Sketching Light: An Illustrated Tour of the Possibilities of Flash (Voices That Matter) by McNally Joe

Author:McNally, Joe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2011-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

To do this with line-of-sight TTL from my camera angle would have required taking the master flash off the hot shoe via an SC-29 cord, and most likely bouncing it downwards off a reflective board on the sand in hopes that the TTL signal would skip off that source and ping pong up under the straw roofs to ignite those flashes and give me control of them at camera. Working line-of-sight, as I am generally used to, this would have been my approach, and it most likely would have worked.

But with radio TTL, it’s a no-brainer. At least after some fussing and sorting out. The only Nikon we have worked with the PocketWizard Flex/Mini system is the D3S. We started on the beach with a D3X, but either the camera or the radio system wasn’t having it. We switched up to the D3S, fussed again with all the on/off sequencing for the Flex/Minis at the flashes and at the camera, and voila! Radio TTL transmission occurred.

Overhead the model was a boomed 24″ Ezybox Hotshoe softbox. It’s placed just at the upper edge of my frame, straight onto her. On the sand down at her knees was a reflective TriGrip, but honestly I don’t think it’s doing much, and we may have even removed it during the shoot. There’s no low catch-light in her eyes, which is a good indicator that the overhead light is doing the heavy lifting. She just has to keep her face up into a bit. If she looks down, the picture disappears, along with her eyes.

Two TTL groups, driven by radio! Very cool. The lights underneath the huts needed no tweaking, power-wise, and ended up running at 0.0 compensation. Same for the boomed main flash. Finals on this were D3S, ISO 400, 4” (that’s four seconds), at f/4. She stays in darkness and holds relatively still for the long shutter. Notice the burning bottles are by and large behind her. If I swung those around to the foreground and they starting incrementally lighting her face up, I would have had a sharpness problem with a four-second shutter drag. But as long as she’s in relative darkness, she’s controlled by the fast duration of flash. (When your subject is silhouetted like this in extreme light conditions, I often go to manual focus and use an iPhone flashlight type of app to light up the eyes and pull my focus. Here, because she’s wrapped in the firelight glow, surprisingly the camera did okay with auto focus.)

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