Yesterday, I posted part 1 of my GX1 review, here’s part 2:

As soon as I looked at the first pics I shot with the GX1 on my computer, I got the feeling that the GX1 could possible be more than an even better always-with-you-camera. Therefor I needed to test it in a real life situation: a photoshoot that would require me to create several different looks in a short amount of time.

I had a shoot scheduled with Sofie and she agreed to do it all with the GX1. Sofie runs a great fashion blog called Bien Sucré and needed some images for her business cards and other uses. Lots of different setups in only a couple of hours, seemed like a good stress test for the GX1. We started outdoors but couldn’t really find good locations that went with her outfit. The few decent places we found were so exposed to the cold wind, that we couldn’t shoot more than a couple of minutes. Here’s one of the few keepers:

1/200 – f/5.6 – iso 3200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

The new Panasonic 12-42 vario lens came with the test camera but being used to fast glass with a constant aperture of f/2.8, this f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens couldn’t really convince me. It has an electronic zoom which is probably great for video but not as fast and accurate to use as a good old manual zoom ring. The fact that I wasn’t too crazy about it also has to do with the fact that this must be one of the ugliest lenses I’ve ever seen. But it has to be said that the optical quality is amazing, certainly for that price. So I’m not saying it’s a bad lens, but some nice primes are more interesting (and unfortunately way more expensive) for photographers who want more control over depth-of-field and low light shooting.

After this cold adventure we decided to head back to the studio to come up with something useful. We started with a very basic setup with one speed light and a shoot through umbrella.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

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1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

We moved on to a clamshell setup with the speedlite and umbrella straight above the camera and a silver Sunbounce mini under the camera as fill. I like how the clamshell light worked on Sofie’s face in the first picture but I wanted less depth-of-field. Therefor I switched to my Canon 50mm 1.4 with a cheap e-bay adapter. On the GX1, my Canon 50mm, becomes a manual focus 100mm f/1.4. It’s pretty hard to manually focus at that wide open aperture but with lots of shots and a bit of luck, we got the eyelashes in focus like I wanted.

For a bit of a retro look, I wanted to work with a white background. I could have setup a white seamless or my Lastolite HiLite but as we had little time, I just used my big Chimera Octa that was already setup in the studio. There’s an Elinchrom 600RX in the octa and it’s triggered by it’s optical slave. The main light is a speedlite. Some shots with an umbrella, some shots with just the bare flash.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

For a fashion blog I thought it might be quite nice to have the setup included in the shot. And it helps you get an idea of how this was shot

I also played around with just the pilot light of the Chimera to see what kind of results I would get at iso6400.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 6400 – 12-42 lens @42mm

Looking for a different background, I saw one of my silver Sunbounces and figured it would make a nice background if I could get lots of reflections of it’s surface. I’m not a big ring flash fan and I must admit that I’ve only used my Orbis ring flash adapter one or two times since I got it a couple of years ago. But somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

I just noticed I’ve written very little about the GX1 in this article and maybe that’s exactly the point. During this shoot and the post processing I hardly noticed that I was not shooting a pro DSLR. This got me thinking about my current gear setup, the kind of work I do, the kind of work I WANT to do more, budgets, investments, options, … but more about that as soon as I’ve figured it out.

And the GX1, I can be short about that: I bought one and made sure it got delivered before I had to send the test camera back

About a month ago, I posted about a studio experiment inspired by Matthew Jordan Smith. Some people requested some more info about the gear used on part 1, so let me go over it, before jumping to part 2.

Here’s the setup:

In the studio I use mainly Elinchrom monoblocs because I find them the best studio flashes for a realistic budget. I’m also very happy with the support and the rental possibilities from Servix & Partners, the Belgian Elinchrom importer. For this shoot, I used a single Elinchrom Style RX300 monobloc. The RX300/600 ’s are the reliable, fast syncing workhorses in my studio. The strobe is fitted with the small white Elinchrom beauty dish (with the silver deflector and the white “sock” to diffuse the light as much as possible). A silver California Sunbounce Mini reflector is placed under the camera for some fill from below. And that’s it. All the rest is just a matter of testing, metering, fine tuning and more fine tuning.

