What hectic times: I feel like we’ve released Making Light, An Introduction to Off Camera Flash just yesterday, and today I’m already thrilled to present you with the sequel, Making Light 2. Advanced Use of Off Camera Flash. This second part picks up where Volume 1 stopped: it’s all about working with multiple flashes and more advanced techniques such as High Speed Sync, that allows you to sync a flash up to 1/8.000 of a second.

To feed even the biggest gearhead’s gear lust, there’s a chapter on… gear! I discuss some of the modifiers I use, my choice of triggers and other useful stuff. Hey, I even mention a printer. What do printers and off camera flash have in common? Well, you’ll read it in Volume 2 .

Just like we had in Volume 1, there’s again 10 case studies, illustrated with setup shots but quite frankly, there are a lot more case studies, tips and suggestions throughout the gear section of the book, as well. So even if you’re on a budget, you might still skim through it!

But probably the most interesting part of this eBook are the four interviews I did with colleagues Jürgen Doom, Andy Van den Eynde, Bert Stephani and Tom Museeuw: these interviews give you an insight into the minds and camera bags of four working professionals who are head-over-heels into off camera flash.

If you’re interested, you can pick up a copy of Making Light 2 in its entire 77 page PDF goodness for only $5 here. And if you do so before October 24th, midnight, you even get 20% off with discount code MAKINGLIGHT4. If you’re really hungry for knowledge, why not get some other books from the Craft & Vision store and save 20% off any purchase of five or more books with code MAKINGLIGHT20.

Finally, if you did not yet get the first Making Light, there’s also a limited-time bundle where you can get both Making Light books for $8. The bundle can be accessed from the bottom of the Making Light 2 product page (see the screenshot below).

Below that, you’ll find a couple of screenshots from the book.

Hieronder vind je nog een paar screenshots uit het boek!

I’ve been playing around a lot with FourSquare, recently. And no, I don’t mean that silly Facebook App that tells people where you are all of the time and that allows you to become the mayor of Whateverville. No, I’m talking about THE Foursquare.

The FourSquare is a combination of a custom designed flash bracket and an equally custom designed 30 inch softbox, both of which fold down to a small package. The bracket can hold up to four speedlights, which is what it did on this very sunny day. The nice thing about the FourSquare is that the back of the softbox can be opened, allowing you to trigger the flashes optically if you want to. As this shot of dancer Olympe (you know you’re destined to do great things when your parents name you like that!) was shot in blazing sunlight and optical triggering can be unreliable, I preferred to use the following setup: one SB-900 was attached to the foursquare as a Commander, and connected to my camera with the SC-28 cord. The other three Speedlights were set up as Remotes. The flash signal goes from the camera to the Commander via cable, so no problem there. And the Commander is so close to the Remotes, that the infrared signal triggers those without a problem.

An alternative would have been to equip the four SB-900′s with PocketWizards Flex TT5′s, but this setup is expensive enough as it is

Anyway: why would you want to use this setup instead of real studio lights? One word, or actually: three words: High Speed Sync. As you notice from the exif-info, this was shot at a blazing 1/4.000 of a second at f 2.8. Try that with studio flashes! High Speed Sync allows you to work with fast shutter speeds and wide open apertures (to minimize distracting backgrounds such as this one). The only drawback is that it eats a lot of power, especially when you diffuse your light through a softbox. That’s why 4 SB-900′s were used (at full power).

More info on the FourSquare can be found here.

I’m very proud to announce the release of my second eBook through Craft & Vision. After ‘The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond’, which was all about postprocessing images, this one is about photography itself.

‘Making Light. An introduction to off camera flash’ is the first in a two-part series about the wonderful world of opportunities that using a hotshoe flash off camera will open up for you.

The book offers an introduction into the key concepts, techniques and gear that’s needed to get you started right away. Below is the Table of Contents.

The last chapter shows nine case studies in which off camera flash was used to take the picture to the next level.

