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.



The Setup: I put a black background behind the drum set and placed a few other black things to hide the wall and the little bit of floor that appeared in the shot. Yes, black seamless would have been perfect for this but a) I don't have any and b) it would be too much trouble to move the drums to set it up. I put my 24" softbox at camera right, up about 7 feet and angled down at the drummer's stool, with an SB-900 mounted and set as a remote in Group A. I put the camera on a tripod with the 12-24mm wide-angle zoom lens on it and an SB-900 on the hot shoe to act as the flash master. After some experimentation, I arrived at the following configuration:

• exposure settings: 22mm, ISO 200, f/11, 2 seconds
• outer diffuser of softbox removed, inner diffuser still in place
• master flash set to command the flash in the softbox to provide a total of 8 flashes, 3 per second, at 1/8 power
• master flash in command mode only, not contributing to the exposure

With no flash, those exposure settings still gave me an essentially black frame, so ambient light contributed nothing to the photo. I found that to get the repeat rate I wanted, I couldn't push the SB-900 at more than 1/8 power. Since each diffuser in the softbox eats 1 stop of light, I had to pull one of them out to get enough light on the subject.

The Shoot: Now it was time to bring in the drummer. I discovered very quickly that while I was getting the blur of hands that I wanted, his head didn't move enough from the start position to the end position to give a clear picture of his face. Instead, it was just a big blob. I knew I needed to shoot a static start position with a slightly hotter light to burn his face into the result. Time to pull out the old multiple exposure capability that I described in my earlier post, Roue de Paris. The trick was how to change commands between a single shot and the repeating burst without my model getting fed up and going off to do something far more fun. Or worse, start wailing on the drums with me standing right there going deaf. It's not a quick flip of the switch on the master to change those settings.

The easy solution was to set the camera's popup flash to be the commander for the static position and leave the on-camera SB-900 configured for the repeating sequence. The beauty of Nikon's CLS is that the remote flashes don't have to be reconfigured at all. The master tells them what to do and they just do it. Thus, the sequence became:

• remove the SB-900 from the camera
• pop open the built-in flash
• shoot the static position
• close the built-in and reinstall the SB-900
• shoot the drumming sequence

all with the camera set to take 2 exposures and combine them into a single image.  I ended up setting the flash exposure compensation for the static shot to -1.0 to get the right balance between the 2 sequences.  And I got this:

Click an image to see a larger version.

2 exposures © Richard Critz

While that's pretty cool, I also thought it might look even better with a static ending position burned into it as well. I set the camera for a 3 exposure multiple and popped the SB-900 off and the built-in back open for the third, ending position shot.  

3 exposures © Richard Critz

All 3 shots were still with a 2 second shutter speed but the room was dark enough that he could get up and dance a jig after the flash fired and the camera wouldn't see it. In fact, he might have done just that!