For the second part of the shoot I wanted to shoot half to full body with just one single hard light. Instead of going for a standard reflector, I got out my Elinchrom Maxi Spot reflector aka The Sun. This reflector is designed to bundle the light and throw it as far as possible rather than creating an even spread of light. I often used it on location with my Quadra when I need more power than I can get out of a standard reflector at full power. The Maxi Spot squeezes close to two extra stops of light out of the same full power pop of light than a standard reflector. The price you pay for the extra power is a less even light but I actually like the less perfect light from the Maxi Spot better because it looks more natural. Prior to this shoot, I’d never used it in the studio, but I will certainly start using it more. I loved the light it created. We placed it pretty far and high (about 6 meters away from the model and 3,5 meters high).

Sylviane is the most professional commercial/lifestyle model, I’ve ever worked with. She plays every role you want … except herself. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, she’s just so used to be asked to give the lifestyle smile and the commercial poses. The biggest challenge I’ve set myself for this shoot is to shoot PORTRAITS of Sylviane, pictures that say something about who she really is. I think I managed to get that. And the main reason why I got it, is that we took our time to set up and test our lights. And once we were happy with it, we forgot about it and focussed on getting Sylviane out of Sylviane.

Lucie surprised me with the intensity she threw herself into the second part of the shoot. Her energy blew me away. This was one of those few instances where you just have to concentrate on preventing your jaw to drop onto the floor and push the shutter button.

It helps that Lucie has lots of experience at high end fashion shoots. But she also told me afterwards that the atmosphere has to be right to reach her full potential. That made me realize to pay even more attention to setting the mood: music, drinks, a warm studio and even more important … the right team.

Inge Van den Broeck is more than a make-up artist. She does hair too and has a great sense of styling. On top of that she’s just great fun to hang out with. She certainly had a big part in making these pictures more than just a lighting experiment. Steve Bayens had the most unglamorous job on the set: the assistant. But his eagerness to learn, kept me focussed not to make stupid mistakes and his hard work, let me focus on the big picture and not on all the small but important details.

This was such an interesting experiment and lots of the things I’ve learned will find a way into my daily work. This proves to me again, that as a photographer you’ve always have to keep pushing yourself. What was the last time, you did a shoot, just to learn something new?

Having a personal style is important as a photographer but it’s probably harder to achieve than gaining good technical working knowledge. It takes years of hard work to find and then perfect your own style and vision. I’ve come to the point that I sort of know what I stand for and I think my clients recognize that too.

So style is important but to me it’s also a dangerous thing to have. You can get too confident and too experienced. It’s at that point that your style stops evolving. I can only talk for myself but I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends face the same problem. We’ve build a large comfort zone and the larger it gets, the harder it is to get out of it. It’s the been-there-done-that-got-the-t-shirt disease. But it’s an imagined disease. You may have been there and done that but there’s always another higher level at which you can be there and do it.

A long introduction to tell you that I did a test shoot which contained pretty much all things that I already knew how to do and a number of things that I don’t like. The inspiration to do this anyway was the Creative Live class by renowned beauty/fashion/celebrity photographer Matthew Jordan Smith.

The first part of the course is build up largely about a relatively simple beautylight/clamshell setup (see above): with a beautydish above the camera and a silver reflector below. This setup gives you very even light that makes every woman shine. The background is a white seamless and is let with the same single light source We moved our whole setup (including model) back and forth until we got the right amount of light on the background.

I’ve never been a big beautydish fan, it’s not that it’s bad but it’s just not my taste … or haven’t I tried hard enough to master it? The answer is … YES. It’s just easier to go back to the umbrellas and softboxes I know so well. It took some time of experimenting with all the possible variations in the setup but eventually we settled for the small Elinchrom white beautydish with the white deflector and the diffuser fabric (aka “sock”). I needed to push myself hard to try to make it work and I needed to push myself even hard to admit to myself that the beautydish can actually produce a kind of light that I like.

Does that mean a beautydish always works? Hell no, it depends on the model, the make-up, the story and the feeling. And that brings me to the TEAM. Most of my assignments (and budgets) dictate me to work alone (or with one assistant), without make-up artist, hair stylist and usually I work with “regular people” (no models). I’m good at getting good results by improvising. But if I want EXCELLENT results, you sometimes need to assemble the best possible team around you. So I called out for help on Facebook and got myself a real dream team.

