Freezing the Blog

To all people out there who own a blog: did you ever ask yourselve, who is reading your stuff? - so did I.

Since I support another blog named Basel Strobist Blog which is about the same topic - photography - I decided to stop this blog for the moment. Maybe I'll continue later on, I don't know. Probably not.

The new blog is in German, sad for your English-speaking guys. But for me, it is more probable that it will get read since most of my friends speak German. Some do even not speak English at all.

Sorry guys who do not understand German. If you want to know anything, please don't hesitate to contact me (see contact.burrima.ch).

Bye bye martinphotography.blogspot.com...

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Challenging stage shooting

Last Friday, I was hired by the band Evy & the Bluesjacks to take some shots during their concert. They were playing at “Em Bebby sy Jazz”, an annual Event in Basel where many Jazz and vocal bands give their best for a big audience. The inner city is totally crowded each time.

Of course I was quite nervous since this was my first official engagement and I knew that for good shots I must get close to the stage where I would be exposed to the audience. I was even more nervous as I saw the stage. It was covered by a white tent with walls on the back and on the sides. The lighting was ambient by one single big spot light on the inner side of the tent. Terrible! There was some additional ambient coming from bulb-ropes hanging above the audience.

Thank goodness I had brought some Speedlights with Manfrotto Superclamps with me. I attached one of them to each front side of the tent, pointing to the inner tent side, i.e. the diagonal opposite corner. Therewith I was able to have enough light to get to decent camera settings and also a bit of a hard light to get some more dramatic pictures. The white tent helped me out by reflecting some light as fill light.

(Click to see a bigger version)

But still, there was the white ugly tent and my fear to expose myself to the audience. I was happy when Jens, a Basel Strobist friend (to see on the right side of the stage in the above picture), arrived to support me. This gave me some relaxing. During the long concert of 2 hours we took many pictures (around 200 from my side and I guess about the same from Jens). The attached speedlites proved to be a good idea and they worked reliably during the whole event. I was even surprised about the so-called “low-end Ebay triggers” (Cactus) – they worked flawlessly even at distances around 20 m. Well, I have done some transmitter-antenna modification to increase range. But still, I didn’t expect it to work so well.

So, light was ok, lens was one of the best (borrowed a Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR), band was really great, audience was in good mood – but, there was the white ugly boring tent. To overcome this, Jens realized that the best place to shoot the front row of the band (singers and guitars) was from the side at high position. Because then we could have black background from the opposite tent side which was halfway open. But this meant to stand right on the border of the stage. At the beginning I was very afraid of doing so, but as Jens did it, I got more and more encouraged until I overcame my fears and also did it. And it was worth it!


In order to come to an end with this blog entry, here is a list of what I could learn during this unforgettable event:

• Don’t be shy, it’s worth it. The audience is not so concerned about you, they want to see the band.
• Go close, show heads, emotions.
• Black-and-white is sometimes better for stage shots, depending on the available light.
• Black-and-white allows higher ISO since the noise is not so distracting then. It event gives the photo an artistic touch.
• Don’t be afraid of darkness – allow the histogram to be towards the left side at night.

At this point, it remains to say: THANK YOU!! – to Evy and her band for the engagement, to Jens for the support and to my honey for the patience.

You can find all images in the gallery.

Photo taken by Jens Winkler.

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Basel Strobist going public

Up to now, Basel Strobist was accessible only by it's members. We worked on a private Flickr group basis. But now the time has come to go public. So, Jens suggested to have a public Blog where we can share our lessons learnt to a wider audience. It's good for us to reflect again on what we did each time and it's also kind of a documentation method to store the knowledge for the future.

The blog is still being built up, but you can have a first look at it here: baselstrobist.blogspot.com.

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Ensemble Contrapposto

A couple of days ago, the "Ensemble Contrapposto" asked me if they could use on of my photographs taken at Dance & Dine 2008 for their homepage. Of course they can! I'm very happy that they asked me. See my photo here.
BTW: Contrapposto is the ensemble that played at Dance & Dine. It's a cool formation matching perfectly to that event.

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News from Basel Strobist

It has been a long time since my last post. Sorry for that, I was very busy. In the meanwhile, I went to 3 Basel Strobist meetings. We are now 4 people, namely Jens, the leader, Peter, Max and myself. We meet approx. each 2 weeks. The results from the first time can be found in the previous post.

The second time we focused on head shots. This, because David Hobby (original Strobist) started a new series of assignment exercises whereas the first topic was about mugshots, ehm... headshots. So, we could perfectly combine lighting 102 with the new assignements. The initial ideas was to take part in the challenge to win some photo equipment. But finally, no one of us passed in since the deadline was very taff. For this evening, we invited a model, namely Christian Morf, who potentially needed some photos of himself for job applications. The assignement contract was on time-for-picture, i.e. Christian spending his time and getting some pictures instead. All on a non-commercial basis.

