BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Marketing Your Photography -- Intelligently

By Jim Zuckerman

Lighthouses sell often for calendars, jigsaw puzzles, note cards, and fine art prints. This is Heceta Light on the Oregon coast, and I photographed it about 15 years ago. A client of mine recently bought 40 images for the right to reproduce them as canvas prints for national distribution, and this was one of the images he wanted. However, the original shot didn’t have Indian paintbrush flowers in the foreground because these flowers don’t grow in Oregon. My client didn’t care. He wanted some additional color because he knows that color is one of the biggest factors in selling prints. The fact that this is biologically incorrect was completely irrelevant to him and, more importantly, to the people who will buy this print.

The same is true for this farm I photographed in New England. The hillside behind the barn is covered with California poppies that were photographed in – no surprise – California. I had had these two images in my files for about 18 years before it occurred to me to combine them, and I did so only because this client kept asking for more and more color.

I teach Making Money with Your Photography here at Betterphoto.com, and one of the things that I stress in the course is that you will increase your income significantly if you are capable, and willing, to enhance reality. Your pictures are products, and they must satisfy the needs of your client. Some clients want unmanipulated images, and that’s fine. Most clients, however, don’t care how you got the picture. They just want an image that works for them, whether it’s a magazine cover, a canvas print, or an advertisement.

Getting Strobes to Work Together

By John Siskin

This blog is about getting your strobes to work together as a team, I recently wrote about how to trigger one strobe from the camera, now we have to get the rest of the lights to go off. There is a slave unit that is particularly handy for this purpose: an optical slave. These trigger a strobe when they are hit by another strobe. I use a lot of these to trigger additional strobes on a shoot. Slaves are generally a small package of electronics encased in solid plastic. They have different connectors for different strobes: pc, household, 1/4inch headphone style and hot shoe.

Optical Slaves 9 slaves including PC plugs, household plugs, hotshoe connectors and the large headphone style plugs. These units have very different sensitivities. This is the grope of slaves I usually take with me on location. © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

The big problem is that slaves don’t always work. Several reasons of this, first the slave may not “see” enough light. The simple way to deal with this is connect the slave to a sync cord and move the slave closer to another light. You can do this with a radio receiver also. You can also get slaves that are more sensitive; of course they cost more. Another problem is that slaves and power packs, particularly packs that use the household connector type sync, need the plug put into the pack in a certain direction. The answer to this is simple: take the slave out turn it 180º and plug it back in. Sometimes a slave with a household connector will keep triggering, this means that the slave needs to be plugged into the pack in the other direction. Both problems with the household connector are a result of polarization in the sync circuit and the slave. Then there are slaves that stop working. I don’t know why they do this but I check all my slaves every few months to find out if they still work. Lastly there are situations when the strobe goes off when you don’t want it to. If someone else uses a strobe it will trigger your optical slave, this is why optical slaves are not good at weddings. Sometimes other things will trigger slaves. I once had a problem with a flashing light on top of a forklift!

Covered porch, pool and landscape © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Optical slaves may be a little annoying but a handful of them will make impossible shots doable! In this next shot I have 9 lights! I couldn’t have done it without optical slaves.

Have Fun!

John

Strobe Sync

By John Siskin

Dodie Helps Out Again © John Siskin All rights reserved

Syncing your strobes to your camera is one of the eternal annoyances. The problems include cords and misfires. A little background, sync is basically an electrical connection, when the first shutter curtain finishes traveling it connects the two sides of the electrical circuit and this triggers the strobe. If the second shutter curtain has already started to travel when the first curtain finishes you get a partial picture since the second curtain is covering part of the picture.

This connection should be very simple, but there are a couple of reasons that it isn’t simple. First the electricity in this circuit is not the actual power for the strobes since that would be too powerful. It is a sync voltage that triggers the actual strobe, thus we have a switch triggering another switch triggering the strobes. Some equipment uses a high trigger voltage that can damage some modern cameras.

Camera PC Socket © John Siskin All rights reserved

Camera Hotshoe © John Siskin All rights reserved

There are two places on a modern camera where the sync is located: in the hot shoe and in the PC terminal. The hot shoe (also called flash shoe) is usually on top of the camera and the PC socket, when it is there at all, is usually on the other side of the camera from the shutter release. If you are going to connect the camera to the strobes with a wire you will connect a PC cord to the PC terminal of the camera and either plug the other end into the strobe equipment or plug the other end into an extension and then into the strobe. There are adapters that allow you to use a PC cord with a hot shoe. Unfortunately PC cords are delicate and often fail. Be sure to have an extra.

PC cord tip © John Siskin All rights reserved

Most strobe packs use one of two plugs; of course this couldn’t be standardized. Most, but not nearly all strobes use a .25X1.25 inch plug (looks like an old style headphone plug). The other common plug used is a regular household plug, just as you’d find on a lamp or a blender. The problem with the household plug is that if you have a momentary lapse of thinking processes you could plug your camera into the wall current. This would be very bad. I had an assistant do that once, very very bad.