I’ve been working with models Lucie Goossens and Sylviane Alliet before and experienced their combination of a great personality with great modeling skills. Both are very experienced models but they are still driven by a passion to create better and different images. It’s that passion that got them to drive over 100 kilometers to an unpaid test shoot with knowing any decent pictures would come out of it.

The same is true for make-up artist Inge Van den Broeck who performed her magic on Lucie and Sylviane. And she brings so much more to the shoot than just a case full of expensive make-up products. She brings vision, style and creativity to the shoot. Stylish and fashionable as I am, my directions didn’t go much further than: “uhm, yeah … I want that kinda sorta commercial beauty look … but not really commercial, you know … just a bit different … uhm … edgy without being edgy …” But Inge somehow understood my idea and did truly amazing things.

The last crucial member of the team was assistant Steve Bayens (who also assisted and shot video on the 70 EUR Studio shoot). Steve is a young photographer who’s just starting out with studio work. What he lacks in experience, is easily made up with spirit, a good eye and his ability to ask questions that challenge me.

I should have added another member to the team to really pull this off: a professional retoucher. I’m sure I could have found someone to retouch these pictures to perfection. But I just needed to get some quality time in Photoshop. I’m pretty good with Lightroom and about 95% of my work is Lightroom only. It suits my love for the beauty of the small imperfections and it allows me to work really fast.

But I wanted to go for this crisp commercial look and it requires lots of small corrections in Photoshop. I figured it would be a good challenge to brush up on my rusty (and limited) Photoshop skills. On the commercial jobs I can rely on professional retouchers but I have some personal projects coming up which will require me to do my own Photoshop work, so this was a good exercise.

I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone for this shoot, that I was actually pretty nervous at the start although I would be working with all people that I know and like. But in the end I’m pretty pleased with the results. It’s not that I will suddenly shoot nothing but this kind of pictures but I learned a lot that will certainly have an impact on my work.

This was just the first part of the shoot. I’ll keep the second part for a future blog post.

Way too long A while ago I announced that I was working on the return of the Confession videos. Due to lots of work and the fact that I keep changing my mind about the best format, it’s all taking a bit longer than expected. But I want these new videos to become a long lasting project, so I figure I better take my time. One of the videos we already shot is about seeing if a digital medium format camera could fit into my often fast and improvised shooting style. Until the video is ready, I thought I’d already write up a review (sort of).

Until now the Pentax 645D was the only MF camera that kind of fitted my requirements. That’s not to say that the other medium format cameras are bad, on the contrary, but I need near DSLR productivity for it to work for ME. When I talked about my requirements for a MF camera, the guys from Servix told me that I wouldn’t be disappointed  with the PhaseOne IQ140. So I borrowed one with an 80mm 2.8 Schneider lens for a personal shoot that would test the camera in a run-and-gun improvised kind of shoot.

We used the PhaseOne in combination with my favorite Elinchrom Ranger Quadra and a Lastolite Easybox and the Quadra Adapter. There will be more technical and why-the-hell-I-choose-this info in the video. But let’s just say that I thought it would be a high end equipment package that fits my shooting style.

I didn’t have time to test the camera or even read the manual before this shoot, but it all felt very familiar. There are no complicated settings, just all the basic stuff I need. The camera is a heavy beast but it didn’t get tiring. It sits very well in my hands and I had no problem shooting handheld for a couple of hours. The IQ140 back is also easy to operate and has a nice iPhone-ish touch screen. And finally I found a MF back with a more than decent LCD-screen. I can really judge my pictures on this screen. Which is an absolute must if I should want to use a MF camera on a daily basis.

When it comes to handling, speed, ergonomics, battery performance, autofocus, … this is probably as good as it gets these days in MF land. It’s not quite as snappy as your normal high end DSLR but good enough for me not to get frustrated about it after an hour of shooting. In fact, for my portrait work I found the camera slowed me down just enough to make better pictures than with a DSLR. I sometimes feel shooting my Canons is a bit like eating at McDonalds: even if you have plenty of time, you still shove your meal in your face way too fast. I know that nobody is forcing me to shoot (too) fast with my Canon, but I can’t help doing it too often.

The huge sensor and the great glass, give you incredible files. I was blown away by the look and the detail of the pictures. It also seems like you can pull and push the RAW-files incredibly far and still retain great image quality. This is the main reason why I’d considering shooting MF and the IQ140 certainly delivers. I think I’m going to have a couple of really big prints made because the small web size certainly doesn’t do the images justice.

