Bonk, Bonk, Bonk. Is This Thing Turned On?

How many items do you carry in your photographic kit that don't need electricity? Not many, I suspect. Even the lens cleaning cloths these days seem to have a battery door somewhere...

One that you can rely upon without power is the grey card. Also known as the gray card in rural Missississippi. It is the photographic studio equivalent of a Powdermilk Biscuit - always there in the cupboard and good for any number of things.

The schools all teach about grey/gray* cards when they talk photography. In some cases I suspect their lecture material was last revised about the time that Ansel Adams invented the 2-zone system...he expanded his practise later...and they make great theatre out of using the things to assess exposure. Some modern students can be brought to understand this and come cannot, but it is still good to see old rituals being enacted.

The standard 18% reflectance grey/gray card was used first with hand-held meters - indeed it may have been seen with extinction meters in the Jurassic period. It allowed the user to have a standard surface colour and contrast to measure to ensure that exposure fell somewhere in the middle of the sensitive range of the plates or films in use at the time. It worked, and let the user make one good guess regardless of whether the scene to be photographed was in contrasty sunlight or flat dark shade. The photographer could then override that advice by merely setting the aperture or shutter speed differently.

This was in the days before camera companies packed the central processing chip with 20,000 images that could be referenced in an instant to give a perfect exposure. You got one bite at the cherry and, often as not, your teeth hit the stone inside. This was in days when you paid for the film, developing, and printing, and did it with your own money. You wanted to get the exposure right the first time.

Your scene might have been all over the place as far as lights and darks went and measuring any small portion could have thrown out the whole shebang. The 18% reflectance was what your meter was set for so it was what you measured. Some of us measured them at home before we went out and cello-taped the controls down on the cameras but that didn't work all that well...

Well... you can do the same thing now with the cards. Use them as exposure guides or use them as white balance guides. You can shoot a custom WB into one and save yourself a lifetime of slider hockey on the computer when you get home. You can take a clear picture of it, compare it to the computer screen and later to the print and see exactly whether you've got the balance right. Like the multicoloured X-Rite calibration colour checker cards, 30 seconds spent shooting this simple little plastic panel will save you 30 minutes in the computer room.

That's good value for money and time. Grey, gray, or grau - they make sense.

* Not to be confused with a noted Melbourne television personality who did crow imitations.

Hot Lights A Go Go

What is the appeal of the hot light? What? How can anybody love a lighting system that makes a studio hotter in January? That needs specially-ventilated light shapers to work. That makes the metal snoots so hot they smell like the grille at Alfred's Kitchen? What is the deal with hot lights?

Well it is June and the weather is getting colder, and if you are in a studio right now the constant light can be a bit of comfort. It is not as good as a reverse-cycle Fujitsu set to 27º but it goes a little way to heating the place. And the metal snoot? Well, you can heat that to welding temperature with the modelling light of at the average mono block anyway - learn to direct the head of the light by using the handle at the back instead of grabbing the light modifier at the front.

The real deal with the hot/constant light is that you can see what you get. If you are training students to see what their lighting is actually doing, or if you yourself find the leap of faith between a modelling light and the end result is a little too far to make, then the constant light is the answer. It pours out through whatever modifier you choose exactly as it is. You change your ISO and white balance to match the output - about 3200º to 4000º Kelvin - and your camera is happy.

There is the fact that other sources of illumination will also make themselves felt in the final exposure...much more so than with the fast impulse and brightness level of the electronic flash...and you may have to take them into account. Hot lights work best in a darkened studio.

But here is the delightful kicker - continuous lighting is perfect for videos. If you choose a set of lights that have no noise associated with them, you can film and record sound at the same time with no interference. Even with the lights that do have some sound - they may have a slight buzz from the internal transformers or whirr from cooling fans - it is generally kept down to such a low level that professional microphones can be positioned to ignore it.

Constant light sources can be large halogen lamps, incandescent lamps, fluorescent tubes, large LED panels, and banks of smaller LED lights. In some cases the housings are fitted with dimmers or rheostats that allow you to vary the brightness of the light without changing the basic white balance. Or there are arrangements in the multiple panels to turn on and off different portions of the bank.

Note that I may have inadvertently led you astray...and that is a pun...because the LED panels can run even cooler than strobe lights while maintaining a daylight balance. The nice thing about many LED panels and large single LED lights is that they are also operable upon battery power - the ubiquitous rechargeable lithium-ion batteries can be banked up to provide full constant lighting in the field.

Camera Electronic has always had some examples of these lights - whether they are Profoto, Elinchrom,  Jin-Bei, Metz, Lume-Cube or LEDGO, there is a variety to suit most purses and light outputs, from full studio high-intensity mono blocks shooting through dedicated soft boxes to tiny banks of LEDS that attach to cell phones.

