For all you Strobists out there, I used speedlights for the above images so you don’t need expensive lights and modifiers to create similar images.

You can book on to this workshop here

The next new workshop is on the 16th October and develops the techniques from the original dance workshop, this time with a street dance theme.  I’ve wanted to shoot more street dance for some time now and it’s great to have the opportunity to do so in these workshops.  Full detail of this workshop is here but here’s an example of the type of images we’ll be capturing.

Last but not least the original dance photography workshop will be returning on the 30th October.  Full details of that workshop are here

Places are limited on all these workshop so get in touch if you want to come along!

My previous favourite location was a disused space at Islington Mill (check out the link, there’s some cool stuff going on there) this was a pretty dark space even on the brightest of days with quite small windows.  It was possible at times to use some of the larger windows as the key light such as this example

But more often than not the natural light was playing a supporting role such as in this example

To a great extent even these basic images were made practical by my choice of equipment.  I’ll be writing in detail in future posts about my equipment choices, but using a camera that works well at high ISO, wide aperture primes and an aversion to tripods all contributed to this developing style.

Over time I began to use natural light more creatively to try and distinguish my images from the norm and a previous post demonstrates how I used gels to warm up daylight in my images.

Laziness was another factor in my developing style   Up to this point I had been using mostly my studio lights within the studio at the mill.  The studio was on the 2nd floor, the disused space was on the 5th floor and there was no lift and the availability of mains power was variable at best.  Suffice to say that after a while the novelty of carrying up all my studio gear wore off (not to mention gallons of water and other kit for some shoots) and I sought out alternatives.  For me the most effective combination was a Quantum Q flash, a large 2 metre PLM brolly and a special flash mount to exploit the combination to it’s fullest.  I’ll be covering each of these in separate posts but the resulting light was ideal for full length yet still quite contrasty and specular.  Add a small amount of smoke and my images were now starting to look like this

In this space natural light was therefore used mostly to add notes of interest to the image with flash usually being the key light.

It was time for a change though and I relocated much of my studio shoots to another old mill.  This time with a much greater amount of daylight called Hallam Mill.  As you can see, daylight wasn’t really an issue here

The challenge now was the extent to which (if at all) I’d allow daylight to dominate the image.  This next example is shot in a similar place to the one above but dials down the daylight considerably

Natural light images also became much easier and I can use my preferred style of placing reflectors in front of the model reflecting daylight from behind thereby giving beautiful back-light on the models hair

As well as the Q flash I increasingly used speedlights and I’ve long since sold my studio lights in preference for battery powered alternatives.  Even in a traditional studio I feel comfortable exploiting the advantages of speedlights to give me the effect I want such as freezing movement.

For me one of the key advantages of battery powered flash is that they can go to very low power to allow them to be easily balanced with even the dimmest daylight with the use of ND gels the light can be even further diminished if needed.

I now teach this style of lighting to others enabling relatively low priced equipment to be used to create exciting images that not only replicate expensive studio gear but also have the potential to add something a little different to images.  Future posts will explore individual lighting set-ups in detail and others will consider my equipment choices but I hope you found this a useful overview.  Please use the comment feature below to ask any questions or to request specific areas to be covered in future posts.

So what have I learned along the way?  Well first of all, if you’re going to be checking your focus carefully on the back of the camera don’t use the ‘basic jpeg’ setting as even shooting in RAW+ JPEG mode the image displayed on the back of the camera is the basic jpeg and it can be quite disconcerting when you zoom in to find the image quality so low.  I’ve recently been using the ‘standard jpeg’ but could often be waiting in the region of 20 seconds for the image to appear.  That said it was usual at the end of shooting a set of images to only have to wait for the last few to download.  The ability for models and other clients to look through the images on the iPad is an absolute boon. At workshops I find, quite often, that photographers who began as sceptical of both the iPad and wireless transfers are ready to order both by the end of the day.

The latest iteration of the software is pretty stable and brings with it a new limited mode which allows you to offer the iPad out with greater confidence to clients without the fear that they may delete the images or mess around with settings.

D3s and D700 users are, I’m afraid, out of luck as Nikon in their wisdom have decided to only provide a type 1 CF card slot on these cameras and the adapters require a type 2 slot.  Quite why Nikon decided to change the card slots when upgrading from the D3 to D3s I have no idea as the body seems otherwise identical.  D3 and D3x users are both provided with the correct type of slot.  Following the excellent article on Rob Galbraith I modified the adapter as they suggested which did seem to improve the range.