Before this shoot I was pretty convinced shooting digital MF was something I’d only do for my high end jobs. But now I’m not so sure about that any more. It’s still not a replacement for my 5D2 when it comes to reportage but I’m going to rent a Phase One more often for portrait and commercial assignments. The big issue is still: can I justify the much higher price for my work and my clients? At this point, I don’t know the answer, but I’m certainly going to give it some more thought.

I’m sorry if I gave away how one of the upcoming videos will end but I really like shooting with the PhaseOne.

Usually I paint with light but this morning I painted with … paint. You see, my hallway and staircase were in desperate need for a full make-over. In fact, my whole house is in desperate need for a make-over but you’ve got to start somewhere.
I can get pretty happy about good light but I never got high on it. That’s the difference between light and paint. Paint fumes really get into your brain.

When I started painting the top step of the stairs I started thinking about my first Tabula Rasa post about what a pain e-mail can be. By the second step, I was thinking about how beautiful life would be without all that e-mail and by the third step, I was pondering about what my ideal life as a photographer should look like. Being a rational human being, I dismissed most of those ideas because they seemed practically impossible. I told myself to be reasonable and to just accept that everyone just have to spend a lot of his time doing things he doesn’t like.

It wasn’t until the fifth step that the paint fumes dissolved the last bit rationality in my thinking. Levis, the goddess of paint, whispered to me in her soft seductive voice (she sounded like Patricia Arquette in True Romance): “Practicality destroys great ideas! Switch it around. Start from your craziest ideas and try to find practical solutions to make them come true!”

By now Levis has left the building and as soon she’s out of the door (watch out, fresh paint!) practicality returns. Luckily I still got a lot of painting to do, so maybe I will be high enough to convince myself to write down the things I really want to do and use them as the foundation of a better business organization.

disclaimer: if all of this doesn’t make sense, I blame the paint

4 DAY+ MASTERCLASS

This full immersion 4 day+ photography boot camp will rock your world and challenge you like you’ve never been challenged before. It’s about technique, lighting, posing, business, post processing but it’s also about identity, ideas and vision. You’ll get to experience all this in the great atmosphere of a small group (maximum 6 participants), creative subjects and great food & drinks.

We have prepared a great mix of lectures, practice sessions, product presentations and post-processing sessions. At the same time, we have build in the flexibility to adapt the schedule to the needs of the group. Thanks to California Sunbounce and Servix & Partners, we have a whole range of toys at our disposal for our experiments: lights, modifiers, reflectors, medium format camera, …

Lunches on Monday and Tuesday are included. The two days we are on location, we’ll make sure you can get lunch at very good rates. Drinks are on me when we are in The Barn. The welcome dinner and diner on Tuesday are also included in the workshop fee.

SCHEDULE
We’ll start this masterclass with a welcome dinner at the studio on Sunday night, so we can all meet and talk about what you can expect in the following days.

Monday is safe portrait day. I strongly believe that a safe portrait is the perfect starting point for a creative photoshoot. It keeps your clients happy, is het perfect insurance for anything that can go wrong and it builds confidence for both the subject and the photographer. We’ll teach you bulletproof lighting techniques, tricks to loosen up nervous subjects, posing tips and much more. This day will give you a toolbox of techniques to get the job done even in the most extreme situations.

Tuesday will be all about lighting. We’ll spent most of the time in the studio to create both natural looking images and extreme lighting setups. At night we’ll have a nice dinner together followed by a lecture about the business of photography with some surprise guests.

On Wednesday we’ll be working on location. The morning will be dedicated to run-and-gun techniques that will allow you to make spectacular pictures in no time with a minimum of gear. In the afternoon, we’ll take “spectacular” to a new level for a big and crazy shoot. We’ll all have to work together to pull this one off.

Thursday morning is special request time. If there’s anything we’ve missed during the previous days or that isn’t clear, we’ll handle it. In the afternoon, you will be presented with a great subject and a challenging assignment. Before we say goodbye, we’ll do a last image review / cocktail hour.

FOR WHO
his masterclass is not for the faint at heart. This is only for passionate photographers who are prepared to work hard to take their work to the next level. If you really push yourself you might even take it to the level beyond the next. We expect a good basic knowledge of photography, your gear and your post processing software.

