Flash Accessories

Having wrote a blog post on the different types of flash, it seems necessary to finish this subject with the accessories used with flash.

Reflectors

As some of the group will know, I often carry at least one small white reflector in a pocket in my camera bag, just in case I or others need it, it’s amazing what you can get on a magazine these days !

These can be used to reflect light to an area where the flash might not illuminate, to avoid shadows.

Reflectors are available in four colours: white; silver; gold and black.

White reflectors are used for reflecting diffused light towards the subject.

Silver reflectors are used to reflect brighter, more harsh light towards the subject.

Gold reflectors are used to reflect a bright and warmer light towards the subject.

Black reflectors, sometimes called 'French Flags', reflect shadows onto the subject. Although this one sounds odd, and completely the opposite to what a reflector is there for, but it works and can add a subtle shadow if necessary. 

 
 

Flash Triggers

I mentioned briefly in my last post about flash triggers.  These units can trigger flash units (both small and studio) without the need for sync cables, for up to 100m.

Because some use radio transmission, rather than IR, it allows for triggering around corners, through walls and is not affected by high ambient light situations.

Flash triggers usually allow the photographer to choose from four individual channel and six studio selectors, each providing a unique ID for a different flash device or combine them to trigger all equipment within a given setup or studio.  This might sound an odd feature, but where other photographers may be near you it can prevent someone else’s trigger from setting off your flash.

This Pulsar flash trigger also features a hot-shoe mount, sync in and sync out terminals, a ready indicator, a test button and an external power option.

With these triggers each unit can be used as either a transmitter or receiver and is powered by just two AAA batteries, again not breaking the bank.

Photographic Flash

Personally, I prefer to use existing light as much as possible, hence the late additional of this posting.  But sometimes you have little alternative.

There are basically three types of flash:

1. Built in Flash
2. Accessory flash units / guns
3. Studio Flash

Built In Flash

The built in flash unit on a camera are very limited, usually with a guide number of about 10 – 13, at ISO 100.  Although not very powerful the main advantage is that these are always available, being built into the camera and can be very useful for fill in flash.

 

Accessory Flash Units / Guns

 

These units offer far more power than built in flash units, and lots more options.

Above is one of my flash units, which has a bounce and pan head, which allows me to bounce the flash of ceilings and walls, which diffuses the light that illuminates the subject, although care has to be taken as sometimes the colour of the ceiling or wall, if a particularly strong colour, can leave a slight colour cast on the photograph.

My flash unit also has a zoom function that can concentrate the flash into the centre of the photograph, to match the focal length of you lens, or zoom setting, which is handy when you are limited how close to the subject that you can get.

Some flash units also have diffusers built in to the head to diffuse the light without having to bounce the light, removing the harsh flash that can sometimes ruin a photograph.

You may have noticed the Velcro pads on the side of the flash head, these were for a flash diffuser which fitted to the head of the flash unit, which was then angled up and the flash was bounced using this diffuser towards the subject.  Yes another of my gizmos !

You can use these flash units either fitted on top of the camera, using the hot shoe adaptor, or off the camera on a tripod, controlled via slave sensor:

As shown above, or wireless / infra red trigger.  Also flash sync cables can be used, but care must be taken to prevent accidents from people tripping over, or even you pulling over the tripod, with its flash unit, if you walk off too far for the cable to reach.

In fact I have three Pentax Xtra Flash units, which are small self contained slave / flash units which I got for £5.00 each.  They work off one AA battery, so they would hardly break the bank for consumables.  These units do take some getting used to, but are something that, if carried in your camera bag, could make the difference between a good photograph and a badly lit one.

Looking today, they are not available from this shop anymore, and one price I did find for these units was £19.99 !

The power of a flash unit is shown as it’s guide number, which shows how far the flash would be useful, based on using ISO 100 sensitivity (or film) in meters.  But this distance does not take in to account the use of bounce flash, so you would have to consider this when deciding if to bounce the flash off a ceiling or wall.

 

Studio Flash

These are the big daddy of the photographic lighting world, and are rarely seen outside a photographic studio, due to their size and their power requirements, so when I had a chance, on my last photographic course, to use them I jumped at the opportunity.

The heads to these units, shown below, can be fitted with a number of flash modifiers, for example soft boxes (as shown above (right)), umbrellas (as shown above (left)), snoots and barn doors.  These are used to soften, diffuse, direct and control the light from the flash to the subject.

These units are usually triggered via wireless or infra red, or sync cables, but again care has to be taken to avoid accidents.

Heather Angel

Heather is an award-winning photographer who has been at the forefront of nature photography in Britain for three decades.

 

Born Heather Hazel Le Rougetel on 21 July 1941.

 

Her love of the natural world began during her childhood summer holidays spent on her maternal grandparents' Suffolk farm. It was therefore a natural progression for her to study zoology at University; but at that time she had no ambition to be a photographer.

