Lessons

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General Flash Q&A

And we have a couple more questions you want to take. Those are ok. So from denny in the cayman islands, how does thie rpt mode on the s p nine hundred work? So it z a stroke risk? Opic flashes what that isthe it's a repeater mood and is like a strobe light and it's for the shutter opens and then the flash goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! And you, khun set um the hearse in other words, the frequency. How many times per second that flash fires and it's for taking multiple exposures really quickly all at once. So you have to have a very, very dark environment and you can do things like a ping pong ball balancing you can see the trails and you can do some other things, so I think I have found a reason to use it. I know that there are scientists that use it to study motion to study, like how people run or maybe golf swings to see how that works. Sports people use that to measure like house only swinging about her kicking a ball because you khun freeze somebody's motion on dso you go and ...

you say I wanted to be this many flashes for this long, and then you get x amount of exposure, so, uh, if you hop into your user manual it will show you it depends on the flash how you adjust all that stuff but the concept is you have to say this is how long I want my shoulder to be open and then you said how many flashes air going be firing inside of that time and there is a there's actually a guide and most user manuals that tell you how to calculate the hurts that you need to set that to to get x amount of flashes an x amount of time yes sir could you get the same thing just what you're doing for yes two for fashion's you can the only difference though is when you're using the repeat mode it's at a very specific interval so you can measure if you're measuring something that happens over time you khun scientifically measure what's happening from this point of this point because you know the exact middle of seconds and so if you're the mythbusters or if you are a scientist or if you're somebody that needs to know like does the velocity of this thing speed up over time, you can measure that exactly using that strip of skopje flash if you're just doing it manually it's not even bits that have to do that right so it's really for dialling and stuff very, very specifically and saying how is this thing working in time and how's the motion so it's something I find fascinating but outside of the realm of science I really haven't found it a use for it although I did a video about it it's on youtube way through a bunch of ping pong balls and darts and we did crazy paddles and gotten anything me threw frisbees around and all kinds of fun stuff so it's on youtube somewhere um it's a video is doing strip of skopje flesh I love that that's your response to so many things well a video on youtube we have a few hundred video so how were like what have we not done a video so very cool all right I have a comment from dj photo who says no question just a big thank you after thirty years as a pro I finally understand the relationship of my flash to my camera for phil flash actually went out and shot this afternoon and understood what I was doing better late than never yeah that's what I like to hear it's like you know just keep going you know what about learning you know that you know, always learning there was another comment that I didn't read too earlier someone had gone to a photo shoot yesterday they were very frustrated almost gave up and they said they heard mark wallace his words in their ear saying don't give up really persevered and had a good shoot so don't give up don't give up thinking that I've had photo shoots where um I've had the internal monologue of oh what is that going on here? I don't know this is crazy I hope I figured this out I mean there's so much pressure what I get myself into and like recently that's happened yesterday no way that that happens a lot um but it presses you teo figure out a solve things and the other thing that's really, really important you don't there's no room for pride there's just no room for pride when you're trying to learn something and so um you know a great example last line if you watch the on location shoot we had stuff that was not working and so I'm like our um john was like, hey, did you check your I s o, which is something I should know it was like all right that's what it is and so if you have people around you that can help you out not for suggestions that know they might not always be right, but a lot of times they are on so you know, don't be afraid to learn one of the things that I love and I get this question all the time, which is how do you know all this stuff? How do you know all these different things about different things? Answer is I've been teaching photography workshops now for almost a decade, I guess and so I've had thousands of students at this point and the questions that they ask in the early days a lot of my didn't know the answers to and so I would look that up figured out and then I took that into my little wallet of knowledge and then the next class would teach something and somebody say oh did you know this I didn't know that so I think my students have taught me more than I have taught them and so if you have the attitude of learning and understanding there's always always room to grow and I don't I don't think I've ever ever taught a workshop where the student didn't teach me something so yeah it always happens very cool attitude hey mark would you mind telling all the cannon users had to turn that custom function back off please no yeah yes so it's the exact opposite so if you go into custom function push your custom function buttonholed it down go to custom function defy it should say three that's where you said it push your set button roll it till says zero because that's where you started hit set and you'll be good to go there's another easy way what is it well I guess it depends on the camera I know my camera hasn't years probably is too if you go in the menus where is this be like menus don't say clear clear your speed light see functional because justin functions creative class e I just learned something that's awesome, but even know that I just like making fun of the two it's on the three. I don't think that's on the two, but that is awesome because we just talked about thiss jason and point yeah, just prove the point, so that's it you're clear on your custom functions and you haven't, but what he's done? You tell me something it's in the menus. So next workshop I teach when they say, how did you do it? I'm like there's two ways to do it awesome tonight I think we may have talked about this earlier, but harry lim has asked again, I noticed that nikon flashes can be triggered through the pop up flash. Can they can and flash to it too? I believe there are some canon cameras that do that. They think this seventy does. Is that correct? Yeah, seventy does that. I don't know if there are any other candidate flat cameras, but I know that if you go onto the chat room, you're about to be