WHAT TO BRING
A bag filled with a DSLR, some lenses and a laptop are all you really need but if you want to bring lighting equipment or your large format printer, we won’t stop you.

PRACTICAL
Location: The Barn, Dijkstraat 42, 1820 Steenokkerzeel BELGIUM
Number of participants: max 6
Language: English (unless all the students speak Dutch)
Price: 910 EUR excl. VAT (1101,10 EUR incl. VAT)
Workshop fee includes teaching, model fees, equipment rentals, 2 lunches, 2 dinners, drinks at The Barn

DATES AND BOOKINGS
No dates set at the moment. Contact us if you would like to book this workshop.

I got lots of reactions on my first and second 70 EUR Studio post, and even more on Facebook. I also felt like exploring this idea a bit more and arranged a second shoot (in the mean time I did a third one too). This time we kept the video camera rolling (thanks Steve) to give you an idea of what equipment I got for 70 EUR and how I used it. The beautiful and fun Stefanie was brave enough to be part of the experiment.

Without further ado, here’s the video:

View on YouTube

Let’s break it down a little more:

LIGHTS – a double halogen work light (2×350W): This throws out a lot of light at first sight, but when you diffuse it, there’s not much left. You can still shoot handheld but then you’ll have to shoot at iso 800-1600 to avoid camera shake. On the 5D mkII these iso’s show very little noise, so I don’t hesitate to use them. I shot most of the soft light pictures on a tripod at 200 iso and around 1/10th of a second. I would normally never have done that but I found out that it’s perfectly possible to get a good keeper rate when the model, sits down and doesn’t have Parkinson. We played with very small subtle movements because I think they can often make a picture more “real”. That organic feel is exactly what I was looking for because I found my studio pictures where always to artificial.

The work lights come with some downsides too. For a start these things get incredibly hot. You really have to watch out if you want to work with them. When I just started experimenting with artificial light, I used some of these too and managed to let them perform double duty: making light and acting as a smoke machine by setting the diffuser on fire. An ear drum piercing fire alarm, a burned carpet and a scared model later, I decided to buy a couple of flashes instead.

The stand that comes with the lights isn’t exactly as well build and stable as a nice Manfrotto stand. And it doesn’t go up very high so I had to improvise platforms to raise it above eye-level.

In time, I might replace the work lights with some really nice photo/video lights. But apart from being safer, easier to handle and better looking, light is just light.

Diffuser/Scrim – 2 White Shower Curtains: Many people who’ve been to my workshops, know that I always carry a plastic shower curtain in my lighting kit. It has come in handy numerous times as a diffuser, background and picnic blanket. These things are dirt cheap (10EUR for a 2×2 meter light modifier), light and pack very small. I usually clamp or gaffer tape the shower screen to whatever I can find. For this shoot I taped them to my background support system. I guess you could also make some kind of frame for them.

Just like the lights, there are commercial alternatives on the market for the shower curtain diffuser. In fact I have some of them because they handle well and look more professional. But if budget is tight, a shower screen or white bed sheet will get the job done just as well.

Background – 2 textured rough blankets: I like texture in the background, often it looks even better out of focus. When I work on location it’s usually pretty easy to find a textured background but in the studio you have to supply it yourself. I keep some old doors with rust and chipped paint in the studio to be used as a background but it’s not always easy to handle these heavy things. I also wanted to have something lighter that I could use in different ways. When I went buying the lights and shower curtains in the local DIY store, I saw these blankets, and knew immediately that they would be great backgrounds. The rough texture will create interesting highlights and shadows when light strikes the blanket from an angle.

These things are rather small, so I’m thinking about buying some more and stitching them together.

After having seen the video, I’m sure at least half of you are thinking: “Fuck the light, when is he going to tell more about that wireless tethering to the iPad?”
Well … I’ll save that for a future blog post. I first need to go over the hard light pictures.

The two pictures are above where the result of a happy accident. During a break, Stefanie was working on her tan by standing close to the lights. The light looked quite nice even though it was hard and coming from below eye-level. So we started playing with it.

It’s got that timeless, glamorous Hollywood look from the 40’s and 50’s (and even earlier). There are a couple of reasons why this hard light works. First of all, Stefanie has a great bone structure and smooth skin. It’s not impossible to make hard light work with less good looking people, but it sure is hard work.