 

Heather graduated from Bristol University, in 1962, and then took part in a 3-month underwater expedition to Norway – she was the only woman amongst eight men. Here, she took her first pictures – all of marine life – with an Exakta camera, which her father gave her as a 21st birthday present.

 

A period of marine biological research followed when Heather began to write articles on marine life in her spare time. In 1965 Heather worked as part-time assistant plankton sorter at the National Institute of Oceanography.

Gradually, photography began to impinge on the marine biology and some years later she turned freelance. So began a peripatetic life travelling repeatedly from the poles to the tropics in her quest for arresting wildlife photographs.

 

In 1966 she became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, followed in 1971 when she became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society

 

Her work has been recognised by world-wide honours and awards. In 1986, an Honorary Doctorate of Science was conferred on her by Bath University. When Nottingham University appointed her a Special Professor in 1994, she was the first British wildlife photographer to be so honoured. Four years later, the BioCommunications Association of USA made her their 1998 Louis Schmidt Laureate. From 1984-86 Heather Angel was President of the Royal Photographic Society; only the second lady President within the Society’s 152-year history. In 2000, Practical Photography described her as ‘the doyenne of nature photography’.

To date, she has produced 47 books to date.

 

Some examples of Heather's macro photography are shown below:

 

 

Analysis of Images

 

Heather has used the lens to capture the texture of the plants that she has photographed, with a large aperture to isolate the subject from it’s surroundings, with the exception of the Pond Cameo (row 3, column 1) where she has kept the leaf in sharp focus.

 

The photographs have vibrant colours and the elements in the photograph form interesting shapes.

Ezra Stoller

Ezra was born on 16th May 1915, in Chicago.

Whilst studying at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at New York University, Ezra became interested in photography, in particular architectural photography.  During the course he began making lantern slides and photographs of architectural models, drawings and sculpture. After his graduation in 1939, he concentrated on photography.

During World War II, he taught photography at the Army Signal Corps Photo Center in New York City. Two decades later, Stoller founded Esto Photographics, the agency that has become one of the profession’s best known and most respected houses of photography, which is now run by Erica Stoller, his daughter.

In 1961, he was the first recipient of the AIA Gold Medal for Photography.

Having studied as an architect, it gave Stoller’s an architect’s eye and discipline that moved him to capture on film the structure and spirit, body and soul of the icons of Modern architecture, from the Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla to Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York and close to all of the great postwar buildings in between. Often, the image we carry in our mind’s eye of any particular great building was first seen through a lens by Ezra Stoller. He managed, in a career that spanned more than five decades, to capture not only the architecture, but also the times and culture embodied in each piece of work. His photos continue to be featured in countless books and magazine articles, and in art exhibitions worldwide.


 In 1990 Ezra's photographs were published in Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller, which features 400 of his most important works, along with his writing about the pictures, the buildings, and the architects who designed them

On 29th October 2004, Ezra passed away after complications following a stroke.

Examples of Ezra's photography:

Falling Water	Finnish Pavilion
Guggenheim	New Harmony
Seagrams Interior	Chamberlain Cottage
Kitt Peak	Notre-Dame-du-Haut Chapel
Manufacturer's Trust	Whitney Interior

Evaluation of Images

Ezra's photographs show good use of light, texture and shape.  With these images being in black and white the shadows are clearly defined with the texture and contrast of some photographs emphasised by the use of the black and white film.


The unusual shapes and forms in the Finnish Pavilion photograph, with the subtle lighting and the contrasts, not just in light but also with the inclusion of the plant in the bottom right of the photograph and the unusual shapes of the building.    

The shapes and forms are shown clearly, especially in the case of Kitt Peak, where the different tones which are lit by the natural light and the unusual angle of the shot with the almost diagonal line and the shadows created make this image very interesting.

With Seagam's Interior the contrast of the light from the windows and the shadows creating leading lines, leading the viewer into the photograph.   

Julius Shulman

Julius was a very well respected architectural photographer from America, who is best known for his photograph of Case Study House #22, which is shown below (row 1, column 1), who sadly died on 15th July 2009.

Julius was an architectural photographer who’s architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Pierre Koenig's remarkable structures, have been published countless times.

Julius was born on 10th October 1910, in Brooklyn, New York.  He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His family soon moved to a farm in Connecticut. Shulman said that's where he learned about lights and shadows and developed a love of nature.

When Julius was 10, his family moved to Los Angeles and opened a dry goods store. His father died of tuberculosis in 1923, leaving his mother with their five children and the business.

Julius attended Roosevelt High School, where he took his lone photography class. He spent the next several years soul searching and earning his rent money by taking photos with an Eastman box camera. One picture of a bridge won first place in a national magazine contest.