As all other Craft & Vision titles, this eBook comes at the ridiculously low price of 5$, and coupon code LIGHT4 will shave off even another 20%. Feeling hungry for knowledge? Then use coupon code LIGHT20 to get 20% off of any 5 or more titles from the store.

These codes expire on August 21st.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing and photographing it.

Ilona, one of the students of the Swedish workshop goes into ‘grand écart’ mode. Not your typical ballerina shoes, but then again, Sweden’s highest mountain isn’t your typical ballet environment. Using a small aperture (high f-number) turned the sun into this starburst.

One of the other students acted as a Voice Activated Lightstand, holding a bare flash this time. Triggering was again done with cheap Cactus V4 triggers. After all, like I said in the previous blog post, the best triggers are the one you have with you!

But what to do if you forgot even those cheap triggers? Or you have a Nikon Flash or triggers and everybody on the workshop for some mysterious reason is using Canon cameras? That’ll be up next.

Had a great time teaching at a one-week photograpy workshop in Scandinavia (Swedish Lapland, to be more precise). It was a fun mix of landscape photography, environmental portraiture and teaching postprocessing techniques.

Our guide navigates us and the adopted 10 week old Lisa through the waters near Överkalix. Water, forests, a reindeer and a guy named Carl. It doesn’t get much more Swedish than this.

I couldn’t resist the urge to whip out the old flash and make this environmental portrait. I used a Lumiquest SBIII softbox to slightly soften the harsh cast shadows an undiffused flash would make. I find the Lumiquest to be a great, highly portable little light modifier. It’s handholdable and ideal for those guerilla-style ‘the-photographer-is-also-the-lighstand’ kind of shots that I always wind up doing. Best of all, it folds flat and fits just perfectly in my ThinkTank Speedracer bag.

I had left my PocketWizards FlexTT5 & MiniTT1 at home so I used simple Cactus Triggers to trigger my flash. I could have used Nikon’s own CLS, but in bright ambient sunlight conditions such as during this trip, the triggering isn’t always reliable. When working with these triggers, you loose the ability to go beyond the sync speed of 1/200th. You also lose the ability to work in TTL and remotely control the power of your flash. When working outside, I find this to be not so much of a problem as most of the time, you need full power anyway to tame the ambient sunlight, especially when you make that sun a part of your composition, as I’ll explain in the next blog post.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.

There’s plenty of reasons to photograph during the so called ‘golden hour’ (which sadly not always lasts an hour). The colour is warm, the shadows are beautiful and, because the sun is already low, it brings out texture.

For small flash users, there’s an even better reason: a hotshoe flash is not very powerful compared to the sun. But that ratio gets better once the intensity of the sun diminishes.

In this picture, this allowed me to set the exposure for the sky, making sure I did not loose detail there. I positioned the three main subjects so that their faces were still being a little ‘rim-lit’ by the slowly setting sun, which also threw a nice, very three-dimensional shadow to the front. You can see that effect in the picture below. I’d like to tell you that I made it especially for instructional purposes, but the truth is that I forgot to turn on my flash

I then brought their exposure up by using an SB-900 from the front. The flash was triggered by the on-camera flash of the D90. A lot of Nikon cameras have this nifty feature.

The picture below is the out-of camera picture. Because Mrs. MoreThanWords directed the flash towards the faces, the picture is still a little dark around the engine part of the motorcycle. I tweaked it to the final result by cropping in Lightroom and then throwing in a couple of Nik Viveza Control Points.

This picture was shot from a pedestrian walkway over one of Singapore’s many roads. I was after the typical lighting trails that a slow shutter speed creates, but it was only when I experimented with some manual zooming during the 1.3 second exposure that I got something I liked.