The second reason is that the hard light, isn’t actually that hard. A work light is a lot bigger than a bare speedlight. If you place the light source meters away from the subject there won’t be much of a difference but when used up close the relative size of a work light is a lot bigger then a small flash, so it gives you softer light.

And then the light becomes even softer because it’s a DOUBLE light. This off-course doubles the size of the light source. And because the two lights are slightly apart one will fill in some of the shadows that the other creates and vice-versa. This is much like those classic Hollywood pictures. In the days of slow film and not-so-powerful lights, they didn’t use much diffusers. Instead they used multiple movie lights to create a bigger surface.

I hope you enjoyed the new Confessions video.

A couple of days ago, I showed you the first results of my studio experiment with a 70 EUR setup (lights, modifiers and background). I basically shot most of the pictures with my 5D mkII so I could see the results instantly but I just had to use my old Hasselblad and shoot some film too. It just felt right. In the end I managed to shoot only a couple of rolls of film because we’ve spent quite some time testing the light and finding the right amount of movement or the lack thereof. But I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I tried out some different films, to see which ones would suit the setup best. The next three pictures are shot on Ilford HP5+

This only color picture is shot on Fuji Pro 400H which captured the skin tones surprisingly well.

And the last one was shot on Fuji Neopan. It’s only the second roll of Neopan that I shoot, but I really like it. I’m going to try it a bit more often.

Too bad all the developing, scanning and dust spotting is such a pain in the ass. If it wasn’t for that I would shoot a lot more film.

Before the FEP Congress I already knew Paolo Roversi was a fashion photography legend but when I saw his images on the big screen I was blown away. It became even more impressive when I heard that most of these iconic shots where made with a big Polaroid camera in his rather small studio in Paris with nothing but a north facing window as the light source and a blanket as a backdrop.

Of-course it doesn’t hurt that he gets to work with the world’s best designers, make-up artists, stylists and supermodels like Natalia Vodianova. But still, I think he creates magic in his studio. I have a nice big studio and I’m perfectly fine with studio photography techniques and equipment. I can create what my clients want but at the same time I also feel like I haven’t find my own “voice” yet when it comes to personal work in the studio.

Paolo’s work inspired me to try another angle on shooting in the studio. Lore was so kind to be the guinea pig for this experiment. The main goal was to try to do things that I normally don’t do without fear of failure.

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, so I decided against using any of my usual lighting/studio equipment. I went to the nearest DIY store and spent a whopping 70 EUR on some halogen work lights, translucent shower curtains and some rough blankets. I will probably do another shoot in this setup and make a Confessions Video of it, to show you the technical aspect.

I’m not afraid of slow shutterspeeds but I basically only use them when I have no other options or if I want to pan. This time I decided deliberately to work with a little motion blur from the subject while the camera was locked on a tripod (also something I rarely do). Most of the shots failed because there was too much or too little movement (or because we burst out in laughter after realizing what a sight it must have been).

I’m pretty happy with what we did. Some of the shots worked out rather well but more importantly, I learned a lot. I don’t know exactly what I’ve learned, but sooner or later I will.

All the pics in this post are shot with the 5D markII but basically they were test shots as I really wanted to shoot these on film. I shot 4 rolls on my Hasselblad and 1 with my Holga. I’ll have to wait for the results until they come back from the lab.

So is this my new style of studio portrait photography? Probably not, but it might be a step in the right direction. There’s the organic feel and the beauty of the imperfection that I miss so often in studio photography. Anyway it inspired me to push this whole idea a bit further and I’ll be doing some more shoots in my 70 EUR studio setup.

Thx Paolo for the inspiration and giving me the urge to try something different.

For years I’ve been very happy with my PocketWizard Plus II’s to trigger speedlites and strobes. Basically they just tell your remote flash to fire, nothing more, but they do that simple task really well. I prefer shooting full manual (camera and flash) whenever possible to have complete control over my light and the perfect consistency considerably speeds up post processing because you can batch process. That said, I have nothing against automatic TTL flash control. I’ve been controlling my 580EX2 speedlites with the Canon ST-E2 controller on events and other assignments where I needed to work fast or manually setting the flash power wasn’t a practical option. The downside of the ST-E2/580EX2 combo is that it communicates with infrared signals. Because infrared is just light, you need line-of-sight between controller and flashes. This seriously limits the range and angles at which you can put your speedlites.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine the range and reliability of good radio triggers with the flexibility and speed of wireless TTL? Well, you can. The clever guys at Pocketwizard came up with the Mini TT1 and the Flex TT5 to do just that. The Flex is a tranceiver. Which means you can use it as a trigger in the camera hotshoe or as a receiver for your speedlite. The Mini is a transmitter only (so it goes in the camera hotshoe) but it is small and looks way smarter that the walkie-talkie like Plus II. In fact, people have been asking me several times what that thing with the antenna on my camera was and they all believed me when I told them it was a special walkie-talkie that allows me to talk to my assistant on events without releasing my camera.