It's cooler weather now - time to come in and experiment. Video students especially welcome.
www.cameraelectronic.com.au

In Praise Of Dull Days

Yesterday was a dull day. I am delighted to say. It was full of imperialist mayhem and murder but enjoyable withal.

You see, the bane of the outdoor event photographer - the sun - was veiled for the better part of the morning  by a cover of clouds. Not an unusual thing but the timing of this sort of meteorological assistance is never sure - you go to events prepared for battle.

Camera Electronic sells the goodies to fight the sun. Diffuser screens for portraitists, portable speed lights for fill flash, and battery-powered strobe sets for the more well-to-do. ( Who want to carry more break-the-back stuff on their treks...).  We deploy the light to fight the light and most times succeed - if not exactly overpowering the sun, at least mitigating the worst of the contrast.

Sort of a case of Saul vs Sol...

Well, yesterday had a high scrim of cloud that turned into a cover of cloud that turned into rain. There was little need for fill flash, though in some cases it made a nice gleam off the arms and armour. But there was one curious feature - the little cloud symbol for the WB that was meant to set the camera for cloudy conditions certainly worked but worked too well - the pictures made using it warmed up just that little bit too much. They had to be pulled back 800º k in the final computer work to render the scenes in a natural sense.

At the same time I noted that another friend using a different camera set to AUTO WB had little of this problem. I think I was trying to be too clever and Professional with a capital P.

Moral? Set the WB with ºK by all means but do a little investigation beforehand as to the best temperature. Now I know for my camera. What is best for yours?

Why Are Some K's OK And Some K's Are Not OK?

Because not all K's are created equal. OK?

You all know about the Kelvin scale of colour temperature measurement - named after Lord Kelvin - that measures the relative redness, orangeness, yellowness, blueness, and  eventual whiteness of light and strings it out on a numerical scale. The scale starts at 1, which is the colour and intensity of a mechanic's fingernails and goes to 10,000 which is he whiteness of sunlight as you come off a three-day bender and someone throws the window blinds open. I suspect Kelvin also had a scale for the screams as well.

Well, a lot of cameras skirt around this question by having automatic white balance programs in their software that measures the light, quantifies it on the Kelvin scale, and then gives you whatever the heck it wants to. If you include a dominant colour in your composition, it sometimes agrees with you and renders it accurately and sometimes argues the case by tipping the white balance over the other way to compensate for what it thinks is your error. If you are easily persuaded, you go along with it. Hey, it may not be science but it might be art...

If you are pedantic and scientific and people have started to get wise to your pictures of snowdrifts that look like a sort of a dirty peach colour*, you override the manufacturer's opinion and set the white balance yourself...by following the manufacturer's preset WB options. Now you can get a light blue or green snow drift. If you snow drift is lit by a fluorescent tube you can get just anything...

Determination is the thing. Your camera probably has a custom setting for the white balance in graded steps of Kelvin degrees. Find it in the menu next to the pet smile option and dial in 5000ºK. If you are out in fictitious sunlight at 11:00 in the morning with the sun to your back and a chocolate-box landscape stretched out in front of you you will probably get a reasonable balance. Likewise if you are in a studio with a studio flash popping away at a X-Rite colour card held by someone who is a neutral colour themselves...you'll get something recognisable.

But - modify that old sunlight with cloud, haze, chemtrails**, or advancing hours and it will get red or blue or orange or whatever - also if you are shooting in the studio you may discover that your beloved strobe units don't fire at 5000ºK.

I know - My studio lights fire at 5300ºK. Not a big difference, but enough to throw off some grey backdrops and some delicate colours. When I noted this happening I conducted a long test and look day and finally got the right number. I have it dialled in on a custom setting on the Fujifilm cameras and the whole thing now works a treat.

If you can't afford a big X-rite or an old McBeth chart get a Spyder ColorCheckr24 and make that do - you'll be glad you did in the end.

* Note peach coloured snow was common as winter wore on in Alberta. And there were worse colours as well...

** When I was a kid our chemtrails were maple syrup...

Take Me To Your Leader - Rotolux Lands

There is something vaguely alien about the Rotolux RL NEO cine light - particularly when it is mounted on a Cullmann suction mount. You expect it to shuffle along and shoot x-rays out from its eyes...

Well, you can also mount it on your DSLR and video camera or on top of a standard tripod. There's a 1/4" socket on two sides of the circle.

The light is LEDs in two separate circuits - driven from 6 AA cells or an ancillary A?C adapter. The two circuits are to supply two different colours of LED - and there is a mixer panel on the back  to blend the white and the amber. A readout lets you know the exact colour temperature that you are pumping out.

In addition, one of the controls also allows a true-fade of both colour sets - you can accurately supply illumination or fill in any environment. You can also add a set of round filters for further CT adjustment - they are included in the pack.

Note that the light supplied will be a round catchlight for the eyes - good for natural results.

We come in peace...