Neil Danton

Fortunately, we both managed to avoid a soaking, although I came pretty close to it.

A second look at the back-story to creating a fairly simple editorial image. Nothing remarkable in the image as such, pretty standard fare for an editorial feature in a sunday newspaper. Fairly shallow depth of field to focus on the “widget” (yep did the reverse image as well, with the subject in focus and the “widget” out of focus).

It’s the setting-up that I’m detailing…

The subject is an engineer and the “widget” is part of a system that assists visually impaired people with swimming. Anyway, the sunday newspaper in question really wanted a image taken in a swimming pool environment and a local leisure centre were happy to oblige us – but we could only have access before they opened for the day (no cameras or phones allowed in swimming pool areas nowadays).

OK fine then. “What time are you open to the public?”

“7am”

“and what time do the staff open-up?”

“06:30/06:40″

Now that in itself wouldn’t be a problem, nice early start, get shoot done, off for breakfast.

One small fly in the ointment – having experienced shooting swimming competitions, I know that generally it takes AT LEAST an hour, sometimes longer, for all the metal, glass and electronics in a camera to adjust to the very high humidity in an indoor pool area.

So three conditions then. Opening time (fixed), kicking us out time (fixed), camera equipment fogging up (hmmm, maybe a variable there).

I had to make a choice on equipment at 6am and stick to that choice. The gear was put into the passenger foot-well of the vehicle and I drove to the pool with the vehicle heater on full blast. Happened to be in a period of fairly warm & humid weather which rarely happens here. Brilliant, I’m wearing shorts & a t-shirt and the heater thinks it’s mid-winter.

Arrived at the pool, almost fell out of the vehicle which, even with the windows open, was like being in a greenhouse by then, left the heater on until the moment we gained access at 06:40, and then carried the gear inside wrapped in a fleece!

The pool area was fairly hot, but the actual pool is covered with a canvas overnight so the humidity wasn’t over-bearing. By the time the canvas had been reeled in we were set to go, 5 or 6 images and we were done, just as I could feel the humidity starting to rise from the water.

No fogging on camera or lens, and exited the leisure centre at 06:59

Above is my preferred image, but the paper used this one:

Think that’s the earliest I’ve done a shoot, done post-processing, transmitted to picture desk, had breakfast, and all by 8am!

TTFN

…and other light modifiers.

This post is pretty long as it seemed to grow legs of it’s own and get bigger and bigger as I wrote it, so grab yourself a coffee or your preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and sit down and relax for a while…

I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits on this-here blog from search terms that refer to umbrellas or white umbrellas or shoot-through umbrellas or combinations of the above.

So, if the whole idea of using umbrellas is confusing you, I’ll try and give you the idiot’s guide to using them (the idiot being the person giving the guide, not you) and in the process try and cover as many of the queries as I can.

Our cousins across the water may need to substitute “flash” for “strobe” from here-on as that’s the term they generally use for a hot-shoe flash.

First up I need to explain that if your camera has one of those green-spot settings – otherwise known as “use this setting and let’s all hope the camera will work out WTF I’m shooting and give me incredible images” – then I probably can’t help you, because you need to start taking control.

Similarly if you are using flash in ETTL mode (that’s the Canon term, not sure about Nikon or others) or automatic flash control, some of this stuff won’t work either. From what I can gather, the Nikon auto-flash seems better than the Canon, but I’m not changing brands now, and I rarely use auto-flash anyway. That’s just me, old fashioned. OK just old.

Using flash, whether it’s the hot-shoe type or the bigger studio type, is all about you controlling the light you want for your subject, rather than letting the light control you. When I use lights everything is in manual mode. The camera’s exposure, and the flash output, but not usually the camera focus, although I do revert to that on occasion.

An umbrella is just a light modifier and the circumstances in which you use light modifiers are so varied and diverse that it’s more than I can cover in a single post, I’d need to write a book *ding – lightbulb moment*.

There are however some generalisations. Mostly there’s hard light and soft light (and you use modifiers to get the “soft” bit). Then there’s directional modifiers, basically converging or concentrating, and the opposite of diverging or spreading.

Umbrellas generally fall into the spreading and softening category, although it’s not always as simple as that. There are shoot-through umbrellas (usually white), and reflective umbrellas (usually white, silver or gold). My preference is white shoot-through, for a couple of reasons:

Haven’t written so much for a long time without throwing in some images, so here goes:

This is a reflective silver umbrella. It’s a very small one, for head-shots or half-length portraits:

and with the flash firing:

Same thing, but the gold version:

and with the flash firing:

White shoot-through umbrella opened ready for action:

and with the flash firing:

There are also many other light modifiers of course. The ones I use are a couple of different soft-boxes, one a tiny Lumiquest mini soft-box that fits on a 580EX flash, and a 60cm (2ft) Ezybox soft-box that fits into the front pocket of my gear roller-bag. Bigger is nearly always better, but not when you always work on location and are 99% of the time on your own without an assistant. I also (occasionally) use a snoot, which is a cone-like device to really concentrate the light into a small area, often used by glamour or fashion photographers behind and to the side of a subject, just to light the hair. Not what I use it for!