told by a million cannon people, which one to do it and which ones don't, but I know the seventy does it, and I think some others do too, so yes, but not as many as candid, I mean, michael has me is no good. A question from deal richards photo who's from england who says why the speed lights have a rectangular head when surely a circular head would give a better spread of light? Uh, because, um your sensor is rectangular, not circular and so it's matching the rectangular sensor and broadcasting light that is equal to that that horizontal format that's why, yeah, so if you're if you're sensor and what you took a picture of was round, it would also be round, but it is trying to mimic them, but yeah, that's why studio strobes in our quantum that we showed you it's round and you get spectator highlights? It looked like the sun squares, so all right, I'm kind of looking through questions, but I know I had seen earlier I don't know it if you would like to talk about people are asking if you could go over the lighting scenarios for some of the photos there on the wall. Yeah, I can do that so that really fast and then we'll call that the end of the day, how is that that's, what we're gonna do some of those tomorrow? Also, what we'll do is, um and this is we're going to go over this quite a bit my name gonna grab that weight bordeaux so john's helping me out, I'm taking what I need now that's what I want okay, I'm going to do this from memory so somebody going toe looked this up online because their videos of both of these pictures and they're going to say it was the wrong thing so um let's start with us this photo right here this is, um a model named sam she's in phoenix she is awesome so that was shot a cz part of a pocket wizard video um and you can actually see the video of me taking this picture on pocket was there dot com I believe and it's part of the many inflect siri's of videos that I did so if you really want to know you can actually see this happening on and also on the promo for the tour there's a clip of that video and you can see if you posit you can see that so what we did is this is a basic three light set up a basic three lights set up which we're going to teach tomorrow on the three lights set up is made of a key light phil light and a kicker or separation light spent separates and s e a yeah separation I didn't go to school very much okay so these three things key phil separation light so on this and this is from the top down this is we're going to show we had our model sam that's her head and go with it and weigh had one key light to camera right right here and that was in a soft box ok, that was a speed light in a soft box I believe it might have been an umbrella but I'm sure let me look I have been an umbrella I can't tell on that picture from the eyeballs and only looking eyeballs and you can see it was an umbrella or soft box I think it was a soft box can't could be wrong right? So that provided the majority of the light on salmon the camera would be right here came so that was the first light the second light on that was a speed light so these are all speed lights and it was shining this way and the way I did that speed light was it was vertical like this not horizontal vertical the reason I did that vertically was I wanted to make sure it lit the entire side of her face and shoulder. So is this way ok like that so that illuminated that and then way used the thing so kelsey enough can you grab one of the the snooze that we're showing this morning the rogues newts um so here's this thing that we're giving some of these away actually and it really restricts the light and I needed to just give a really so highlight on the top of her hair there we go you know that for a second so I put this on the flash and we did this this morning actually um in the hallway for those of you were with us this morning we were bouncing the light you can sort of make these into a little tube like this thing that goes on your flash and this is called a snoot it goes through so what that does is it restricts the lights you're just getting a very, very narrow beam of light because I didn't want light spilling all over the place I didn't want it to spill into the lens because this guy was above our model and it was shooting this way that's how it was and I didn't want this like to spill into the lens and so that was coming right up top right on there so that was the set up three lights set up so this was our key light this was our separation lighter kicker light so I call that a kicker if it's just a highlight and this called a hair light which is the same it's a version of a kicker light so phil on this on this other side of her face I believe we got that by the size of the soft box and so depending on the size of the sock box I'm going to draw this out if you have a soft box is large you can offset that soft box from the position of the person well happen is this part of the soft box will fill the left side of the face and this side of the soft blocks is like going everywhere this will become the phil so you basically we're getting two different things from your soft box so depending on where your position your subject in relation to the soft box, you'll get different results especially if it's really really close and so I have to check and see if it was a soft locks or large umbrella but sort of the similar thing we may have used a reflector on this side I'm not sure also looked at the video I don't think we did but that's that's that one ok the other one this shot behind me girl and flowers her name is brenda she's from the czech republic tool she we shot in a location in phoenix, arizona and um what we found was were and it was a really bright sunny day windy not ideal conditions and we found this place that was pretty cool but had um I had dirt roads behind it had fences, fences always like wire fences always are nasty there were cars that were driving bikes it was on a a place called the farmhouse I think so there were it was like a restaurant place so people are walking so we're like we're going to do so what we did is we found this location it was this little hut or people could like do picnics and stuff there's maybe the size of where we are now and it was covered in these vines that had these yellow flowers just tons of them the problem was inside of that hut it was a really, really dark because it was it was so dark so it was this there was this hut thing like this and had all these vines coming down just covered in those okay, so what happened was as soon as we put her inside there she was absolutely, totally under exposed so we could get all these vines right that's the ambient light but brenda inside there she was just dark so we did if we put this I'm going to take this hut so here's the hut brenda was here was your model. What we did is we put I believe, two umbrellas here to just pop some light behind her tio brighten that up and it's very subtle in this um we also had I believe an umbrella inside to illuminate most of her body just to brighten up her body. So we're just adding light around and it also you can't really tell him this