problem solving: light as a maximizer

When commissioned by ad agency Publicis to shoot a print ad series for Oral-B I was immediately captivated by the concept: people in important situations who are distracted by food caught in their teeth. The conceptual humor was right up my ally. I was eager to dig in.

One final photo from the series. "If it's stuck in your teeth, it's stuck in your head."

The art director was concerned that the lighting on the location shot and on the separately-shot food item wouldn't match. Poorly planned lighting would have been a dead giveaway that the image was a composite. At our first pre-production meeting we figured that we could shoot the food in the same light as the location shot: just stick the food in the hospital bassinet, shoot it, and enlarge it for the composite.

This didn't work for a couple of reasons. First, we still weren't sure what food we were going to use as the baby even during the nursery shoot. We were debating BBQ ribs, strawberries, etc... We went with broccoli the day after. So we were going to have to shoot it separately anyway. Second, smaller food items were going to look wrong even if they were in the exact same lighting because they would be enlarged.

*this gets a little complicated after the jump*

rockland wildlife

improv photo - rubin

When improv comedy duo Ruby Marez and Binu Paulose AKA "Rubin" commissioned a promotional photo for their live performances I got to do something I've wanted to do for awhile. I've "shared" photo information from separates frames before to make a better moment. Sometimes I've composited one person's facial expression from one frame onto another. It's a good skill to have when working with seven or eight-person improv teams who go wild in front of the camera. But, this time I got to plan out frame-by-frame a fully-composited eight-person group photo using only two models and a lot of character.

Thanks Rubin!

holga picture success

It's been a little while, but I finally have a finished Holga photo talked about in a previous post. It's from a shoot I did with Mike Walters of Mystery Circuits.

I LOVE IT! I'm so impressed with the aged photo quality that the plastic lens adds. The mood is exactly right and the camera worked great with my off camera strobes (you can see my blue-gelled background flash behind Mike on top of the TV). I'm so excited about this addition to my camera bag, that I went ahead and added a holga gallery to the main website (even though there's only one picture in the gallery).

I intend to whip out the little red holga whenever I have lights set up. Please hold me to it.

I scanned the 2 1/4" color negative on a flatbed scanner with a negative scan feature. It doesn't give the file size that a dedicated negative scanner would, but it allows me to scan to the edge of the film. That way I can show off the heavy holga vignetting and the nifty fuji data burned in on the edges. Cool.

tech nerd: pocket wizard relay mode

This video explains Pocket Wizard's relay mode and how to apply it in a situation where you want to use a remote camera with off-camera lighting.

I stayed up late on Tuesday night to have this post ready for Wednesday, then I realized what day it was. I don't think anyone can get away with a tech blog posting on April 1st after David Hobby's forehead slapper last year. So I waited.

So, how can you use your off camera strobes with a remote camera? This can come in handy in a number of situations including indoor sports photography like basketball where you're using a pre-focused remote camera pointed toward anticipated action. Often you've already put up some lights to use with your primary camera, but you want to make full use of them and sync them up with the remote camera as well. I've seen forum postings saying to just put everything on the same channel and fire them all at once. This ends up not working and causing all kinds of confusion. Here's the solution. Enjoy.


tech nerd: pocket wizard relay mode from Jeremy Bales on Vimeo.


Basically you need to set the transceiver on your remote camera to relay mode. It will receive a signal on one channel and send a signal on a different channel. This is an automatic function built into the Pocket Wizard transceiver (there's no switch to flip) and since everything happens in a split second, it can be confusing. The relay is you remotely trip the camera and the camera remotely trips the lights. Clever.