Here’s a few examples of different light modifying…

First up, outside, no light modifier:

Outside with a 60cm soft-box:

and outside with 2 white shoot-through umbrellas:

Moving inside, shot with a mini beauty dish (hard light):

Inside with a softbox (soft but quite concentrated light):

and inside with 2 white shoot-through umbrellas (softened light and sprayed everywhere!):

and again:

No I haven’t suddenly started doing family portraits, that was shot for the Money section of a Sunday newspaper!

I mentioned a snoot earlier, this is one that’s designed for small flash instead of studio lights:

and can be fitted with a grid to concentrate light even more:

Here’s an example of an image shot with a snoot:

and one shot with a snoot fitted with a grid:

So back to the original “hit list” of search terms by which people came to my blog, and some answers:

TTFN

It was a lot trickier to line up all 4 eyes than you might imagine!

TTFN

…Don’t They?

Apologies if you’ve just used a search-engine and are looking for the 1969 Sydney Pollack directed film about a dance marathon, but this is nothing to do with it.

This is about me shooting horses, actually more about shooting a horse-trainer, and only shooting with a camera.

I was assigned last week by one of the “Sundays” to head out into the countryside early on a very cold morning to shoot a feature on former jockey, now trainer, Jim Culloty. Jim won many races as a jockey, including the Cheltenham Gold Cup three times in succession aboard Best Mate.

I met up with the journalist and we arrived together, so while the interview was taking place, I was off scouting locations and setting up lights.

By the time the interview was finished, I had my shot-list sorted out in my head, and lights set-up in two locations.

First up was a shot in the Yard, one-light with a mini softbox:

Then there was an archway that led from the Yard to the Gallops and I wanted something there. This was going to be quite difficult to balance the daylight coming into the arch from the Yard, with the darkness underneath the arch itself. I had set-up two lights on stands behind the conveniently located doors that hid them, both firing out towards the entrance at about 45deg. As best I could guess I had the power about right, at least that’s what the images of the back of my hand were telling me!

I had my subject lead a horse through the archway, and believe it or believe it not, I’d nailed the flash-power with the 1st image:

I made another couple in different locations, here’s one:

The one that was used was actually taken in one of the stables, no lights, just subject interacting with one of the horses. Out of about 6 frames I chose this one to transmit and it was used pretty-near full page width:

That was it. 15 minutes to set-up lights, 20 minutes shooting, 5 minutes to pack-up lights and 30 minutes & 20 miles down the road before I could feel my fingertips again.

TTFN

…appreciate the things you take for granted, when suddenly you have to do without one of them.

Few people even think about the “normal” things that are always “just there” like electricity, running-water, cable or satellite TV and nowadays of course internet access. I recently had to struggle along for a week without broadband, as the average life expectancy for a Netopia modem that Eircom supply seems to be about six months (I’m now on my third).

The latest “doing without” is running water, as a result of the pumping station that supplies half of Cork City being under several metres of water. Why it was located in a place that to my certain knowledge floods on average once a year I don’t know. OK, so it’s never flooded that much before, but in a country where it rains so much, it comes as a surprise to me that it comes as a surprise to others that sometimes … it rains a lot.

The waffling excuses valid explanations being uttered so far, such as “unprecedented” and “once in a lifetime occurrence” aren’t bringing much comfort to the 100,000 people that are struggling along at the moment. Of course there are lots of politicians, public authorities and utilities helping to put things right by scoring points off each other in the media as to whose fault it all is, but right now they’d be appreciated a lot more if they offered someone the use of their showers.

The fact that the government has now got involved and set-up a “task-force” fills me with lots of confidence of course, and so I now expect things should be resolved by 2025 (and I don’t mean almost half-past eight).

So anyway, last week I needed to get an image of a chef with an “alternative Christmas lunch” and the dish was salmon, which I thought was appropriate. Salmon – fish – water – get it? Oh c’mon, I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but I’m doing my best under difficult circumstances. I’ve had to reduce my coffee intake by 50% due to lack of water.

This was going to be a real quick image. Chefs are always busy, so I only had a few minutes with Paul, the head-chef at Actons Hotel in Kinsale. Easiest thing was to kill-off the ambient light and distracting background by under-exposing the scene by around 4EV, and lighting him solely with lighting I have control over.

I always keep one flash in my bag that is set to slave mode and manual power which works nicely with an ST-E2 transmitter. It’s a struggle sometimes if used outdoors, as the infra-red transmitter doesn’t always fire the flash, but indoors I’ve never had a problem. Used a mini-softbox on the flash, 3 test shots to get the exposure correct, half a dozen shots of different angles and poses and job done:

I then took a different dish with a different subject (thanks Tania), and then one of the two of them together and all done. 15 minutes, start to finish.

If only the engineers could get the water supply back on that quickly.

TTFN