On location with a box of lights and a few ideas.

If you've been following the blog for any amount of time now you know that I get bored using the same stuff to make photographs with.  The idea of doing the same thing over and over again is not very attractive to me.  I know that for everyone like me there are a bunch of people who want to master one set of tools and use them until the end of time.  I guess you could have done that in decades past but the pace of change seems to accelerate with every passing day.  The things we can do with the newest tools were unimaginable seven years ago.  The high ISO performance of the cameras.  The low "buy in" cost of lights.  Even the avenues to learning have exponentially increased.  You can embrace change and have fun with it or you can hope that "this will be the last camera and lens I will ever have to buy!!!!!"  and stick your head in the sand.  While the profession is rife with nostalgia I have only nostalgia for the fees, not for trying to make good, quick work with a recalcitrant Hasselblad 500 CM and a 2000 watt second Norman flash pack.....

I've been playing with LED lights with the same enthusiasm that I had when I started playing with Nikon SB800 flashes and I came to realize that I could replace my heavy duty (and just plain heavy) studio flashes with a Domke bag full of battery powered, hand holdable, computer controllable flashes.  I think I'm starting to get a handle on the color rendering and the difference in power output vis-a-vis flash and I've been impressed with what can be do with a very high tech/low tech product.  

Why do I say "high tech/low tech product"?  Well, the technology of LED lighting is pretty cool and all based on semiconductor processes.  These are really the first semiconductor lights to hit the market in a wide scale way.  And I say low tech because they offer all the real functionality of a light bulb.  You can turn them on and you can turn them off.  One some models of LED panels you can also dim them. And that's all they do.  They don't calculate fill, they don't auto expose and they don't do anything smart.  The panels just sit there and put out light.   That's a pretty low tech set of features to give to a generation raised on "smart flash" but there are some benefits too.  Since the light from the panels is continuous you can actually see what you are getting while you're shooting.  With continuous light you've instantly cut your "recycle" time to zero so you can really lean on that motor drive if you want to.  If your camera will do 10 fps so will these lights.

Anyway,  I love to take risks so when one of my favorite agencies asked me to help them with a project I told them I'd love to do it if they let me use my new toys to do the job.  Surprisingly, they agreed.

I packed some big LED panels and some small ones.  Here's my box full of the small ones:

I've been buying little panels since I first got interested in shooting video.  They come in handy and I like em.  The first generation I bought are the littler ones.  The come from Dot Line Corp.  I call them DLC 60's because they have 60 LED's on them.  I've done some fun stuff with them and I love the fact that I can click all four panels together to make a small soft bank or a thin or thick strip light.  They are the most primitive panels I own because they have nothing but an on and off switch.  (FTC statement:  All these panels were purchased from either Amazon.com or Precision Camera.  No manufacturer or merchant has given me any free lighting product.)

Just before I started working on this project I also bought two new panels from an Amazon vendor.  These are the slightly bigger units in the photo above.  These panels have 160 LED's each.  They put out about one full stop more illumination than the smaller units and have a number of features including:  A dimmer knob that seamlessly allows you to drop the power from full to next to nothing.  A battery check button with a four LED read out on the back.  The ability to take a ton of different batteries.  A filter slot and supplier diffusion, tungsten and slight green correction filters.  And an articulating mounting foot.  

In practice I find the 160 LED lights to be a wonderful compromise between the lower power of the smaller panels and the size and bulk of the larger A/C panels.  The only thing that would materially im prove this product would the be ability to link together multiple fixtures the way you can on the DLC 60's.  

Pricing on Amazon can be wildly kinetic.  When I first looked at these lights they were in the $90 price range.  The next time I looked the price plunged down to $64 each.  That's what prompted me to buy them.  The vendor I bought them from, Fancier, is now showing "out of stock" but several other companies sell an identical unit and their prices seem to have settled in around $79.  At $64 each they were an absolute "no brainer". 

The 160 LED light is sold on Amazon.com by Fancier, ePhotoInc., Cowboy Studios and several others. I've ordered product from each of them and it's all worked just the way it should.  Here is the way the filter slot works.  Nice.

A side view that shows the dimming switch (also, off and on) as well as the shoe mount.  It's articulated so you can put the LED on a still or video camera and tilt it back to bounce the light off the ceiling.

See how the Sony camcorder battery fits into the back area.  If you open the surrounding door you discover that you can also power the units with six double A batteries.  The unit gets warm during operation but not uncomfortably so.

So, I packed up a complement of large and small LED panels and we went to visit the Austin Technology Incubator.  We had a big shot list.  We needed to do portraits of the staff, some of the start up businesses that are currently resident there and even head shots of interns and advisors.  The location was the old MCC building in north Austin.  It originally housed the Micro Computer Consortium and is a great venue to shoot in.  There's a four story atrium that runs thru the center of the building.

