Tinker, Tailor, Sol..o.. Photographer

Hacks 'R Us (warning: shop talk)

Photographers LOVE “kit”

as the Brits would say. Gadgets, tools, contraptions, accessories. Kit. (Literary anglophiles will have to excuse my appropriation of the great spy novelist, John LeCarre, in the title of this post..) My dad was WWII Generation, born 1914, back when country folks had to fix their own plows/roofs/livestock. It’s nice to grow up around people who can fix things, it’s infectious. Matthew B. Crawford has written a couple of great books on self-sufficiency in the shop (“skills, Pedro”), especially his Shop Class As Soulcraft. The process of drilling, fitting, testing, modifying, is as satisfying as the using, being able to craft some of your own tools for doing your own work, no matter how janky they appear.

Sometimes it’s just a hack

or a modification of an existing piece. Additive, subtractive, approach it however you like. Recently I had a shoot where I wanted to use two softboxes (and no, I don’t shill for Paul C. Buff, just enjoy using the products) but I only have one speedring to attach a softbox to a light. (The others I have fit different lights). So I drilled four holes in an umbrella spill-kill reflector and bolted it to a generic metal speedring.

(Not exactly beautiful. Who cares? No one but me & you will ever see it, and not for long)

The giant-washer arrangement? Ugggly. But I wanted both these particular softboxes because I have grids (to contain the light spread) for both boxes. Discreet light. A subconscious hunch is better than no hunch at all. Let there be light. Just let be only where I want it:

The shot above is an unretouched simple two-light setup. At camera left there’s a gridded 40’’ strip box with a strobe and a 24” gridded softbox behind and to the right of the subject funtioning as a “hair light” but with the bonus of also defining the chair and spilling just a touch on to the background to keep it richly rendered, moody. The image above is the uncropped exposure and graphic designers often use these tonally-dramatic shots since they can knock-out (white letters) type against dark background. The softbox-with-grid is also great for keeping out lens flare. That was a danger with the right-side semi-backlight pointing (kinda) toward the camera. The grid narrows the spread from the light and works as a gobo. The (left) main strip light with grid creates dark shadows and doesn’t throw light about the room like an umbrella would, but the vertical spread of the light is normal . Next day I ordered another proper speedring for the strobes. I needed the spill-kill reflector again. This hack is no more.

Back When I Used To Shoot Weddings

as “City Park Studio” I had several gear hacks that really worked well for the run-and-gun aspect of wedding coverage. Today it’s not uncommon to have a wedding job that lasts 8-to-10 hours. With two photographers. I’ll get knackered on a gig like that. It’s a young person’s game. I’m out. And, Prospective Bride: who would you rather shoot your wedding, a former college classmate or Paw Paw over here? Young women are a powerful force in modern wedding photography, on both sides of the camera. Many are visually sophisticated in creating a fresh, romantic, dream world on that big day. In a way, every bride is a princess and social media is a stylized pictorial mode. Hats off to the ladies. Put a ring on it, Club Mix.

This Franken-bracket Above

was built from a wonderfully designed, one-hand, Balcar strobe handle bolted on to a metal strip that I bent-up with a hammer and vise. The softbox bracket (with the hole in it) is standard generic. The cold-shoe (red dot part) is a Honeywell (now Vello) shoe mount to hold a speedlight (camera flash) but it is well made and durable. Newer store-bought brackets are available, no doubt. But with this unit holding a speedlight shooting into a 24-inch softbox, mounted onto a self-retracting Cheetah stand, I could walk around with a small softbox at a wedding. I’d be shooting dancers with an on-camera strobe and using the softbox as a second light, synced to the camera. Then outta nowhere its time to shoot the cake-cutting, pick up the softbox unit (Cheetah stand retracts for moving through a crowd) and walk over to the cake. Two lights (or one soft light) wherever I wanted. ‘Course, all the youngsters nowadays (switching to Paw Paw mode) like to brag about how they “never have to light anything” ‘cuz their whiz-bang cameras are soooo awesome. I don’t much buy it. This idea that available light is always perfect, well… it ain’t. Learn how to light. You might decide to do this as a career! For Fun and Profit, like the box says. I do miss wedding photography just a bit. When done correctly it’s an intense activity, producing (hopefully) dozens of pictures people will (theoretically) cherish…until the day they’re divorced! Surely, I jest. But I enjoyed it. Thank God I don’t have to do it anymore. It was fun while it lasted and I got to tinker like a madman.

(Mirrors are your friend. Turn one light into two lights.)

And If I'm Perfectly Honest

lots of the best wedding flash photos now use the very popular technique of on-camera-flash mixed with a slightly underexposed ambient exposure “shake ‘n bake”. The flash is usually pointed backwards, at an angle, away and to the back side of the room/space. With super-high ISO sensors, ISO 6400 routinely produces acceptable images on new cameras. Any unflattering shadows will be partially filled by the pointing-backwards flash and camera-to-flash balance is well controlled by the brain in the camera.

(“She got dem apple bottom jeans and the boots wit’ da furrrrrrr…”)

This shot above is a forward-pointing-flash shake ‘n bake (1/15?) which captures some of the “practical” (a cinema term) available light. The balance between flash and ambient is important. I did it manually (you can too: get a couple of Lumo180’s and a compatible transmitter) but newish cameras allow you to set Program mode to accomplish the same thing. This Speedlight Lighting world has been well-explored by strobist, Joe McNally, and others. It’s limitless, like most of photography.

(If you ever need this or similar in your camera bag: find a better way. Really. There must be.)

Back In The Darkroom Days

I’d often have to make a mask to print certain images with a wider white border (since I had filed-out my negative carrier to print the black “rebate”). Below is an X-Acto knife cut-up promo spread mask. If you’ve ever printed on an Omega D-Series enlarger you’ll recognize this shape, the negative holder. It’s just more light-shaping; in this case, keeping light off printing paper, discreetly:

Exposure, adding light / subtracting light, is analogous to sound recording, and all forms of data recording, really. Your eye can be trained to become better at perceiving exposure variations. (I shot ASA320 Tri-X for so many years I can still get within one stop of guessing an exposure in any light, and usually closer). Many younger photographers are returning to analog film because the shooting process is different for them and insta-digital “chimping” has become a turn-off. They seek a purer photographic experience, moving closer to their subjects in a mysterious dance of delayed gratification. It allows one to sense the light as much as measure and control it. And, of course, sometimes it’s not about creating a lighting strategy at all. It’s the old newspaper photographer’s adage: f-11 and be there:

Got a photo-hack? Comment, below. Thanks for reading and please forward to anyone who would enjoy Ark Hive. For non-nuptial assignments: www.rickolivier.com. Cheers!