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Archive of ‘Technology’ category

Personal, Photography, Technology | 1 Comment

Multiple Flash Triggers – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - ballroom dance with backlit flash

Flash Photography

The holiday rush for shopping is almost here, so camera manufacturers are getting into the fray with lots of new products. I am happy with my current setup for most events, but there has been some occasion where having more options for triggering multiples flashes would have come in handy. Working with some other photographers on their projects started me thinking on how I can accomplish this with my existing equipment. They have their own systems, but since I have different gear, I needed to do some thinking.

©TimeLine Media - ballroom dance with backlit flash
©TimeLine Media – ballroom dance with backlit flash

The monolights I use in my event photography are Elinchrom Style RX 600s which are triggered by the Elinchrom Skyport remote. These fit into the hot shoe connection on your camera. I wanted to have the ability to trigger a speedlight at the same time that the monolight is fired. Althought I could set the speedlight go off the optical slave, it will fire anytime that another flash is fired. In most events now, many have a camera. That would burn the batteries too quickly if this happens. Also it would probably ruin everyone else’s photos that will trigger my flash. Here is my slick solution, that I will try at the next opportunity:

Flash Triggers

©TimeLine Media - Pocketwizard TT1 and Elinchrom Skyport on one hot shoe
©TimeLine Media – Pocketwizard TT1 and Elinchrom Skyport on one hot shoe

Directly connected to the camera is a PocketWizard MiniTT1 for Nikon. Also connected to the hotshoe connection on top of the MiniTT1 is the Elinchrom Skyport. The MiniTT1 is designed to send a radio signal to an off camera flash that is connected to a FlexTT5, and pass the shutter signal through it’s hot shoe on top. Usually another speedlight is connected on that top hot shoe, but I connected the Elichrom Skyport and experimented to see if both flashes would fire. Here are the results:

©TimeLine Media - Speedlight triggered from PocketWizard
©TimeLine Media – Speedlight triggered from PocketWizard

Having both connected, but leaving the monolight off, the PocketWizard will still fire the Speedlight connected to the FlexTT5.

©TimeLine Media - Monolight triggered from SkyPort
©TimeLine Media – Monolight triggered from SkyPort

The Skyport will also get the signal leaving the TT1 on the camera on! I had the Speedlight on a different channel just to see if it would pass the signal while not making a connection to another unit. When I had the MiniTT1 off, it did not pass the signal to the Skyport. So I tried it with both of them on:

©TimeLine Media - Combination triggers firing 2 different lights
©TimeLine Media – Combination triggers firing 2 different lights

Success! I tried this on all available channels, and everything seemed to work. It was just in my basement, so I don’t know the range of this setup, or how it will work over a long shoot, but the early tests show promise. Once I try this in a more demanding application, I’ll post the results here. Let me know if you have tried something similar, and if you have run into any trouble with this setup.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Studio, Technology | 0 comment

Working with Lightroom Catalogs – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

Adobe Lightroom is the best photo editing software available today. At this time it has support of all the major camera manufacturers and is best suited to handle professional RAW files from digital cameras. Many of my Tech Thursday articles have talked about working in the program, but I want to post today about the backend of working with Lightroom, specifically Catalogs. These are files that have the “.lrcat” extension. There are different strategies for working with these files, but I wanted to show you how I work with them to keep things organized, and to keep your hard work safe from potential data loss.

Catalogs in Lightroom

With this in mind, I create a new catalog file for every big event that I photograph. If it is a wedding, I will create a new catalog “brides_name__grooms_name.lrcat”, if it is a ballroom dance event, I will make a catalog “year_eventname.lrcat”. Afterwards, I will import only the files from each event into the catalogs, and work with them from there. There are some that will add every image from every shoot into one large catalog. With the metadata searching power of the Library, I can see the advantage of doing this. According to Adobe, there is no limit to the amount of photos you can have in one catalog – some have reported using catalogs with 800,000 images and more!

I separate my shoots into separate catalogs for 2 reasons. The first is that I have experienced catalog corruption when working with some Lightroom catalogs. In these cases, there was some data errors in the lrcat file which prevented the file from being opened! All of the edits from that event  with ~1200 photos were lost, and had to be redone. What if that were to happen in a catalog with 800,000+ photos! From then on, I have clicked the “Automatically write changes into XMP” under Catalog Settings so that if a catalog was corrupted, the work would be saved in the XMP sidecar files along with the RAW files, and the catalog could easily be recreated. Let me know if you have any tips with working on your Lightroom catalogs.

Enough with the geeky talk, here’s a pretty photo. The Capitol building will need major renovations which are scheduled to begin later this year. Here is a late afternoon photo before all of the scaffolding goes up. Enjoy!

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC
©TimeLine Media – US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Ballroom Dance, Event, Photography, Technology | 2 Comments

Special Event Lighting – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge

White Balance

When shooting color images, digital photography gives us a lot more flexibility in color balance. This is usually one of the first options that photo applications will let you adjust in your photos. In Adobe Lightroom, they call this “Temperature” referring to the Kelvin setting in degrees. On the lower end of the scale are the “cooler” or bluer settings starting at 2000K. On the other end is going to the “warmer” or yellower settings 10000K to 50000K.

Lightroom - color temperature slider
Lightroom – color temperature slider

Similarly to a previous post which I talked about bouncing the light off of colored walls, having mixed lighting sources will also affect the look of your photos. At events where there is lighting setup to set a mood for the room, you will have strongly colored constant lights. These will usually be tinted with a gel or LEDs that can make every kind of color possible. This can be difficult to balance, as now there are competing sources of color in your frames.

Ballroom Dance Photos

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge ballroom dance
©TimeLine Media – DC Dance Challenge ballroom dance event lighting

My thought in this situation is to use my flash to get the best exposure I can at the time. Having a good exposure means I can work with the file more easily in Lightroom later. The dance events usually has changing lights, so I cannot do a good white balance for each color, I just have to make a good exposure.

Back in Lightroom, I use the temperature and tint sliders to ensure that the skin of subjects in the frame looks good. It may not be exactly their skin tone as you see it, but neither is their color on the dance floor flooded with colored light. The downside is that the colored light in the background, or the ambient color of the room may change, but skin tones are my only concern. Whatever colors happen to change in the background or other room elements will have to be left as is. Let me know what you guys do when facing these room a wedding receptions, or other setups with special event lighting.

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge
©TimeLine Media – DC Dance Challenge

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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