Ooops, I forgot my remotes!

Last Sunday night I was at a reception that required a backdrop for larger groups. I didn't have any radio remotes to fire the lights, so I thought about using the Ultra Zap 2400's built in optical slave. I thought I could use my SB800 and swivel it to point backward towards the Ultra Zap and use it to trigger the Ultra Zap. But the normal setting on my SB800 is TTL and it sends out a little pre-flash to determine the exposure. That little pre-flash triggered the Ultra Zap so that when the actual exposure was made, the Ultra Zap was recycling and did not fire.

Setting my SB800 to manual and dialing it down solved the problem. Manual doesn't give you a pre-flash, so only the actual exposure flash triggered my off-camera optical lights. Situation resolved.

Upcoming

It's been a while since I posted. I have some neat images for the blog and as soon as I process them I will post and talk about them. I really like the SB800 and the Nikon Creative Light System!

Yesterday's wedding was at Independence Grove here in Libertyville. It was a full day in the sun, but the temp was only in the upper 70s and the humidity was bearable. The breeze really helped, too.

Sunset with the bride and groom

Last Sunday night I was at Independence Grove with my associate, Emma. The bride asked for a sunset picture, so we walked down to the waterfront. I posed them looking at the sunset on their wedding day, and had Emma take a Lumedyne with a radio slave around the side and slightly in front of them. I metered for the sky, underexposing it by about a stop. Then I took a test shot and adjusted the aperture until the light on the couple looked nice. I re-metered the sky (keeping it a stop under exposed) and banged off a few shots.

It was 95 degrees out there last Sunday and we went through a lot of water and Poweraid. Remember to keep hydrated!

Why you need to test

Last time I said I marked the floor of my garage with two marks ten feet apart. Yesterday I got the Nikon SB-28 speedlight I bought on eBay (gotta love that place). I tested my current SB800 against the newcomer to get an idea of relative power. Here are the results at full power ISO 100 at 10 feet.

Zoom SB28 SB800
24mm f4.0.9 f5.6.1
28mm f5.6.0 f5.6.3
35mm f5.6.4 f5.6.8
50mm f5.6.8 f8.0.1
70mm f8.0.1 f8.0.4
85mm f8.0.3 f8.0.6

It looks like the SB800 is consistantly about 1/3 stop stronger. That could be due to the age of the capacitors in the SB28. But now I know that they are pretty much the same. I think a third of stop is pretty close.

Now I have two similarly powered speedlights (and I just got the PC male to PC male sync cords) so I can do some of the cool stuff that David Hobby talks about on the Strobist (see links). Have fun and keep shooting.

Testing, Testing, Testing

I am such a geek that I marked my garage floor with two lines ten feet apart to facilitate testing flash units. Now I have a quick and easy (and repeatable ) way to experiment.

I tried a Lumedyne flash vs. a Nikon SB800 and found that the SB800 delivered the same amount of light at full power at the the Lumedyne at 100ws. That means that the Lumedyne at 200ws is only one stop brighter than the SB800. You could compensate for that by increasing the ISO or opening up one stop. Nice to know and have in your bag of tricks.

TTFN

Another great blog and resource

Yup, I am a photo-dork. I am meeting my associate at the studio this morning at 9:00 AM to leave for our wedding. So I got up at 6:00 to make sure I had time to get the van loaded, make lunch, and get ready. All that is done, so here I sit surfing the web, looking for inspiration and new ideas. Yup, I am a photo-dork.

I came across a great site dedicated to weddings and lighting weddings. It is http://www.flashflavor.com/ and I will include it in my links. That's all for now, so keep shooting!

DON'T PANIC

As the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Universe says, DON'T PANIC! Tonight, I got a frantic call from a friend. He was shooting a wedding when he had tried to review his last image. Suddenly his camera said that there were no images on his card. The counter on the top display said that he only had one image left, so something was on his card. But the monitor said there were no files on the card. Clearly something was wrong.

I told him to remove the card and set it aside and keep going. DON'T PANIC! It won't help. Just replace the card and keep shooting. As it turned out, the images were all there except the last one. Something happened and it was corrupted. That caused the camera to be unable to read the card. I was able to successfully download the card and determine that the images were there. This same thing happened to another friend a few weeks ago, but it happened to several different cards, which meant she was nearly out of memory. Her husband was about to go to Walgreen's and buy some more memory, but they were able to finish the night with what they had.

At Studio West, we shoot the entire wedding in raw mode. This takes the maximum memory. Our standing orders are to shoot raw (or NEF, or RAF, or RAW, or camera raw, or whatever). If, however, we are running out of memory at the reception, we can switch to Large Fine JPG for the dancing. If that still isn't enough, we can shoot with a lower resolution or more compression. You see, it pays to have a thought-out procedure; the proverbial Plan B!

Just an update for you all. I am in the midst of three weddings in five days plus a camp on the sixth day. I have some really great things from yesterday's wedding and should have some unusual things from tomorrow's wedding. I will post them early next week.