Guitar plug sync cord © John Siskin All rights reserved

Sync cord, power pack end © John Siskin All rights reserved

An alternative is to use a radio sender to tell the powerpack what to do. This requires a sender that attaches fits in the hot shoe and a receiver that attaches to the strobes, in the same way a wire from the camera would attach. The great thing is that there is no wire connected to the camera, which makes handling the camera easier. Also there is no high trigger voltage to damage the camera, very nice. So there are several kinds of radio slaves, units like the Pocket Wizard that cost between $150. and $300. or units made in China and sold on EBay that cost between $30. and $50. check them out at: photography.listings.ebay.com. I have the one of the units from EBay, it works very well. These units have the 1/4inch guitar jack and a pc terminal that you can attach to a pack that uses the household connector, of course you will need a household to PC adapter.

Chinese Radio Slave © John Siskin All rights reserved

You may want to trigger more than one strobe: I often need a bunch of strobes. I’ll be talking about how that works next week.

IMC Warehouse, original transparency © John Siskin All rights reserved

Have Fun!

John

A Lucky Sighting

By Jim Zuckerman

I had never seen a coati before, so it was exciting to see this unique Costa Rican jungle mammal looking down from an unobstructed branch in a dense tree. Fortunately at that moment I had my 500mm f/4 IS lens mounted on the tripod, because a shorter lens would have made the animal too small in the frame. I got off two shots before the shy coati ran out of sight and disappeared. What a blessing autofocus is!

At mid-day during the dry season, the sun is very high in the sky and the lighting is so harsh as to make good photography virtually impossible. The only hope is to photograph in the shade. The thick jungle is a big problem because animals can hide so effectively from our view, but the good news is that the density can, in many instances block the direct sunlight and prevent the kind of patchy lighting that I consider the kiss of death for good photography.

Toucan Silhouette at Sunset

By Jim Zuckerman

I tried very hard to get a good toucan shot so the beautiful markings could be seen, but I just didn’t have enough time. It took a lot of energy and time to get every shot on my trip to Costa Rica, and it was more important to me to go after the macaws. I’m thinking of developing a photography tour to the ecolodge for a week so there would be plenty of time for a lot more shooting. There were toucans in the trees every day, but too often they were high in the trees and obscured by leaves. The best I could do was to capture a silhouette when the sky had nice color in it. I like this composition very much, but it’s not what I was hoping to get. This was taken with my 500mm f/4 IS telephoto and 400 ISO. Even though there is a large toucan population here I had to be very quick. These flighty subjects are so fast that they can be posing nicely one moment and then they literally drop out of the tree before they spread their wings to fly. I had the camera's metering mode set to evaluative (the same as matrix for a Nikon), and without any compensation it gave me this correct exposure.

Bird Photography in the Jungle

By Jim Zuckerman

My primary goal in going to Costa Rica – photographically speaking – was to capture macaws in flight. Although I saw many of them fly, I found it extremely difficult to fill a significant part of the frame with them and follow focus at the same time with a long lens. I hiked all over the place, looking for the trees they frequent and then waiting for them to fly. I could get relatively close but I found that my 500mm f/4 was too long because the birds would be in and out of my frame before I could focus.

I started using the 70-200mm f/2.8 and then was able to capture some of the action. I was looking for good wing spread and good color. I never got what I consider an outstanding image, but I came close. Here are two of the images I took, and I’ll upload another one soon. I like the unusual body language of the first image because the bird almost looks like dancer. In the second photo, I like the elongation and grace of the macaw, but this one is less artistic and more literal. At least that's how I see it.

Passion Flower on the Jungle Floor

By Jim Zuckerman

I did very little macro photography of plants and flowers in Costa Rica last week. A photographer could spend the rest of his or her life doing nothing but flowers in the tropics and be very happy. However, I was concentrating mostly on the wildlife because I find animals more fascinating, and it’s definitely an exciting moment when you can overcome the challenges and get something really good.

At mid-day, however, most animals are not active. They retire to the deep shade of the jungle out-of-sight, so during those hours I photographed some of the flora. This passion flower had fallen on the ground, so I placed the tripod right above it and shot with f/32 for complete depth of field. My ISO was 200 and the shutter speed was .8 seconds.

Note that there are three things that make this a successful picture. First, the lighting is soft and diffused, the ideal type of lighting for flowers. There is no harsh contrast and no black shadows that have lost detail. Second, the graphic design of the flower is beautiful. The radial pattern is visually attractive. And third, the color contrast of the red flower against the earthy colors of the leaves is striking.