Original Raw-file to the left. Post-processing (mainly increasing Fill Light, using the TAT-tool to brighten the colour of the light trails and rotating and cropping to a square aspect ratio) was done in Lightroom. I’m a big fan of square crops (although I’m less happy with losing 33% of my pixels when doing so). It’s time for Nikon to release the D700x or D800 or whatever the new high-res Full Frame Nikon will be called. Or maybe I’ll switch to a Leica M9. Just have to sell my car to finance it. Although I doubt that selling a 12 year old, dented Volvo will cough up enough cash to get me an M9. Might have to rob a bank, which is probably not a good idea to do on foot. So, I’ll hang on to the Volvo, just in case. But, I digress…

I also made a new Export Preset in Lightroom, allowing me to automatically add a small, 3 pixel high white stroke at the bottom of the picture and then a higher grey stroke with a selection of Exif-data. For this, you need the excellent LR2/Mogrify plugin. It’s donationware, but it’s the best 5 or so dollars I’ve ever spent on a plugin. LR2/Mogrify is king when it comes to adding borders, captions and watermarks. You have unprecedented control over where you put everything. You might have to experiment a little (tip: try out your settings on horizontal as wel as vertical pictures) but once you’ve got it to work the way you like, you only have to add it as a preset and you’re all set. Export presets are a great way to speed up your Lightroom Workflow. I use them all the time, for example for exporting pictures for the blog.

By the way, if you’re looking for the keyboard shortcut to add bullets in the LR2/Mogrify text editor: Alt-Shift-period is for the bullet • and Alt-Shift-l (that is l as in lightroom) gives you the pipe symbol |.

P.S. Those are Azerty keyboard shortcuts on a Mac. I don’t know if they’re the same on a Qwerty keyboard. If you find them to be different, please let us know in the comments.

When I shot this picture, I knew I was going to post-process it to Black & White. Still, I did not use my camera’s built-in B&W setting – I would not even know where to look for it, quite honestly. As always, I shot in Raw, because that gives me most flexibility afterwards, enabling me to seperately and precisely control the grayscale conversion of every individual color. Shooting with a Black & White preset on your camera is as definetely not the way to go, as the car in the picture definetely is not a Mercedes… although those rims sure tried hard to persuade me otherwise!

I also used a polarizer for this shot. A polarizer has become an essential piece of equipment for me. It weighs nothing, costs next to nothing (at least compared to your camera and lens) and it can totally change the look of your pictures, in a way post-processing can’t. It can make skies look darker, make reflections disappear, or, as in this case, maximize them. You loose a lot of light, though (4 stops), which is why I cranked the ISO up to 640. But even that loss of light can be handy for those times when you want a slower shutter speed during the day: you can actually use your polarizer as a makeshift 4-stop neutral density filter… If you don’t already have a polarizer, I’d advise you to get one. If you already have one, you know what I mean . Just pay attention when you use it on wide angle lenses, as you might get vignetting at the extreme wide focal lenghts.

I converted to Black & White using Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro plugin (I blogged about this in further detail here), which I activated from within Lightroom: I chose the ‘underexpose by 1 EV’ preset and added a couple of control points, to add some more ‘Structure ‘ (Nik’s version of what Lightroom calls ‘Clarity’) to certain areas. The whole process took only a couple of minutes. I then cropped the picture to a 2:1 crop  ratio in Lightroom, which I have added as one of my crop presets, as it is perfect for creating a double spread in a square photo album, which happens to be my favorite album type.

Funny how a day of shooting pictures can turn out: I shot this picture on a plantation tour in Java. While the other members of the group were being instructed on the life of the cacao bean and the origin of vanilla sticks, I had wandered off (again) and found myself making this picture of a young Muslim girl.

Because the girl’s own umbrella put her face in a shadow, I chose to fight her umbrella with mine

While her mother held my white flash umbrella, through which I shot an SB-900, I just had to press the shutter and focus on composing. I like to ask bystanders to figure as Voice Activated Lightstands. It involves them in the process and it always attracts a crowd, which can be an interesting supply of new faces to photograph.

I ducked down deep to make sure the umbrella filled the entire background and to make sure that the lens (and hence the viewer) would not look down on the girl, as is often the case with pictures of kids made by people who are taller than them. I have a couple of pictures of the girl looking straight in the lens, but I prefer this one. You can see the catchlight of the flash umbrella in her eyes.