We set up an umbrella from camera left, a silver reflector on camera right and a background flash lighting the white wall from bottom up. Enough writing, here are the results (click on the images to see a bigger version):




The third meeting was about food. Jens knows a shop owner of a very special shop. He sells exclusive stuff from Switzerland, e.g. cheese, dry meat, tea, etc. As Jens one day entered the shop, he saw a really amateur-like looking image of some cheese. So, he decided to offer the shop owner to take some pictures for him on a goods-for-pictures basis, so the shop owner sponsoring some goods to take photos of and then getting the pictures to make advertisement. It took us approximately 4 hours to get the shots.

We recognized that it is challenging to take food shots. But finally we came up with a solution that used no more than 5 flashes and a macro tent. One flash from behind, coming in high, two from the side, snooted, lighting the background and two from the front, one camera left and one camera right. On the second shot, the camera left one was moved to camera top to light the cheese a bit more. Here are the results:

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Basel Strobist

Some of you probably know that I regularly visit David Hobby's webpage called Strobist. Amongst this page there exist a big photo community, attending and actively participating David Hobby's lighting tutorials. These photo communities meet and exchange photos and know-how in Flickr groups. The most popular is for sure David Hobby's Strobist Flickr group. Many local spin-offs exist and so also one for Switzerland, the Swiss Strobist Flickr group.

And the newest baby is the Basel Strobist Group. Jens Winkler, himself a strobist fan, brought this group up. He asked if anybody in the Basel region would have interest in doing David Hobby's Lighting 102 tutorials.

When I saw this announcement, I did not hesitate to sign in. It has been quite a time now since I was looking around for some photo friends in my living area.

Last Tuesday, we met the first time. It was a very cool evening where we introduced ourselves, discussed a lot and finally also took some photos. Thanks guys for that time, I'm looking forward to the next meeting!

So, here is one shot of our first meeting. I will keep you readers up to date about our further work (ehm, better said: fun). You can also find my homework in the gallery.

Photo by Jens Winkler. Strobist info: 430 on 1/32 with Tungsten gel and Kellogs Bag, 20cm away, bending from 9 to 11, Camera on 3500 K, IS0 100, f5,6, 1/200

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Techniques used for Kaltern photos

Many of you TV Wohlen guys will probably see my pictures from the sports camp in Kaltern. Some of you already asked me stuff about why I did certain things while photographing. Here, I will give you some explanations about the techniques that I used during the sports camp.

Inidirect lighting

When I remember correctly, Angi asked me why I pointed the flash upwards to the ceiling and not towards the actual subject that I wanted to photograph. The answer is simple: Direct flash produces harsh shadows and reflections. When you e.g. look at a picture taken with a compact camera, you will see shadows of the face and body in the background. And you will see bright points in the face where the flash reflected (e.g. on the nose or on the forehead).
With indirect lighting, you produce a much bigger light source which provides softer light than direct flash. Studio photographers use big soft-boxes (= white screens) to get soft light. Of course I can't carry a soft-box with me. But I can bounce the light off a wall or the ceiling. Here is an example where you actually see the effect in the window reflection:

Gelling the flash

Somebody asked me (was it Reto?) why I used that orange foil on top of my flash. Well, simply spoken this is to match the color of the ambient (environmental) light. Tungsten light bulbs produce a somewhat orange light where a bare flash produces "white" light. Experts talk about color temperatures where tungsten has about 3500 Kelvin and Xenon flash about 5500 Kelvin.
The goal of the orange foil on the flash head is to match the flash light's color to the tungsten light to get a nice (neutral) colored light in the photo. Of course, with orange light, the image will be orange. But I can easily correct that in the post-production on the computer. Alternatively, I can set the white-balance on my camera correctly.

Spotting out the subject for a more dramatic effect

Look at this image:


Here, I set my camera to fully manual and the flash to automatic (TTL). The ISO, shutter speed and aperture were chosen to underexpose the background for a couple of stops (if you don't understand that, let's just say "underexpose a bit"). And with the flash I exposed Toni correctly. Actually I had not so much to do, since the automatic flash made the work for me.
Luckily, the bounced flash came from a direction where it made a more dramatic look on Toni's face. A bit of luck is always a good thing ;-)

Using flash off-camera

For more special effects or when I don't have a wall or ceiling to bounce the flash, I can take the flash head off the camera and put it wherever I want to. In the following example, I put the flash to camera right, directly on the floor. The harsh light (+- a point source) coming from the side provided a dramatic look on Reto's face.


This technique needed some more fiddling around with the settings since the off-camera flash must be set to full manual mode (because I have no TTL cable which are very expensive). So I had to set the flash power manually which needs some try-and-error.

Using fill-flash in harsh sun-lit scenes

Some of you might have scratched their head when I ran around with my flash on the camera as the sun was fully shining. But the following two images of our super-model Stephan should show you the difference. Of course I dialed down the flash output power since it was not my main light source. I just used the flash to lift the shadows a bit.

  
Left without flash, right with flash.

What else to say...

I hope you enjoyed my explanations. If you have any questions, please leave a comment, e-mail me, call me or whatever.
Thank you very much for the cool sports camp in Kaltern, I really enjoyed it! I would like to stay in touch with you all!

- bzzzzzzz

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