Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 12:08AM | in Photography 
Emma; Sydney, Australia; 2009 ©Gabriel Ponzanelli
This photograph was taken as a lighting experiment. For those interested, I used 2 Nikon Speedlights, one on camera left (SB-600) on a stand with a shoot-through umbrella and one mounted on the camera's hotshoe (SB-800) with a dome diffuser pointed to the ceiling.
Monday, April 27, 2009 at 5:44AM | in Reviews 
For a long, long time I struggled to get a hang of Nikon's Creative Lighting System (CLS). A few years ago I bought a Nikon D70s and a Nikon SB-600 Speedlight Flash with the intention of playing with the possibilities of remotely controlling the flash unit without the need for extra (and expensive) hardware. The original manual unfortunately doesn't do a very good job at explaining how this works and the flash units have many settings hidden in the menus that make the whole thing quite confusing.
After a while, and a lot of trial and error (mostly error), I finally figured it out. But by then I was moving onto a Nikon D700 and bought an SB-800 to add to my portable setup. That's when things got frustrating. There are so many ways to control 2 or more flashes with these cameras that understanding all the possibilities is not easy. You can control both as remotes and trigger them with the on-camera flash, or you can use the SB-800 mounted on camera as a master-only to control the other one remotely, or you can use the SB-800 as an actual flash and master, etc. To make things even more confusing, the manuals aren't much help and the user interface on the flash units is not what I'd call user friendly.
I finally decided to search for some external help and came across The Nikon Creative Lighting System by Mike Hagen.This book makes it very easy to figure this all out. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to read, although it does repeat itself quite a bit. For example, there’s a complete chapter for each recent flash unit that Nikon produces and the explanations are thorough enough in each that there’s a lot of duplication of content. I guess if you only own one model it won’t matter and it actually makes sense. The book fully explains the modes and operations of each speedlight, including the SB600, SB800, SB900, SU800, SB200, and even the R1C1. It goes into how these integrate with most of the Nikon cameras of the last few years and briefly touches on some techniques on how to use the system.
The book is divided in 16 Chapters, roughly:
The book is great at helping you set up and understand CLS from a technical point of view. However, the application side of things is not a strong point. If you’re looking for creative inspiration you’ll be sadly disappointed. The photographs used for the examples are really not that interesting and in many cases are just plain bad. This is a shame really as the Creative Lighting System lets you do some pretty cool stuff.
In summary, if you’re looking for a book that gives you clear step-by-step instructions on how to set up the camera and flash units, you’ll be very happy with this one. It’s truly a replacement for the manuals when it comes to CLS. However, if you’re after creative applications or generic lighting techniques, this is not the book you want.
book, lighting, photography, review, speedlights Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 8:42AM | in Photography I got a few emails after my post about overpowering the sun with small flashes. I'll explain briefly what I did using my own equipment, but there's also an abundance of information on the Internet on how to do this. I suggest you go over to the Strobist blog, where David Hobby has done a great job explaining how to light using speedlights. There's a wealth of information there.
Additionally, if you're using Nikon equipment, Mike Hagen's book The Nikon Creative Lighting System
There's also Joe McNally's new book The Hot Shoe Diaries
Anyway, on to what I did. The photograph below is one I shot recently using the same equipment. I used a couple of Nikon SB-800's and one SB-600 fired through a translucent material held by 2 friends as a makeshift softbox. They were all fired with Pocket Wizards. I used a large-ish aperture (I think it was around f2.8) and set the shutter speed to 1/1250th of a second. That underexposed the ambient by about 1 stop. I was using the Nikon D70s which somehow can shoot at very high speeds without screwing up the flash. When an SB is mounted, the sync speed is 1/500, but if it's on a Pocket Wizard you can shoot at any speed. Anyway, I pumped all the flashes to maximum power and managed to get the image shown in that post.
