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.

Turn household items into lighting modifiers

    Daniel Norton one of the photographers who appears regularly on Adorama's Youtube channel did a video during the COVID-19 lockdown demonstrating how to turn things around the house into lighting modifers.

    Among the items he uses to modify his single speed light are tin foil and poster board reflectors, as well as wine bottles and honey to create different effects.

    While he was doing it with a small figure on his desktop, the techniques could work for portraits.

DIY flash grid lets you put subject in spotlight

     We've talked earlier about softboxes, which allow you to make your light bigger and softer, which can be a flattering look.

    But there are times when you want the light to be tighter. For example, if you want to just do a rim light, you don't want to completely light up the subject.

    This is where grids come in. The grid creates a narrow spot of light with feathered edges so the light falls off. It does this by forcing the light through a grid, channeling it in one direction and reducing spread.

    Photographers use grids on all kinds of flashes, with some covering large softboxes, while others fit over basic speed lights. However, the smallest of those are $7 at some retailers.

    If you are looking to make your own, or make a custom set, you can do it for a few cents a piece.

    There's a couple videos out on Youtube showing how to make them, but the one I like is done by Spyros Heniadis. Instead of using straws to form the grid as some suggest, he recommends using corrugated plastic, also known as coroplast. What I like about it is you just assemble strips of material to a size that would cover your flash head. No need to glue individual straws together, assuming you can find black straws where you live.

    You can pick up coroplast at craft stores or sign shops, or just grab some campaign signs after the election, but you want to make sure the material is black. Other colors will cause a color cast, and white will spread the light out, defeating the entire reason you're doing this in the first place.

 

 

    One thing I did different was instead of using craft foam for the body of the grid, I used cardboard from postal mailing boxes that I used to make the softboxes, and then wrapped it in black duct tape to both hold it together and give it a more professional look.

    Here's a shot I took without the grid.

    

    And here's one with the grid.

 

    I used a 1-inch long grid, but you can use different lengths to either widen or narrow the field. With this method you can make a variety of grids for different situations.

How to get decent portraits with on-camera flash

     So you've decided to get a speed light to go with your camera, but you don't have a way to use it off-camera, or you don't have the space for a portrait.

    What do you do?

    Gavin Hoey, one of the photographers featured on Adorama's Youtube channel (disclaimer: I am not sponsored by Adorama, but its channel is a good resource) goes over some ways to get flattering light with a camera-mounted flash.

    (Note: This is for flash units mounted on the camera's hot shoe. If you're using a pop-up flash, these tips will not work for you, but check out the diffuser we featured earlier.)

     What Hoey suggests is essentially bouncing the flash, preferably off a white or neutral-colored wall or ceiling. If you bounce off a colored wall, you're going to get a color cast.

    But what I found interesting was Hoey's suggestion for bouncing off a wall behind you if the room's small enough. Along with creating a softer light by bouncing it off a larger reflector, this over-the-shoulder move can also allow you to avoid the harsh look of a subject against a black background since the foreground/background light are now more balanced, thanks to to the inverse-square law.

    For those not familiar with this law of physics, light falls off at the inverse square of the distance from the light source. At 3 feet away from the light source, the light is 1/9 the brightness it would have at 1 foot. As you go farther out, the difference decreases, so you can actually get a more even lighting the farther back the light source.

    You do have to pay for that with either a wider aperture or a higher ISO.

     Another tip Hoey offered for overall studio photography is to first take a test shot with the settings you plan to use but no flash. The goal is to have the frame completely black, which means that the ambient lighting will not have any effect on the picture, and that all lighting will come from the flash. That can also be helpful if you're in a situation with mixed light sources.