It was a casual meeting with architect Richard Neutra in 1936 that launched Julius’s career in architectural photography.

The brilliant design and style of buildings like those by Charles Eames, and Richard Neutra, was first brought to peoples attention by Julius's photography. The detail in the photographs of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each of Julius’s architectural photographs brings together the perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.

Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Julius have disappeared or been crudely converted, which is why I wanted to capture photographs of some of the buildings in Burton On Trent, before some of them suffer the same fate.

Julius’s mission was to use his photography to build the reputation of architects who were bringing innovative design to the West.

Examples of Julius’s work

Case Study House #22	Chemosphere
Fire Station No 28	Palm Springs House
Prairie Chicken House	Juergen Noga
	Freeman House

Evaluation of Images


Julius's photographs include some colour photographs as well as black and white photographs.

Local Architecture–part 1

One important thing about architecture is that you don’t have to travel far to find any:

Above is a view of the University block of Burton College, in fact the building in which we are studying this course.
Burton has a number of older buildings, which have their own style (like the University Block above), here are some examples:

Andressey Bridge	St Modwen’s Church
Burton Market Hall	Old Building at mouth of Burton Market

Architectural Photography

What is architectural photography ?

Architectural photography is defined as "encompass views of the exteriors and interiors of domestic, commercial, religious, institutional, and engineering structures, as well as records of the evolution of towns and cities".

This latter part of the description is interesting because there are a number of buildings in and around Burton On Trent, that I like and I would like to capture on a photograph, because in the past I have thought about taking a photograph of a building only to be beaten to it by the demolition men.

There are some buildings that I have seen on my travels that I like as either a classic old building, a striking new style buildings.

Below are some of my architectural photographs from our visit to Whitby:

Arch at Whitby Abbey	Part of Whitby Abbey
Nat West Bank – Whitby
St Mary’s Church – Whitby	St Mary’s Church – Whitby

Photo Editors

The photo editing software is the digital version of the photographers darkroom.

As per my previous post, where I discussed some of the different computer platforms, some photo editors are only available for certain platforms,  so I will try to show what platforms these editors are available for.  I will also say a bit about some of the free software available which can be powerful, and even portable !

My personal choice of photo editor is Serif's Photo Plus X4:

Serif Photo Plus  (Paid for  -  Windows only)

This program can handle RAW formats as well as files from Adobe PhotoShop (psd) and Corel Paintshop Pro (psp), with both opening and saving files in psd and psp formats, with layers fully supported.  This editor is only available for the windows platform.

I find that this software is very powerful, with a wide range of options available, but without being too resource hungry (needing very high memory capacity, powerful processors, and storage capacity) and at a reasonable price.

PhotoShop (paid for - Windows and Apple Mac)

This is seen as 'the' photo editor, used by professional photographers world wide, because of its sheer power, but its power comes at a price, both cost wise and resources required.

Adobe photoshop is a very powerful editor used for editing photographs, images for websites, and advertising.

Photoshop, originally started in 1987 under the name of 'Display' by Thomas Knoll, this was later developed into an image editor, before a meeting with Adobe where they purchased the licence to the now named 'Photoshop' program.

Photoshop has a number tools to make adjustments to images including levels, curves, vibrancy and tones of colours, as well as cropping images.  There are also plugins available for photoshop for adding more tools to the very large selection available.

Photoshop can handle Raw files, via the Adobe Camera Raw interface, as well as a number of different image formats. 

Paintshop Pro (paid for - windows only)

This program originally started as a shareware image editor.

In fact I learnt a lot using version 7 of this software whilst studying digital imaging at the Hatton Centre.  I still have version 7 installed on my computer.

Although over shadowed by Adobe's Photoshop, Paintshop Pro has the advantage over cost, which is considerably cheaper than Photoshop, and can also use most plugins designed for Photoshop.

Like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro can make a large number of adjustments to images, including levels, curves and colours.

Originally developed by JASC, the company was purchased by Corel in 2004, and Paintshop Pro was added to their portfolio of software titles.

GIMP (free  -  Windows (installed and portable),

Apple Mac and Linux)

GIMP has been around for a number of years, remaining a free photo editor with a portable version available (which I do carry), which is available on all major platforms.

Although it does have an unusual if not quirky interface, which does take getting used to, it is a handy editor for using when you are faced with someone's computer where they only have Microsoft Paint !

GIMP does not have the following in some circles like Photoshop, but being free it is a good starting place for someone who needs to edit photographs, but cannot afford to spend money.

Like Photoshop and Paintshop Pro, GIMP has a very powerful range of adjustments available and can load and save files in a range of formats.  For handling RAW files you need to install UFRaw, a plugin for GIMP.

Paint.net (free - windows only)

This is another free photo editor, which is easier to understand than GIMP, but is capable of a number of adjustments and like the other programs can use layers.