We decided to do our first round of portraits on one of the bridges on the third floor just outside the client's front door.  The agency wanted to have images for a website and wanted very narrow depth of field in each shot.  In the past I would have used small flashes in small soft boxes for this kind of work.  Yesterday I just put a couple of small panels on a stand, covered them with diffusion material and brought them in toward the subject until the illumination on their faces matched the intensity and feel of the background.  I was trying to leverage existing light and added light together.

Here's a sample:

The light is a little harder than I would have lit five years ago but I'm working a bit hotter and a bit contrastier than I have in the past.  Yesterday we worked all day long at ISO 1600 on both the Canon 5Dmk2 and the Canon 60D.  The 60D shows a bit more noise at 100% on screen magnification but responds very well to noise reduction in Lightroom 3.0.

Before we started shooting in earnest I stepped back and made a few wide shots with my art director as a stand in.  You can see how simple the set up is for this shot.  If I wanted to go softer I would have added another two panels to the mix, interconnecting them on the same stand and then put a frame with diffusion about a foot in front of them.  You can see that we're working under the shade of the "bridge" from the next level up while the background is getting full light from the building long skylights.

That's the main reason for adding in the fill light from the panels in the first place.

Here are a few notes about using the LED panels:

1.  If you are expecting to use these to overpower the sunlight on a location you will be profoundly disappointed.  They aren't a replacement for big fill flash in sunlight.

2.  The auto white balance on the newest Canons (60D) is incredible.  It's better than the 5Dmk 2 by a good margin.

3.  You'll need to group LED panels or use them in closer than you might be used to with flash to get the right levels.

4.  It's great to have a continuous light source without being anchored to a power cord.

5.  It's great to shoot without having to worry about radio slaves and syncing.

6.  The goal is to become masterful at mixing ambient light with the light from your panels.

7.  You know how the Eskimo people supposedly have something like 50 words for different kinds of snow?  Well I'm starting to build up my vocabulary in the same way when it comes to the different diffusion options.  From very sheer white material to various thicknesses of ripstop nylon to products called "Luxe"  there is a whole world of diffusion out there that most still photographers don't know about.......and every variation has a slightly different look.

8.  Lithium Ion camcorder batteries are cheap, recharge pretty quickly and last a long time.  I've got them for most of my little LED panels.  We shot 700 frames from 10 am till 5 pm yesterday and all the panels made it thru the day without needing to be recharged or have the batteries switched out.  It was pretty amazing performance.

9.  People blink less with continuous light sources.

10.  Everyone I met was interested in LED technology.

In one of the shots we did in the late afternoon we set up nine different panels.  Some were just scattered on the floor.  Others beamed in from down the hall.  A few were set up in a fashion similar to the way I'd light with other light sources.  It was fun to experiment and really easy to see what I was getting.

I'll repeat it again for all the people who love to do things the same way over and over again.  This stuff looks different.  The shooting style changes.  The areas of focus change.  The shooting techniques change.  And none of this is really a bad thing.  In some ways it's just the continuing evolution of photography brought about by digital technology.

We're past the bleeding edge with this technology and we're joyously embracing the ever accelerating changes.  Hop on in.  The water's fine.

Craft, vision and practice. Stories from the art world.

Some people have asked me why, "all of a sudden" I'm posting behind the scenes stuff from photo shoots when there are countless thousands of website and blog sites that are also doing "instructional" stuff.  I'll admit, when I find a challenging new niche to master I become a bit compulsive and start digging like a possessed badger until I feel like I've got a good grip on the subject matter.  Once I understand the technical issues I see how I can fold the knowledge into what I already practice.....just in case it's a catalyst for moving my real work (taking photographs of people) forward.

If you aren't interested in lighting with LEDs you probably should just be patient.  The novelty will wear off soon and they'll just become another set of lights I'll be able to use to do the things I've always done.  Once mastered they will be assimilated and find their niche in my primitive brain, leaving my conscious mind to collide with other projects.

But it does bring up a point that I like to make:  Practice is good.  Practice is learning.  Practice ensures that the eyes and fingers can keep up with the brain and the brain can keep up with your passion.  When I made the comparison of practicing photography to practicing swimming I got several (heated) responses telling me that they were nothing alike.  One person claimed that he could put his camera down for months at a time and, when the muses struck, he could pick it up on a whim and create a masterpiece.  I went to his website in search of masterpieces.  I found only pixels.  People with a paucity of passion, however gifted, want to believe that they can play with art in a detached way.  But anecdotal evidence about artists in general says,  "NO."

Like Edison's inventions successful art is built on the 1,000 or 10,000 failed trials that came before.  There's no real shortcut to the process of failing and challenging and changing.  No workshop will provide the same humiliating experience.  No handbook will provide the emotional context of despair with resolve that great artists endure.  But it's the need to keep moving toward the unknown that leads to the journey that can lead to the great works.

