Fiddler on the Roof

Ok, so it's a bad joke. "Sunrise, Sunset" is the name of one of the songs in the musical "Fiddler on the Roof", one of the classics and one where I still know most of the music despite never having actually seen it on stage, only on film.

What's that have to do with photography? Nothing, except that today's post is a short and sweet one about sunrises and sunsets. These shots are all about playing with the White Balance setting on the camera to enhance the colors rendered by the camera. Facebook friends have already seen them.

The sunrises are first (well, duh) and were shot with the camera set for a standard, cloudy white balance. For these shots, I had to boost blacks and highlights to improve the contrast, and boost the saturation of the reds and yellows just slightly (all in Lightroom). With a little more time to fiddle with the camera, I probably could have gotten closer to this directly out of the camera but I was trying to snatch the photo in the 3 minutes where the light was just right.

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/25 © Richard Critz

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/80 © Richard Critz

Pro glass

The Nikon D300 (and its bigger brothers) are incredible performers in low light. One can shoot at ISO 1600, and even higher, without fear of luminance or color noise spoiling the frame. Even up at ISO 3200 on the D300, the noise is easily managed with small adjustments in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. Unfortunately, even with that capability, being limited to a maximum aperture of f/5.6 when fully zoomed on my consumer-grade zoom lenses has made it a challenge to get photos in dim auditoriums. It also makes portraiture more difficult by requiring more light from the strobes and having too large a depth-of-field.

An iPhone picture

Since I'm doing much shooting in dim auditoriums and am looking to start trying to do some portraiture professionally, I decided to take the plunge and buy the first item on my drool list, the Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II lens. This is a professional grade beast that seems universally loved by the shooters who have it. If nothing else, I'll build up my left arm just holding the thing!

Technically, it features a couple of huge advantages. First, unlike my other zooms, its maximum aperture doesn't change as it zooms. It's a solid f/2.8 across the board. This gives me a full 2 stops more light through the lens when it's racked out to 200mm. Second, it has Nikon's latest generation vibration reduction technology (VR II) which lets me shoot without a tripod at much slower shutter speeds than would otherwise be possible. Nikon's marketing materials claim VR II allows you to hand-hold 4 stops slower than would be possible without VR II. Most of the reviews I've read contend that's pretty accurate.

Mega-softbox

It was a few minutes before sunrise and it had snowed just enough the night before that the schools had declared a 2-hour delayed opening. The sky was still thick with clouds, almost to the ground, and there was enough fresh, new snow to make everything clean and white again. Sounds were muffled and the air was still. In short, it was one of those rare mornings that make New England winters worthwhile!

The clouds and the snow also made the light amazing. It was broad and soft, with no harsh shadows. It really was like being inside a gigantic softbox. The challenge, of course, was to make the camera see and, more importantly, reproduce what I was seeing. These are exactly the conditions that highlight the difference in dynamic range (the difference between the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows) between the human eye and a camera. The eye is so much more capable of adjusting to extremes.

Playing the drums

Tonight's installment will be short, I promise. (And less Greek, Kali! Well, maybe not, but I'll try.)

When I got my SB-900 flashes, one of the many cool features I discovered in the manual is the ability to do a repeating strobe effect. This is definitely not something my older SB-600 flash could do. I immediately had the idea of using it to catch my older model, Thing 1, playing the drums. Of course, the first time I tried, I really didn't have a clue what I was doing and failed completely. I didn't even keep any of the shots, they were that bad.

However, not to be deterred, I kept studying, playing, experimenting with other lighting and mulling the shoot over in the back of my mind. Finally, a couple of days ago, I thought I knew enough to try it again. First, I had to wait for nightfall. I knew that I needed to have essentially no ambient light because I was going to have to use a 2 second shutter speed and I needed the camera to record only what it could see when the flash was firing. The room where the drums live has LOTS of windows, so nighttime shooting was the only option.

Flash? Oh no!

Since I first picked up a camera with malicious intent again 2 years ago, I have largely avoided situations requiring me to use flash or otherwise add to the existing light in my shots. Yes, I had a Speedlight (Nikon SB-600) that I would use when I absolutely had to, but I hated the results I got and no amount of "but you just have to bounce the flash" made it better. In short, the results sucked. Thus, I confined myself to outdoor photography and to taking advantage of the outstanding low light capabilities of my D300. To be sure, I got some great pictures within those limitations but I was still restricted.

Back in October, I decided that I could no longer live with these limitations and that I had to figure out how to use, really use, flash to control the light in my photos. To that end, I started reading everything I could find and watching every video I could lay my hands on. I discovered Joe McNally's blog and video courses (arguably the most amazing lighting artist around and a damn fine photographer, too), David Hobby's blog (aka the Strobist), training from Scott Kelby, Neil van Neikerk's blog (a wizard with shaping a single, on-camera flash so that it looks like you didn't use a flash), Russ MacDonald's blog (anything and everything that should have been in the Nikon Speedlight manuals and is not) and many other resources as well.

