Home for the Holidays

I am very thankful to not be traveling this Christmas season. And as in years past, I won't be posting between now and the new year, either. What I do hope to be doing is spending as much time as possible with family and friends.

In the meantime, hit the jump for our annual attempt at a Year in Review. And this year we have a little twist… Read more »

Rosco Plusgreen: The Magic Sunset Filter

Druids may get all festive around Winter Solstice, but you can bet your typical cubicle worker is equally pissed off. That's because most of them arrive at work barely after sunrise, and don't leave until after dark.

For that same reason, it is also when architectural photographers are most willing to go out and freeze their nu brave the cold weather to make skyline shots. At least in the northern hemisphere.

Buildings with their lights all aglow at mix light are much prettier than they are at mix during other seasons. In June (at 39 degrees north, where Baltimore is) you'd have to wait until 9:30pm to get this shot. And the buildings are mostly empty and dark by then.

Mix light is wonderfully unpredictable when it comes to the color of the ambient. And on top of that variable, here's a little tip courtesy the architectural photographers: When you shoot dusk skylines, try a few with your camera set to the FL white balance as in the example above. (Click the pic for a bigger version.)

Why?

Because it does two things. First, it cleans up the indoor fluorescent lights in your photos, taking out a lot of the grody green cast. And second, it adds about 30CC of magenta to whatever your post-sunset ambient light is doing. Even though I shoot in raw, I always shoot it in daylight, tungsten and FL balance just to get a feel for which one I might like the best while still on the scene.

Okay fine, Building Boy. What's all this this got to do with lighting?

A lot, actually ... Read more »

Drew Gardner's Brown Bag Video Series

Long-time readers of this site are already familiar with London-based commercial and advertising photographer Drew Gardner. Many of you will be happy to know that he has just released a commercial series of walk-thru videos of over a dozen of his more notable shoots, broken into McDonald's lunch-priced segments.

I have always enjoyed Drew's lighting, but even more so his creativity and imagination when approaching a shoot. And frequently, that ability to source a location or bootstrap say, an elephant or water buffalo as a prop for a shoot is more key to making the magic happen than knowing where to put your soft box.

I have had a chance to view most of them, and the takeaway for me has been that there is generally one unexpected or unusual thing you have to figure out to make a shot come together. For me, that is a big lesson -- because I am usually about the light.

But Drew seems to have a talent for hitting the curve ball that comes at you from left field. And I would give a lot of lighting skill away to be able to do that so seemingly effortlessly. I learn something from the guy every time we talk.

Drew kindly made one of the tutorials free, and I have embedded it above. (Blip.tv is ad-rolling it, but you can click them away.) You see the other photos selected for video tutorials here.

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First Grope: Nikon SB-700

When Nikon first announced their new SB-700 speedlight three months ago, I went down the feature list and immediately took notice of one thing: The lack of a PC jack.

But I recently had a chance to talk to some folks from Nikon. And they're all like, Dave, you're putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. It's an evolution of the SB-600, not the SB-800. (And to be fair, they've got the SB-900 for that.)

Okay, fine. Maybe it is not the most PC flash out there. But given that, what's under the hood?

First impressions after a hands-on day, inside. Read more »

A Pop in Page Views

Congrats to Strobist reader Edward Horsford for making the front page of the internet. Yahoo chose his photo of a water balloon (without the balloon part) as a lede image for their curated gallery of high-speed captures.

Cool tidbit: More than a third of the images in the collection were by Strobist readers.

It was the first time I have seen Yahoo leveraging Flickr content to create a main-page gallery. If this is to become a regular thing, I would expect we'll see more Strobist Flickr group members getting this kind of insane exposure. I did a quick check while this was up on the Yahoo front, and Edward's Flickr page for this photo was getting about 3,000 views a minute.

I'll bet he sure was surprised when he saw it, if he did. You can see exactly how Edward lit the photo (with two Nikon SB's) here.

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Profoto: The Light Shaping Retina Searing Company

Remember the guy who zapped words into German tourists' photos with his DIY flash projector gun?

Suffice to say when you swap out the speedlight for 4800 watt-seconds worth of Profoto Pro-7B, things can get a little more interesting.

(Tip via Joel)

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On Assignment: Brian England

I shot a job last month for a story on the downstream impact of the new Jobs Bill (as in small business, not Steve.) Local auto shop owner Brian England, above, was one of the voices in the story.

It's your basic talking head. And just about anything would suffice for this kind of story in the local biz publication. So I always see these kinds of job as a perfect time to try on a new lighting style for size. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by experimenting -- as long as you cover yourself in case it doesn't work. Read more »