Depth of Field issues

By Jim Zuckerman

When I arrived at the ecolodge in Costa Rica last week, one of the guests told me about a hummingbird’s nest in the jungle. I was excited to see it, so he led me to a tiny nest hanging very close to the ground on the backside of a leaf. Hummingbirds will often tolerate people in close proximity to their nest, so I set up my camera about five feet away. After a few minutes, the little hermit hummingbird returned to the nest to feed the chicks inside. Every 15 minutes or so, this wonderful event repeated itself so I was able to have ample opportunity for photography.

When possible, I like to fill the frame with a subject, as opposed to taking a picture with the animal smaller in the frame and then cropping later. This has pros and cons, of course. The advantage is that the subject will be dazzlingly sharp in a print, but the downside is that with very tiny subjects like hummingbirds, depth of field suffers. You can see that the body of the bird is sharp but the wings aren’t. The flash I used froze the motion; the reason the wings aren’t sharp is a depth of field problem. Had I moved back from the nest, the wings would have come more into focus. However, there was so much vegetation in the way that I couldn’t do it. The number one problem in shooting jungle inhabitants is that it’s hard to get a clear shot without a lot of leaves and branches in the way.

The reason the depth of field is so shallow is because I used a Canon 500mm f/4 IS lens plus a 1.4X teleconverter, which equaled a 700mm lens. In order to make the lens focus so closely, I had to use three extension tubes as well. This reduced the light by three full f/stops, which is why I had to shoot wide open, and it made my depth of field about one inch deep.

I don’t like black backgrounds behind hummingbird shots because these birds are not nocturnal. However, in the dim light of the jungle the only way to balance the background greenery with the light on the bird was to use a longer shutter speed in addition to the flash. This was not feasible if my goal was to render the bird’s body as sharp as I could. I can use Photoshop to add a soft green background if I want, but what you see here is how I shot the picture.

Macro Photography in the Jungle

By Jim Zuckerman

Photographing something as tiny as this green and black poison dart frog from Costa Rica presents a technical and artistic challenge. It is only about an inch and a half long. In order to significantly fill the frame with the amphibian, I had to focus very close to it. This meant that the depth of field would be extremely shallow. So shallow, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible to maintain focus on the entire body. The only way to increase the depth of field would be to use a small lens aperture, but in the shade of the jungle that would force the shutter speed to be too slow, and my fear was that nothing would be sharp at all.

I brought with me a flash bracket by Novoflex that has two flexible arms for holding two flash units. The flash units can be positioned simply be bending the arms, and I wanted one flash on either side of the subject. I figured this would provide a better type of light than on-camera flash. I tried that, but the problem was that the frog was so low to the ground that the light wasn’t illuminating the underside of it. Since a large part of the frog is black, the contrast between the illuminated dorsal area and the very dark ventral section was too much. There was no detail to be seen in the shadow.

The only solution was to use the ambient light that was very soft and diffused. I took the shot with a 50mm macro, 400 ISO, and f/8 (a 100mm macro would have given me a greater working distance – a good thing so I wouldn’t scare the frog as much and it would offer more protection from coming in contact with the poisonous skin – but f/8 on a 100mm lens has less depth of field than f/8 on a 50mm lens). My shutter speed was 1/60th of a second. I couldn’t even use a tripod because even without a center column, the ballhead of my tripod wouldn’t allow me to place the camera low enough for an intimate eye-level portrait. I lay flat on the jungle floor, trying to keep my distance from a mound of fire ants, and used the ground to steady the camera.

After I took several shots, the frog jumped to another platform and I moved with it, shooting a vertical this time. You can see that the camera lens was right at ground level.

Low Light Photography in Costa Rica

By Jim Zuckerman

I am in Costa Rica right now. Today I encountered one of the animals I’ve wanted to photograph for many years. The two-toed sloth is a direct descendant of the giant ground sloth that went extinct 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. It’s a unique, slow moving animal, and that made it easier to photograph than most of the animals and birds I’ve been trying to capture these past few days.

There are several challenges when shooting in jungle environments. First, it is usually very dark in the shade. I always want a low ISO if I can get away with it (400 or below), yet the shutter has to be fast enough to freeze the subject’s movement in the low light. Fast moving animals like monkeys and birds are really difficult, but the sloth’s movements were much easier to handle.

Second, there are always a million leaves and branches between the camera and the subject. Animals feel more secure when they are less visible, and they hide in the thick vegetation.

Third, the heat and humidity is oppressive. It drains your energy, making the photography much more difficult. This is the dry season, but the weather feels like South Florida in August – times ten. Rain isn’t a problem now, but I have to make sure that my lenses are clean and that they haven’t fogged up.

I used 400 ISO for the sloth, and the lens I chose was the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS at full telephoto. The f/2.8 lens aperture was worth its weight in gold in this shooting situation because the extra light gathering ability made the difference between getting the picture tack sharp and being disappointed in havng an almost-sharp picture.