What has really caused this update is not so much Shuttersnitch but the free update that Eye-Fi have recently launched for all their X2 cards which provides a new ‘direct’ mode which purports to do away with the need for a router.

Frustratingly I’ve been away from home for the last few days and couldn’t try it for myself but I did note that the forums were alive with folks having issues with the update and the launch (on a Sunday) didn’t seem to be handled particularly well with cards being advertised and sold as supporting direct mode but it not being available and when it did launch it only went to those who bought the newer cards and at a time when there were no support people online.

It was with fear and trepidation therefore that I plugged the card in to my macbook when I got home and downloaded the (now fully available) firmware.  I activated the direct mode and altered the settings so that the network was always available and would always listen.  I switched off the 3G data on the iPad and asked it to ‘forget’ my home wifi network.  After I took a photograph the iPad recognised a new network which began with the words ‘Eye-fi card…’ I clicked on it, entered the password (which I’d forgotten intially to note) and sure enough….. nothing happend.  A reboot later, still nothing.  Just to be sure I clicked on ‘set-up eyefi access’ within shuttersnitch and ensured it recognised that images were to go to the card.  In the end I killed the app by double-clicking the home button, tapping and holding an icon, and pressing the red minus-button on shuttersnitch. I restarted it and, hey presto, it was downloading images immediately.

A 12mp fine quality jpeg was downloading in around 10 seconds, a RAW in around 20. This is at least twice as fast as I was getting using the router most of the time. Although I’ve always advised against using RAW and wireless cards I’d actually consider it now. Most of the delay seems to be writing to the card and rendering the image on a 1st generation iPad. No doubt these times would improve on an iPad2.

I then moved further away from the iPad with the camera, my fear being that it would lose signal. So far I’ve been 8m away from the iPad without problem and I’ve even shot upstairs and it’s appeared on the iPad downstairs.

So far so good then. One of the great features of the latest version of Shuttersnitch though is the ability to upload images automatically to Smugmug (Flickr, FTP etc. are also supported). I can’t yet find a way of doing this when direct mode is activated. The wi-fi connection is taken up with the eye-fi card and when I activate 3g and try it the app crashes. I’ll raise the issue with the developer but this may be a hardware limitation I guess.

Following a further update by the developer Shuttersnitch on a 3G iPad will now receive an image from the Eye-Fi card over Wi-Fi and then upload it to the web by 3G – very impressive!

I’m overjoyed with the new direct mode and it will ensure Shuttersnitch and Eye-fi become an ever more important part of my workflow.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, hopefully normal service will resume in 2011.

I’m really excited about the capabilities of Capture One v5 and have recently been going through some old RAW files to see how much improved the workflow is and how little I need to use PhotoShop as a result.  I’ll share this knowledge with you as part of the workshop.

Prior to the workflow section we’ll work through the use of lighting from basics to the more creative side and you will have to opportunity to work the our resident model for the day.

Full details of the day can be seen on this page.  I hope to see you there.

We started out with a basic headshot and built up the lighting to include key, rim and fill until we ended up with this

I took the iPad with me and we found the ability to see the images on there, transmitted from the camera by the eye-fi card, really useful.  You can read more about this set-up on my earlier blog post here

We then applied the skills learned in the headshot set-up to other settings such as full length and 3/4 shots such as this one.

All our lighting was done with Strobist style kit, using small ebay softboxes, Manfrotto Nano stands, Nikon SB800s and Alien Bees PLM brollies.

One to one training can be tailored to your particular needs so any photographers that are interested in something similar please drop me a line.  The training and studio time is only £45 an hour and you can either supply your own model or I can find one for you with no mark up.

The great part about this is that it can be done at almost no cost, assuming you have some sort of off camera flash.  The Strobist gel pack is about £10 which includes several strengths of CTB as well as a wide gamut of other filters at a size that will fit most flash guns.  If you have studio lights then a sheet of CTB gel will run to less than £5.  I’d suggest getting a quarter CTB that way you can layer the gels if it’s not strong enough.