There's a great book about art called:  "Art and Fear: Observations On the Perils (and rewards) of Artmaking" by Ted Orland and David Bayles.  Nestled in among the other nuggets of knowledge is a story about a ceramics teacher who challenges the class like this:  He divides the class in two.  He tells half the students that their final grade will be solely determined by the sheer weight of the ceramic pieces that they each make.  He tells the other class that they need only make one piece but that the grade will be determined by their best piece.

The quantity half of the class gets to work in earnest, cranking out piece after piece.  The quality side of the class thinks and thinks and thinks, and then,  partially paralyzed by the nature of their task and their need to achieve perfection they finally produce.

In the end the students from the quantity half of the class produce far more good work and even far more great work than the other half of the class.  The constant experimentation led to making each piece better than the one before it.  Mistakes were resolved, their hand skills blossomed.  They understood the limits of their materials.  And then they challenged the limits of their imaginations.  It was a great blending that could only have taken place thru the process of experimentation and active exploration.

It was a revelation to me to read that particular chapter.  I stopped sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike and started experimenting and shooting more.  In this same vein I'm on a constant quest to see what different cameras, lenses and lights can do for my vision.  And I KNOW that when I shoot more quantity I get luckier.  There's a groove and I get down in it and produce.  And it all gets easier.  I can read the light.   Controls on the cameras fall right to hand.  It's easier and easier to direct the people in front of the camera.  Obversely, when I'm dormant for weeks I seem disconnected from the processes, timid about directing people.  Everything feels like stop and start.

I've tried to be transparent in the blog and what you are living thru as readers is my "infatuation" stage with a new technology.   And it is different than flash or hot lights.  The nature of the light is different and the way we use them is different.  It's dictated by their strengths and weaknesses.  Soon infatuation will give way to comfortable and we'll be back to looking at expressions and composition and what not.  But in a big view way this is all part of my personal creative process.  I shot for Zach Scott for hours on Saturday.  I shot all day with Jana on Sunday.  I learned stuff.  I rejected stuff.  I'm happy.

Vision is a great thing to have.  And so is style.  Unless it becomes a trap and keeps you producing the same stuff you've done for years.  It may be good for products to be consistent but I would argue that nothing kills art quicker.

By Popular Demand. Behind the scenes stuff. Or, "Does this lens make the photographer look fat?"

Since I posted photos from my shoot yesterday I've gotten dozens of requests for "behind the scenes" shots that would show how everything was positioned.  Fortunately my friend, Amy Smith, was assisting me on the shoot and she kindly provided some behind the scenes coverage.  I hope these will be help you more accurately visualize how I was placing the lights and how it affected the overall look of the shots.  

The first one is a studio shot done with my favorite light source, the big-ass 6 foot by 6 foot scrim.  I'm using a Photoflex frame and one layer of white diffusion. As you can tell I like to use the light source as close in as I can.  I have black panels on the shadow side to make sure that too much bounce from the studio's white walls doesn't fill in too much and degrade the contrast I wanted.  These are quick edits and no,  I haven't edited out fly-away hair, etc.  If the images were heading straight from here to a client we'd  retouch them first.  

While strobes might yield more depth of field and add a bit of sharpness I think you would agree that these images look more cinematic and life like.  Afterall, we chase fast lenses in all the reviews and forums,  doesn't it make sense to use them close to wide open from time to time?  Isn't that why we spent the extra money?

Yes.  You can do this with a small flash.  Really easily.  Almost as easily as just tossing up three small light panels and taking a look through your camera's finder....... Funny.  I worked at color correction and did a custom white balance.  Amy was shooting jpeg and seemed to hit the right WB everytime.  Live and learn.

I call this, "lights on a stick".  Love the wooden tripod.  Goes so well with the tennis shoes.

It's cruel to use small lights without even the tiniest bit of diffusion.  I didn't want anyone to report me for "cruelty to models" so I added some Rosco Luxe to each panel.  I think it's endearing that the little panels I use snap together to make bigger panels.  I have two more coming this week........

I'm no fashion photographer.  That's for sure.  But I kept hearing about clamshell lighting and I thought I'd try my own variation with my LED lights.  I tossed a couple of 500's on the floor, covered with some half stop diffusion and I put the 1000 through a two stop Westcott Fast Flags diffuser and blazed away, screaming, "Pout for me baby and I'll make you a star!"  Or something from "Zoolander".  I can hardly remember......

And guess what?  I had enough light to shoot hand held.  Miracles happen every day.......

That's it for the behind the scenes stuff.  Is this something you want?  Should I post more set up shots?  Just curious.  I'm not really comfortable flashing gang signs, participating is extreme snowboarding and saying "bro" and all the frenetic stuff we see on other blogs.  But I am happy to show you where we put the lights.......