picture but it also added some pop to these flowers so it illuminated them from behind their little translucent s o we did that and we increase the power until we got brenda inside the inside this hut to match the really, really bright background back here and this is like a dirt road and you can sort of see a fence back there all this stuff and so using the flowers were so hide that but the problem what we found with this picture was her eyes were dull really, really dull you couldn't see him and you have beautiful eyes and so what we did is we put just a normal speed light out here and that speed like all it did is it through a catch light in her eyes so is the equivalent of the little white card so we just did that so it is pop some light right into her face and we zoomed it in as far as possible so that we could just illuminate is a small of amount of light as we could. So what that did is thie umbrella pretty much eliminated this but if you look closely her face is just a little bit brighter and the rest of her body and so that's what we did we actually had two different exposures on her body we had one just to give her some light and another one to bring out her eyes in her face so that was a four life set up so I get it right or, you know close there's only three only three lights out there yeah that one wasn't there and this one was just there didn't have numbers so this is bear bear that's bear and not that yeah okay and so is this way yeah like this okay good. I knew I was gonna get it wrong okay today how about the other one did you look at that video I didn't look at that one yet but ok yeah so they're out there that's a problem of like going for my mom and I know that was gonna look it up um yeah that we had light coming from behind in two lights from the front so it's three likes it so this would be the key to fill separation of kicker light okay. Any other questions about that? Yeah. Any other questions are people asking about the michael picture because I could talk to that one as well they did they did ok, so I will say this this is a horrible representation of this photo it did not print I sent the wrong file size and so to really see that go to my my portfolio mark wallace photography dot com and go to faces I believe it's faces and you'll see that in high resolution as it should be seen and maximize on your screen because it's meant to be seen really large in fact we have that printed out in our studio and a really, really big print it's a few feet tall it's pretty amazing when it's really tall but that was uh that was shot for cannon they came out with a brand new super spectacular printer and they wanted us to test the dynamic range of the printer so what I was trying to do was create a photo that had it in a very dark background with very very subtle transitions between the darks and the blacks this printer can't do it so that doesn't look like it should the canon printer could by the way and it did it really spectacularly so what we did is I wanted to have showered up the field and I wanted to have light that fell off almost immediately wanted like to just fall off so we wanted to do is use the inverse square law that says you get a lot of light in the new it just goes away so what that meant is I needed to get a light extremely close to my subject really really really close and um that would give that really rapid light fall off but I also wanted to use it an extremely wide aperture so I wanted to use a two point eight actually wanted to use a little bit wider but we didn't catch anybody on fire so we did is I used the nine stop neutral density filter on the camera and we meet her toe f sixty four so way had a soft blocks way had a michael um he was is like being blasted there is ok that was um when the light was about eight inches away maybe from his face it was really, really, really close his pupils how close it wass and just the magnitude of the bar yeah and so what I did was show the five d mark two and the soft box was just right above his face and I actually had tio crouch down and smooth the camera into the soft box that was sort of right there so that's how close it was and we use some of the wide angle and you can see it's sort of distorted on gwen we shot it was sixty four which is really bright boom sixty for it at eight inches that means the light you're getting about right here you're getting seventy five percent of the light right there and then right here you're getting maybe twenty five percent and by the time against the back of it of the person's head there isn't more light it's just gone so that's what we wanted we want their rapid light followed so because we have sixty four this is sort of geeky stuff but I love it we wanted to shoot it two point eight that's where we wanted to shoot so that is nine stops so what we did is we used a neutral density filter that was nine stops using nine stop interagency filter if you've ever used a knife stop neutral density filter, you'll know you can't see through it way too I know so fun way had tio sort of guess get close hope that were in focus could you can you focus with the nine stop neutra density filters so we mainly focused boom it was like a and then you know, everybody would sort of fall back and the stuff that started coming out of the camera it was sort of like let's just try this. We were amazed and then we printed these big prints so this canon printer from huge prints we're like whoa, this is really amazing is just like you're just being drawn into these pictures and so michael used to work for us. Um he was a good sport. I'm like michael come here, stand there. Plame ah, that hurts, okay? And we're so we printed it out like man it's amazing and so, like kelsey get out here. And so kelsey came and sat on the chair whom we shot the picture of chelsea and she's like, ah, that hurts and we printed out the picture like that's amazing and kelsey had no makeup on during this shoot, so if you look there's kelsey with just no makeup on and so you can see every detail of her face which I love and then aaron, who also works for us. We're like, aaron, get out here. Boo only shot her, and we printed also no makeup. So we shot that, and then we had a model that came in for a shoot. Well, let's, just try this with you, and she had her makeup all done in here. We saturday on boom the horrible, because she was all made up. And so the beauty of these shots is because they're so, like, you can see every single detail of the person's face, the character of the person really comes out as soon as you start trying to hide that and make it beautiful, becomes too artificial and just didn't work. And so, oh, I just love those, I'll promise you a bunch more, but the reason I haven't is people aren't willing to get their picture taken where you can see every single little blemish, and so we've only had two people that we pay, and we they had to do it on your heels would, so I want to die and to do it, my wife and she said, there's, no way, s o, we have kelsey and michael and aaron and matt, also, who works for us, um, his pictures there, as well, that's the story that one