Another not so extreme example is below. I shot that quickly with a friend just to test the speedlights with less harsh light. For this one, I had a Nikon SB-800 on camera as fill and as a master, and an SB-600 on an umbrella on camera right as the main light. I shot in Aperture Priority with an aperture of f/5.6. I underexposed the background (or ambient light) by 1 stop, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second. Then I turned on both flashes and did a test shot with the SB-800 at -3.0, it's minimum power (as I only wanted a bit of fill) and the SB-600 at 0,0 (which was the main). Based on the results, I played around with the ratios and ended up with -1.7 on the SB-800 and 2.0 on the SB-600.
The cool thing about using an SB-800 mounted on the hotshoe is that you can control the power to each strobe from it's display, so you don't have to go to each one to increase or decrease the power.
Everything was done using Nikon's wireless flash system, called CLS (for Creative Lighting System). For those interested, here's how to set up the SB-600 and SB-800 to become master and/or slave:
SB-800: To turn it into Master (or Commander):
That's it. Now the SB-800 is the commander Flash. You can turn it into a slave by following the same steps but selecting REMOTE instead of MASTER.
SB-600: To turn it into a Slave (or Remote):
If you do that, you'll be able to control the power of both from the back of the SB-800 mounted on your camera as long as they're both using the same channel. To overpower the sun all you need to do is slightly underexpose the ambient light (aka The Sun) and use the strobes as the main lights. Obviously there's a limit to this. If the sun is way too bright and/or your strobes are too far away from the subject, it won't work.
lighting, nikon, photography, speedlights Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 10:30PM | in Photography
Emma; Sydney, Australia; 2009 © Gabriel Ponzanelli
This shot was one of my experiments with small speedlights. It was shot using one SB-800 on camera as a commander and a little fill light, and one SB-600 through a shoot-through umbrella from camera right as the main light just out of frame. I wanted to create a soft light with minimal shadows.
Anyway, I have another shoot with Emma planned soon. I need to get onto it quick as she'll be moving to Queensland, Australia very soon.
fashion, lighting, photography, speedlights Friday, March 20, 2009 at 11:02AM | in Photography 
I've been experimenting with my speedlights to understand their full capabilities. Last week I went out with the guys in a lighting class I'm taking, in midday with extremely harsh sunlight, with the plan of overpowering it with flashes. After using a proper strobe, we tried a similar setup using a pair of Nikon speedlights (an SB-800 and an SB-600) fired using Pocket Wizards. Since I was using my old D70s, I realized I could sync past the 1/500th that's published as the official sync speed. I'll write a full post soon with the details, but the result was really encouraging. The above shot was done using just the speedlights as a test. Thanks to the teacher for posing for us!
lighting, photography, speedlights Monday, March 16, 2009 at 9:30PM | in Photography 
I'm doing a lighting class at the moment. I've never really shot in a studio properly as all of my photography has been on location, so I decided it'd be a good idea to learn some things about studio lighting. It's been interesting so far, but this weekend we did an outdoor shoot in midday... yes, it was around 12pm and the sun was strong and extremely harsh. Hardly an ideal time for shooting. Anyway, the key idea was to understand how to balance the light using reflectors and how to overpower the sun using flash.
We did a few shots with a proper strobe and a beauty dish, which turned out pretty cool. But the coolest thing was when we decided to try it using my speedlights... and it worked wonderfully! The above image was shot using an SB-800 and an SB-600 fired remotely by the on camera flash in a Nikon D70s (using Nikons Creative Lighting System). Both strobes were behind a white shower curtain to soften the light a bit. The sun was coming from high above, slightly to the right of the camera as can be seen by the shadow on the bench.
What's great is that those little flashes were enough to overpower the sun and create an interesting lighting effect. Unfortunately we didn't have a beautiful model to shoot that day, so we had to do with Greg. He's the photographer who's teaching the class. Thanks Greg, it was a great day!
lighting, photography, speedlights 