A Scenic World

I really didn’t like the photo I posted for my self-portrait photo today. So while I was at work, I had an idea. It would involve buying more sparklers, because Mike and I went through all his stash the night before, but it was worth the $1 I’d have to spend.So tonight I got off work, bought my sparklers, and headed home to change. I lugged my tripod, my K200D with the 31mm lens attached, my remote, a lighter, and the sparklers outside. I set up the shot I wanted and made sure the focus was locked in the right position (Pentax AF isn’t exactly known for being perfect in the dark).

Then I realized that my idea wasn’t going to work. In fact, there was a very good chance I was going to end up setting my house on fire.

Time for Plan B! Except there wasn’t a Plan B. So I set up my tripod so it faced a different direction, lit a sparkler, and stood in one place. Yeah, very original.

I went through all 12 of the sparklers in the box and prepared to pack everything up.

But wait!

There was one sparkler left! The box had only advertised a dozen, but there it was: Sparkler #13!

I lit it, waited for the magic to begin, and changed things up. I danced. I twirled. And I pressed the remote release.

When a holiday comes around, it only means one thing for me: work.

Last night, though, Mike Autry decided to spice up our July 4th with root beer floats, chicken wings, and a few packs of sparklers.

After we’d both gotten off work (roughly 10:30pm), we headed out to my yard with our cameras and tripods to see what we could get. A few of my distant neighbors had apparently gotten something larger than sparklers, but they only shot about one firework (can it be used in the singular every five minutes). This was the best shot I got:

Now, on to the sparklers. I couldn’t figure out a good way to incorporate them into an interesting photo. Mike hit upon a very clever application, but I couldn’t steal his idea and my own brain was just mush. This is the best I got, which isn’t much:

I thought about using that for my daily shot, but when I went to my porch this morning, I saw we’d forgotten to throw away one used sparkler. I liked how the foil curled, so I took it inside and took this instead:

Ah, well. There’s always next year.

In flash-related news, I feel I made a breakthrough today when I set the flash to “Manual” and could control the output by determining the power of the flash (i.e. 1/1 for full power, 1/4 for less, 1/64 for WAY less). I’m going to play around more when I have a chance and will hopefully get something useful. I still really need to get an off-camera flash shoe…

Or, rather, I figured out how to make the flash fire wirelessly. Whoo-hoo!

First you have to make sure EVERYTHING is right. This means:

• The flash setting on the camera is set to “wireless.” Under the Fn menu, press the down arrow, then press the right arrow twice to get to “W.”
• The flash and camera are set to the same channel. Once you put the camera in wireless mode, the channel will show in the top LCD for a moment. To set the channel on the flash, slide the menu selector thingy on the right side of the flash body to the bottom menu (the white block will now be on the bottom). Press the button that says “Zoom” on the top and “CH.” on the bottom until you get the channel that matches the one on the camera.
• The flash is set to wireless. It’s the setting between “Off” and “On.”
• The flash is set to slave. The button below the “Off/Wireless/On” button toggles between “Master,” “Control,” and “Slave.” More on those settings in a later post.
• The flash is set to SL1. Move the menu selector thingy on the right so that the white box is now on the top. Press and hold the “Light” button. The menu will change to show either SL1 or SL2. To change it, press the “S” inside the dial.
• On-board flash is up:)

The first thing I wanted to do is to make sure that the flash was indeed firing. It was hard to tell with the onboard flash firing at the same time (I had the on-board set to master at this point). Despite Jens’ stern warning, I looked directly into the flash to make sure it worked. It did.

Guess what you can do when you’re holding the flash? You can move it around and cast weird shadows across your face!

One thing I noticed while I was bouncing the flash off different surfaces in my room is that I had to be really careful with how I was lighting my eyes. I’m not sure if it’s because my eyes are pretty light in color, but it’s painfully obvious if they’re not illuminated equally.

So all this time, I’d had the camera set to Av. I went ahead and bumped up the EV to +2 (hey, I’m pale!). The camera chose a shutter speed, and I have to admit, I was happy with what I was getting in my nearly dark room:

But I wanted to see what a photo taken at different shutter speeds (with all else kept equal) would look like. The processing values are the same for all photos (except where noted):

1/180th:

1/13th:

1/5th:

1 second:

Whoa! Let’s tone that exposure down in post-processing, shall we?

Much better! Now, with a 1 second shutter speed, I can finally take the shot I’ve always wanted to take. You know, the one that proves how much I value photography as an art form; the one that will prove how much I’ve grown as a photographer; the one that will indicate my maturity to the world:

And that concludes today’s lesson.

Between a visit to the optometrist and a surprise work shift, I was able to squeeze in a couple of hours of shooting with Mike today. I had a goal: texture and abstracts. This isn’t usually what I shoot, but I figure I won’t know if I like something until I try it (like the sweet soy sauce at Liquid Ginger - I tried it and I loved it!). Here are the outcomes:

I’m going to learn flash.

There. I’ve said it. Now if I don’t, I will have failed, and the world will know!

I’m using (for now) the Pentax AF-540 FGZ along with my Pentax K200D. My goal is to eventually get smaller strobes and use them manually together (á la the strobist style). But for now, I’m starting with the utter basics of the equipment I already have. This is not a scientific assessment, nor will any measurements be precise. I’m writing this in case anyone wants to learn from my mistakes and to document my (fingers-crossed!) progress. I’ll be learning in the hours before I go to work every day, but work is the priority at the moment, so I can’t spend hours measuring everything and writing it down. My primary goal is to LEARN flash, not to teach others. But if they do learn anything from here, great!

I always only shoot in either aperture priority or manual. Shutter speed is some abstract concept to me that only comes into play when I a) try to exceed 1/4000th shutter speed or b) when I try to hand-hold at speeds slower than about 1/6th a second (the longest I can handhold with my lightest lenses). Otherwise, shutter speed is a non-consideration.

So today, I set out to try to “freeze” motion using the flash. I set the flash to P-TTL mode and high-speed sync. I had the 31mm on the camera and wanted to use a wide aperture for shallow depth of field. I set the flash to +1 compensation because I read last night that if you have a light subject (I’m pretty pale), then the camera and flash will try to make it darker to have a more even distribution of light and shadow. So you use a positive compensation for lighter subjects and negative for darker.

This is my setup: a really dark corner of my living room (I moved all the furniture to the other side), lit a little by ambient light and a lamp with a 40watt bulb :

Pretty dark. I’m not going to post my non-flash test shot (I look like death), but at ISO 200 and f/2.8, a properly exposed photo had a shutter speed of 1/2 second. That’s definitely not going to freeze any motion.

This part of the room is narrow, so I set the camera up about 4 feet in front of one off-white wall, and I stood about 4 feet in front of the camera against another off-white wall. I turned the flash all the way down (90° - had it been pointed toward me, if would have fired directly in my face) and rotated it a full 180° so that it would be firing against the wall behind me. The idea was that the flash would illuminate me head-on without much shadow.

In aperture-priority mode, I liked the depth of field I was getting at f/2.8, but the camera chose a shutter speed of 1/50th. This wasn’t enough to freeze the action, but I really liked the outcome otherwise:

I decided to go with shutter priority with a shutter speed of 1/180th. I missed the focus on this one, but this was more what I was going for:

Okay, enough for today. Tomorrow: lots and lots of reseach.