To get an approximation of what the image will look like in camera I turn the colour temperature up as high as it will go (10,000) but shoot a grey card so that I can set the colour balance correctly later in Capture One when working on the RAW files.  I’ve put a few examples of images using this technique below but you can see others on my Flickr stream here

One of the things I like to do during workshop is show students the images as I take them.  So far this has been achieved by taking a Mac mini and NEC Spectraview screen to the location and shooting tethered with a long USB cable in to Phase One Capture One.  This set-up works great but getting it to and from the location is a pain (literally!) and the USB cable is quite limiting.  I’m considering doing some workshops outside in the near futre and this set-up would be unworkable there and I didn’t fancy forking out for a Macbook Pro just yet.

Enter the iPad.  The iPad is a device that’s simple and intuitive to use, has a great screen and battery life and is therefore, ostensibly, ideal for tethered shooting.  There is a major problem though in that tethering to cameras over USB is not supported even with the camera connection kit (which is great for normal transfer of images off cards by the way).

A new piece of software is available in the app store though called Shuttersnitch which allows you to transfer images to the iPad wirelessly either by using the proprietary wi-fi adapters from the likes of Canon and Nikon or the increasingly popular Eye-fi SD cards.  This is where I hit another ‘gotcha’.  Eye-fi cards are available in SD format only and I shoot with a Nikon D3 which has 2 CF card slots.  I did some research and discovered many tales of woe about users not being able to get the cards to work, especially the new X2 models with Canon cameras although many seemed to struggle with the D3 also.  The cards aren’t very expensive though so I persevered and obtained an SD to CF adapter from ebay which stated it had been tested with the Eye-fi card and a 8GB Pro Eye-Fi card.  I went with the pro version in the end because although RAW and ad-hoc connections are not supported in this setup at the moment they may be in the future.

The lack of support for ad-hoc connections is the next gotcha.  This means you have to connect from the camera to the iPad via a router and is a limitation of the iPad at present.  Fortunately though I have a Three MiFi device which acts as a battery powered router and I decided to put this in my pocket to allow location shooting.

With more than a little pessimism I started to configure the card by connecting the supplied SD card reader containing the card to a spare USB port on my Mac.  I’ll not go through the full set-up process here as it’s covered in detail elsewhere on the web but it’s fair to say it took a reasonable amount of patience with the software, firmware and Adobe Air all demanding updates and the software refused to register my account stating that the password could not be used.  As it turned out the actual issue was with my email address which, to prevent spam, I prefer to use a slightly unusual format for.  It would have been nice for the software to let me know that this was the issue though rather than complain about the password.

I then took the card out of the reader, inserted it in to the adapter and then put the adapter in to the D3.  Before shooting I changed my settings so that the second card slot (where I put the Eye-fi) only received a basic jpeg with the raw being stored on the card in slot 1.  I also changed the settings so the meter didn’t go to sleep and the camera monitor kept on for as long as possible (many of the issues reported online were due to the camera going in to sleep mode).

I then took a photograph.  Much to my surprise it transfered to my Mac first time!  After a couple of more tests I followed the instructions here and sent the upload key to the iPad via email, copied and pasted the code in to the Shuttersnitch settings, opened the application and took a photograph.  Nothing happened.  I quickly realised my mistake, I needed to open a new collection and after I did so I tried again.  Still nothing.  However closing the application and opening it again resolved all connection problems and it’s worked every time since.

One of the frustrations in traditional tethered shooting with Nikon cameras is that you can’t also use the cameras LCD and images are only stored on the connected computer with no option to also store them on the camera.  The eye-fi card overcomes these limitations but in doing so introduces a slight delay in to the process which is the time it takes to download the image to the card, it then initiates a connection to the iPad and sends the file across.   This means there is a slight delay from taking the image before Shuttersnitch starts to download the image.  In testing though, other than the first shot, I found it took about 7 seconds for a basic jpeg if the previous image had been full downloaded.  If I shot a series of images in quick succession they took longer, obviously, but all did get downloaded and each appeared on the iPad as it was received.  Sending RAW files is supported by the card and Shuttersnitch will receive (but not display) raw files.  In my view though this is pretty much a waste of time, at least for my purposes.  The download time is in the region of 30 seconds and, even if I could get the iPad to display the image, I believe it only renders the embedded jpeg.  I will therefore be shooting with just basic jpegs at the moment, but for more critical work jpeg fine only takes 12 seconds or so.

Overal I’m very pleased with the set-up.  It’s very unintuitive compared to pretty much everything else about the iPad.  It’s more like going back to Windows XP (or even Linux) in some ways as you have to bring several things together to get it to work but work it does!  Please put any questions in the comment section and I’ll try my best to answer them.