Video can help when your motor drive isn't fast enough

    Back in the days when cameras would take only one picture when you pressed the shutter, you wound up missing a lot.

    It took time and good reflexes to capture a particular point in fast-moving action back in the film day. I remember going through more than a few takes trying to get a photo of a dart hitting a balloon for a photo class project on "hard and soft."

    While there were motor drives back then, three shots per second was the usual speed, which meant you'd burn through a 36-shot roll in 12 seconds.

    Today, even so-called "entry level" cameras can fire off six frames per second when in drive mode, and with memory cards that hold far more data than the computers that guided the Apollo Moon missions, you can shoot for a while.

    But sometimes that's even not fast enough, as Sony has now got some of its cameras operating with drive speeds of almost 50 frames per second — if you're willing to invest a couple thousands dollars just for the body alone.

    But if you want to get to that speed, there's a way to do it, even with a cell phone. Shoot a video instead.

    A couple caveats first: You're likely not going to get the full pixel count your sensor normally gives you since video is cropped to either a 720 or 1080 format. You might get closer if you're using a 4k video resolution.

    You'll also have an image that's in a 16:9 aspect ratio, but that's not a deal breaker. And you'll most likely be working with a jpg image, which hobbles some post-processing options you would have if you were shooting raw instead.

    But this is a cheap, effective way to get even higher motor-drive speeds than your camera can produce. Some cameras will let you shoot video at 60 frames per second (that's the speed that makes professional and college sports coverage on TV look crystal clear).

    I actually discovered this trick while shooting video of training a National Guard brigade was doing at the Yakima Training Center, a sprawling military installation in Central Washington*. One of the things I shot was a crew firing a howitzer.

    I wanted to send a picture to one of my sons, so I scrubbed through the video to find a picture of the smoke coming out of the gun's muzzle block. I found my frame and did a capture with the editing software I was using, and then processed the photo.

    It was at that point that I discovered I had something incredible. In the photo below, you can see the artillery shell coming out of the cloud of smoke at the end of the barrel.

    I doubt I would have got that if I were shooting stills with the drive running (for that camera) at its full speed of 6 fps.

    It's not something I would do every day, but if you have a situation where you need that extra bit of speed in the number of frames you're shooting to catch some fast-paced action, your camera's video function is a great tool to have in your box.

    (*The Yakima Training Center is where they also filmed the combat scenes in Audie Murphy's "To Hell and Back.")

Know your flash's guide number at a glance

    If you aren't using your flash in automatic mode, you're going to need to figure out things like aperture and power levels on your own.

    But first you need to know how much power your flash has, and for that you need the guide number.

    The guide number is a figure that shows you the flash's power, based on a formual of distance times aperture. The higher the number, the farther away a subject can be and still illuminated adequately.

    In the old days, we would have to do some math to figure out the aperture setting for a subject at a particular distance, or use a table on the back of the flash that would tell you what settings to use for a subject at varying distances.

   Today, if you want to use your flash manually, there are calculators you can use on your phone, such as the one in the Photographer's Companion, where you input a few variables, such as the guide number, flash power and either aperture or distance, and it will do the rest of the work to find the right camera settings.

   If you don't know the flash number, you can look it up in the flash manual, which you can also upload to your phone so you'll have it at all times.

    If you have just one flash, remembering the guide number is simple enough. But what if you use more than one flash, and they have different guide numbers.

    What I have done is made a label showing the guide number that I affix to the side of each flash unit, so I can tell with a quick glance what the guide number is when figuring either how far away to put the flash, or what aperture I'm going to need to get the right look.

    When I made my labels, I used a word processing program and set it for an inverted output, with white numbers on a black background, making the label look inconspicuous, even more than the old tables that used to be on flash units.