ambient AND the flash exposure. To get the flash to fill in a correct exposure, a +1EV flash exposure compensation would have been needed. This changes with the new Nikon D4; the exposures are separate in the new flagship body.


High Speed sync can only be achieved using proprietary flashes and can be quite an investment, but for getting great results in a short amount of time, it can be invaluable. Photographer Nick Fancher shows this off very well in this video, an inspiring look at speedy workflow and a must-see for high speed sync shooters.

The rest of my Chicago photos are here.


more later soon

Waiting on my Lytro

Back in September 2011, I started reading about Lytro, a company making a plenoptic or "light field" camera. The camera captures images in an entirely different way to conventional cameras. Instead of capturing the light on one focused plane on the camera's sensor, the light field camera uses a mico-lens array to capture 11 million light rays at every distance. This allows for refocusing of the image after the fact and a much faster capture time as the focusing step is removed.

In October, the company invited the public to pre-order one of these cameras - the first consumer light field camera. I weighed up the pros and cons of ordering one of these and after a little self-deliberation, I decided to take the plunge. I did so because I think that a technology like this, that could revolutionize the way we take photos, should be supported. While the advances of a second iteration of any product usually come as a result of the investment of early adopters' purchases, I wanted to be on the ground floor of this technology! I wanted to be one of the first plenoptic camera photographers! Why not?

Months later, the vague "February/March" shipping date for the new cameras is here and I eagerly await its arrival. The company recently sent an email stating that the cameras should start shipping later this month. Another batch (presumably only to fulfill pre-orders) will ship in April/May, which makes it sound like it might be June before these will be widely available. That's assuming there's a demand, of course. By then, I plan on having a detailed review of the camera on this blog and a healthy collection of photos taken with the camera.