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March 20, 2014

Photography, Portrait, Technology | 0 comment

Leaf Shutter Lenses Part 2 – Tech Thursday

Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash - ©TimeLine Media

Last Tech Thursday, I had the first post on using leaf shutter lenses. In doing a little research, there are not too many of these that are available in convenient or “affordable” kits. The ones that are available cost most than most DSLRs bundles with lenses – for the lens alone! These are normally in the realm of the medium format cameras with much larger sensors, and much higher price tags. A new medium format camera is in the $15,000 – $40,000 range with the accompanying leaf shutter lenses starting at $4500+.

So you can see why I was excited to learn that the relatively inexpensive Fuji X100s has a leaf shutter. As a refresher, here is a photo taken without any added flash outside. It is the metered exposure from the camera, and has a nice shallow depth of field with the trees and the shed going out of focus. The settings were 1/1000^th second at f/2.0 ISO 200. The shutter speed was very fast due to the open aperture. There was bright sun that is starting to set but is still high overhead.

Flash Photography Test

Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash - ©TimeLine Media — Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash – ©TimeLine Media

With a typical DSLR, you would not be able to use these settings to get proper exposure*. The 1/1000^th of a second exposure time is too fast for the flash to fully expose the frame. You will have a black bar along one of the long sides of the frame where the shutter is still covering part of the frame. You are limited to 1/200^th or 1/160^th of a second on most cameras. To find your, look in your manual, and look for the maximum flash sync speed. On the Fuji X100s, however, the leaf shutter lens is able to sync with the flash up to this fast shutter speed. This is the biggest benefit to using these types of lenses – having more control over balancing the available light in the scene with added light from a flash or strobe.

You can keep the nice darker blue sky, and saturate the other colors by underexposing the background with a high shutter speed. The flash power you can control from the strobe or by adjusting the aperture. Even though in some of these, the aperture was not wide open, it was only closed about 1 stop which keeps the background nicely out of focus compared to your subject. I cannot wait to do more shooting with this setup! It gives a lot more flexibility in what time of day to make outdoor portraits.

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March 13, 2014

Photography, Portrait, Technology | 0 comment

Leaf Shutter Lenses Part 1 – Tech Thursday

ballroom dance photography - ©TimeLine Media

The wintry weather finally broke for a little bit last week! I finally had a good chance to test one of the best features of the Fuji X100s camera – the leaf shutter lens. Most cameras produced today have focal plane shutters which have a curtain that opens and closes in front of the sensor. With a leaf shutter lens, there are blades built into the lens itself that opens and closes as the shutter opens and closes in the camera. As you press the shutter button on the camera, there is no difference in the operation between these two types of lenses. Where the big difference comes is in the fastest flash sync speed that is possible when using a leaf shutter lens. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities!

Camera Tech

On typical DSLRs, between 1/160th to 1/250th of a second is the fastest shutter speeds that you can use if you want the flash to fully expose the frame. If you use a strobe with a DSLR and have your shutter speed set higher (ie 1/500^th second or higher) you will start to get a large black band on your photo where the curtain is still covering a part of the sensor since the shutter speed is too high. This is not a limitation for leaf shutter lenses such as the one in the Fuji X100s. When shooting indoors, like ballroom dance competitions, this limitation is not a problem as 1/250^th second is plenty fast to control the light coming into the camera.

The limitation of 1/250^th really impacts outdoor shoots. If you want to use a flash, and you have to keep your shutter speed at 1/250^th or slower, that means you need to close down your aperture – f/8 or higher depending on how bright the sun is outside. In viewing these photos, everything including your background will be in focus making it difficult to separate your subject from the background. One solution is to not use a flash since you have plenty of light, but now all the tones in the scene are very similar making the image flat, and not as dynamic. Next week, I’ll show you how the leaf shutter lens really changes this photo with the change of a few settings in the same scene.

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703-864-8208

February 7, 2014

Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Creating Vignettes with Flash

Lighting the Roosevelt Memorial with small flash - ©TimeLine Media

On yesterday’s post, I wrote about creating vignettes, in Photoshop. Today, I want to post some photos of another cool way to create vignettes, but this time, doing it in camera. I made these at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. In this walk-through park dedicated to the longest-serving US President, there are many of his quotes engraved into the large pink-colored blocks that make up the monument. You can use the color of the blocks to your advantage as pink and blue are next to each other on the color wheel, so they will work together well in a frame. Here is a frame of the manual exposure setup in the camera without the flash:

Roosevelt Memorial without flash - ©TimeLine Media — Roosevelt Memorial without flash – ©TimeLine Media

Washington, DC

I am just looking to keep a dark, saturated blue in the sky. The flash will be used to illuminate the foreground and pop the subject out of the frame. To setup the flash, I put a warming gel over the front of the flash. Additionally I zoomed the head in to 180mm. This focuses the flash into a tight circle as opposed to just spilling light all over the scene. This is what creates the vignette effect which will draw your viewer’s eye to where you want it to go. I hand held the flash with my left hand, and made this photo:

How far you zoom the head, can make the circle of light larger. Especially if you have more of an area you want to cover in light. This next photo, I zoomed the head out farther since I was standing farther away, and had more words that I wanted to light:

It was a challenge to get the light exactly right. Sometimes, I would flash the ground, sometimes, I would only light the trees above the blocks. It would be much easier to do this with the flash on a stand that you can control with more consistency, but I did not want to risk any entanglements with the park rangers. I simply used a hot shoe cable cord to get the flash off the camera, and fired away. Give it a try next time to get a different look at places that are photographed all the time!

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Posts Tagged ‘flash’

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