The new Pocketwizard system translatse the E-TTL signals from the hotshoe to radiosignals and sends them over to the Flex TT5 who transmits them to the speedlite on top of it. The camera and speedlite(s) behave like they are on camera. However they didn’t stop there, they build some really nice extra features into the system. I’m not going to explain the whole system and all it’s features in this post. There’s lots of info and informative videos on the PocketWizard website.

The main reason why I bought them is not for the TTL-features. I simply got so tired of attaching the PLUS II’s to my speedlites every time, changing broken pc-to-minijack cables and having that big walkie-talkie in my hotshoe. The Flex TT5 has a hotshoe, so you can simple slide a speedlite on top of it and attach the whole set to a light stand. Most of the time, I just keep the 580EX’s attached to the Flex’s in my bag. That alone is a small but significant workflow improvement to me.

But being the tech geek that I am, I just had to start experimenting with the wireless TTL functions a bit. I found the system to work surprisingly well and overall improve the Canon wireless flash system. I’ve been using TTL on many occasions in which I would previously have shot manual. When I bought the AC3 Zone Controller a couple of weeks ago, the system got even better. With the AC3 I can control 3 zones of light separately without running back and forth between the speedlites and my shooting position. First of all, you can switch each zone on and off. This might be a small thing but in a later post, I will show you how important that is to me. You can simply set the flash compensation for each zone individually. And last but not least, you can use manual and wireless change the power setting of your speedlites in a 6-stop range. You can even combine TTL and manual.

Only very recently the Nikon versions of the system became available. My buddy Tom aka Fotofolio, who runs the fantastic CreateThatLight blog, got his hands on one of the first sets and has been pretty pleased with them. Tom is one of the few people who’s just as much a lighting geek as I am and I always learn from him when we shoot together. We decided to go playing with our PocketWizard toys together to compare notes, techniques and tricks. Tom went first and immediately used all the ideas that I had in mind, so I had to come up with something else. While our model tried to warm up again in the car (very cold day), I tried some wireless high speed sync stuff with Tom as stand-in.

Our model Lucie proved to be very brave and professional on this very cold day and Antoon (picture below) was great as our assistant. But you don’t always have the luxury to work with skilled and motivated people. Therefor I wanted to play a bit with a very simple setup that would allow me to get decent shots in a short time and with a minimum of hassle.

It was a very grey day with dull light. Because it was around noon, most of the light comes from right above and even though it’s diffused it casts dark shadows under the eyes. I wanted to give the light some direction by working just below the ambient light levels and complement that with a small amount of flash.

For speed, we mounted the flash on a monopod and just added an umbrella to soften it up. Held by Antoon we could quickly change and finetune the position of the light.

I switched back and forth between TTL and manual, whatever worked best for the situation. Because I could control it all from the AC3, it all went fast and effortless.

After some shooting and lunch, it started raining and we were forced to look for an indoor location. Thanks to Twitter and the very kind people of Visit Oostende, we got free access to Fort Napoleon. At first I struggled a bit to get my flashes to fire. Maybe it was Tom’s aura or maybe I shouldn’t have tried getting the radio signal through two meter thick concrete  walls. But eventually I went for a simple setup with some dramatic light. I used a single speedlite with a grid to create a small spot of hard light.

I tried to balance the gridded flash with the little ambient light that we got in there.

Lucie teaches yoga, so we decided to do some yoga poses.

Does buying some new PocketWizard stuff, make your light better? No, but if you know what you are doing, you’ll produce that great light faster and more conveniently. If you don’t know what you are doing, you’ll just be able to spend less time before you can get bad light. I’m looking forward to experiment even more with this stuff. Also check out Tom’s blog post to see what he did and thinks.