I learned concepts for shaping light, diffusing light, adding more lights, setting flashes to provide different amounts of light (you can do that? -- who knew!), the joys of Nikon's Creative Lighting System (CLS) -- an advanced wireless system for controlling their lights (very effectively, too; see McNally above) -- and on and on. I discovered many reasons why my previous efforts had been destined to fail from the outset. I learned, really learned, how to operate my Speedlights and that all those "weird" adjustments not only are not weird, but are entirely necessary if one is going to make good photos.

I had never realized that the truly good pictures of people that you see in print and on the web look NOTHING like the reality of the situation in which they are made. Just outside the view of the lens in those photos, there are softboxes, umbrellas, reflectors, diffusers, strip lights and lord only knows what else. It may be pitch black dark when the image looks like daylight or it may be broad daylight and look like the middle of the night. And so, I began the process of completely remaking the way I think about light when shooting people, even outdoors. I've only made my first baby steps down the path but I've had a couple of successes that have made me think that I might, just might, have the beginnings of a clue how to do this.

I knew that in order to do this I was going to need more equipment so after much study, I decided the first steps needed to be with Speedlights, both for size and cost. The softbox and other light shaping tools I got to start with all had to be models that would work with a Speedlight rather than requiring a studio strobe of some sort. Then, it was time to experiment.  Experiments require victims. My family have been thoroughly victimized.  Luckily, they aren't complaining (much) and we're starting to get some really cool shots.

The first success was the family Christmas portrait. Ok, I didn't actually shoot it until AFTER Christmas but it's still the family Christmas portrait. I already think I would light it differently now but using what I knew at the time, I set my key light to camera right, an SB-900 shooting through a Lastolite Tri-Grip diffuser. The second light started as my SB-600 shooting through a Lastolite 40" umbrella with the bottom half flagged (blocked with opaque material to stop the light) set to camera left. I triggered the camera remotely and shot with the camera tethered to my laptop so that we could all see the results immediately. I had the lights balanced just so and we were ready, so we all went to change to "real" picture clothes. And the wheels fell off.

Now I knew that our picture clothes were darker than what we had been wearing during the set up and I expected to have to make some minor tweaks to the flash values as a result. What I didn't expect was for the SB-600 to go nuts and starting firing at full power, complaining the whole way that it was unable to deliver the requested flash power, and totally blowing out the image. I didn't figure out until later (with the help of Russ MacDonald, in fact) that the problem was all due to the way TTL metering is done in the camera. If I had been working behind the camera, rather than trying to be in the picture, I could easily have set the camera to spot meter just on a face, locked the value in, recomposed and shot the picture and had no trouble. In retrospect, doing that kind of self-portrait is probably done with less frustration by using manual flash settings and foregoing TTL metering altogether.  In the end, I ended up switching out the SB-600 for an SB-900 (more powerful) because I misunderstood what it was telling me. And through dumb luck (more accurately known as "my oldest son moved around just enough to get his face into the metering part of the frame") we got the shot. And, in my opinion, it's the best picture of the 4 of us we've ever had.

As always, click on a photo to see a larger version.

65mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/6 © Richard Critz

82mm, ISO 400, f/5, 1/80
© Richard Critz

Next up, I tried a technique for "simulated sunshine". This was shot indoors on a snowy day.  If you look closely enough, you can see that there is some ambient light from outdoors coming through the window behind the Christmas tree. The light, however, is a bare SB-900 set on a stand, about 12 feet off to camera right, slightly behind my model and about 8 feet above the floor. I used no diffuser, no gel, no light modifier of any kind, just a bare flash and a willing subject (aka Mr. GQ). The flash was zoomed (unfortunately I don't remember to what setting) to give the light more punch. And it really is, I think, a creditable imitation of the hard light of the sun.

60mm, ISO 400, f/8, 1/80
© Richard Critz

Finally, I changed subjects (also willing, though more likely to complain about the lights going off in his eyes) to try for a dramatic profile shot. For this, I set the 24" softbox at camera right, facing exactly across the shot (parallel to the camera's focal plane) and with the edge closest to the camera directly in line with my model's nose. In order to avoid the "zombie effect" (which would have been somewhat masked by his glasses anyway), I had him keep his nose to the softbox but to look to his right with his eyes only. It's not much use for soccer player cards and school IDs, but the soft quality of the light along with the dramatic fall off into shadows was exactly the effect I was looking for. As a side note, this was shot only a few minutes after the "imitation sun" photos above, in exactly the same place in the room and with daylight still streaming through the windows behind the Christmas tree.

46mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/100
© Richard Critz