Daffodils and Magnolias

The weather in Wisconsin has been very un-spring like with temps hovering in the 30s and 40s for what seems to be forever now and lots and lots of rain and grey cloudiness which doesn't help an outdoor shooter like myself. The magnolia trees are the first to bloom at the UW-Madison Arboretum and I pretty much wait all winter for this splendid occasion. Next week the flowering cherry trees and lilacs will be blooming. Longnecker Garden pretty much turns into a scene from a fairy tale. Besides using a 24" softbox as key I popped a bare strobe behind the flowers to give them that magical translucent quality to add to the fairy taleness of it all.

My first race: Crazy for Crazylegs and POV cams

I started training for the Madison Marathon 2012 so I'm more of a run-tographer lately documenting my training. I began the year entering a 90 day weight loss competition at my gym and won! I lost almost 10% of my body weight and am now addicted to working out. So then I considered entering races. My first race was the Crazylegs 8k. Probably the most famous in Madison as it is on its 30th year. Starts at the Capitol, cuts through Greek row and the UW-Madison campus and ends on the 50 yard line of Camp Randall "Home of the Badgers" with a big bash.
I got a GoPro 960 POV cam as it has a near fisheye (170 degrees) and waterproof housing to cover sports/action. Yes, it works as the first thing I did was throw it into the pool at my gym :) The thing is tiny and has all sorts of attachments for whatever it is you wanna capture. You can pretty much attach it anywhere since it's small and light. I can't do that with my K-7 dslr so I'll prolly use this little pup for BTS videos of photoshoots as well. From searches I have found that people get two and edit the "in front" and "behind" footage which is really cool for surfing or skiing. It also has a 5 MP camera with no manual setting adjustments, truly point and shoot. Drawbacks: most of the attachments aren't cheap so I have been working on my own DIY versions (tripod attachment seen here) yes, it doesn't come with a way to attach it to a tripod lol. It does not have an LCD so you are shooting blind and never sure what you are getting. N0t so much of a problem with the fisheye though. I tried this with other camcorders and had problems with focal length even at its widest. My first run test just had footage of the ground :( Another reason why I went with the GoPro. The fisheye captures almost everything :) The higher up model has a LCD screen you can purchase, getting the point yet? But this also equals great battery life, my rough est. 2 hours + and the biggest bummer, no flash. It's pretty good in low light as you would expect a fisheye to be. The settings are little awkward think of your digital watch. Press mode button and cycle through all of the settings.

Without the housing it's kinda useless. It's just a metal box so you'll have to rig something if you wanna do live feed or anything. I use a clamp with a bolt that I made and use that to attach to a ballhead or whatever. It does have interval shooting which is nice.
So the challenge is how to stabilize this thing to get less of that Blair Witch/Cloverfield look. Well, even more challenging how to stabilize and not make it any more awkward to run with lol. Still working on it but I started with strapping it to my chest. I originally thought to attach to my waist as it's probably the part of my body the moves the least but that didn't work for me. It came with a head band kinda contraption but I don't want to look like a coal miner when running. I get enough laughs as it is. Anyways, here is a short timelapsy video I made. Most of the actual run portion is at 32X since you don't want to see me run the 8k at just over an hour.

Spring has almost sprung...

so why am I trying to kill the sun when I have been missing it all winter? Long cold, snowy winter which = mostly shooting indoors, yuck! But the birds are chirping and the mercury is a rising so tried out a new technique with hotshoe flashes and trying to deal with the horrendous 1/180 sync speed of my Pentax K-7.

So for the first trial I knew I'd need to close up the aperture since I'm limited to 1/180 shutter speed. As I didn't want to try the "sledgehammer of light" or Joe McNally's Desert Shoot with 7 hotshoe flashes just yet. I thought I'd try 2 flashes first and maybe move up in the summer but it's not even spring yet :P

The setup:



I don't like the idea of my flashes, especially 2 of them, being supported by a $10 piece of flimsy plastic, that easily breaks as I have found out last summer, so I have made different rigs to have the weight of the unit more supported, in this case at least one, for this trial. This bracket also helps to align the flash head more toward the center of an umbrella when I opt to use one. So you can see I use Cybersync wireless system which here I just have attached by velcro but am making a caddy for when I shoot in the water again. Based on the iShoot dual flash hotshoe adapter there are only 2 ways to attach the flash bodies and multiple ways to adjust swivel heads.

My logic for this trial was to use the bottom flash for the body so it's aligned vertically and for this shoot, zoomed wide. The top unit I zoomed in tight for the hair/head/shoulder area. At least in thought that was my idea for this test. I shot hard light knowing I'd need every bit of light as it was just a trial. Shot at x 1/180 sec sync speed, f/16 ISO 100. When I have a full undiffused sun I will shoot at f/22-32 and try to get a starburst effect with the sun.

I needed an area with plenty of sky toward the west so I went to the top floor of a parking garage and in this case the one right next to Camp Randall Stadium home of the Wisconsin Badgers :)

oh and for legal reasons I guess I should point out to not stare at the sun lol

Ghetto repeater: Using my Cybersync trigger to fire poverty wizards... two separate brand radio receivers fired from one trigger all in sync

I started off using "poverty wizards" when I followed Strobist.com and played with off-camera flash as cables got in the way. I had problems like everyone else and started doing the mods ie. adding an antenna to get more distance and adapting a AA battery pack to the receiver. Then I found myself with 4 flash units and dying radio/trigger units. I knew I'd eventually have to step up to something more reliable but Pocket Wizards with 4 receivers, ouch! Then the dreaded day came when doing a fashion shoot for a magazine and my poverty wizards failed and I was running three lights. With two MUAs, two models, two stylist, the magazine editor all on-site I started to sweat. I had to think quick and used a pc cable to fire my main speedlight and put the other on slave and add a optical eye on the last light as it didn't have built in slave function. We were indoors so it worked out. But the next day I ordered what my limited funds allowed as I just bought a 35mm 1.8 for my Nikon and upgraded my Pentax body to a K-7 so I did some research and got a Cybersync trigger and 2 receivers.
Now back to the story... so I am shooting tomorrow and have one of my lights getting a firmware update. I would like 3 lights but will be shooting into the sun and optical slaves won't work in bright light. So how can I make this work? I have several poverty wizards sitting around so I thought how can I use my reliable Cybersyncs and maybe use a poverty wizard as a psuedo-repeater and make it more reliable ie two lights closer to each other away from the main/key and camera trigger.


Here is my Seagull adapter, MOD, and in this case using a PC connection to the 1/8 into the Cybersync receiver as I will need the 1/8 on the Seagull for the other half of this mod.
You could use the cable that came with the poverty wizard "micro to PC" but I had cut one already and spliced in a 1/8 for another project. Yes, I do tons of projects :)
The final mod: the Cybersync trigger on the camera hot shoe will trigger the same brand receiver, Cybersync, which is connected via PC cord to the flash (via Seagull adapter) which will be light #2 for the upcoming shoot. The PC and 1/8 share an electrical connection inside the adapter so it causes the 1/8 cord to micro, connected to the poverty wizard, to fire. The poverty wizard receiver will fire light #3 which ie acting like a pseudo repeater as it will prolly be out of range if just used on camera or from the main/key light.

AC/DC: powering my hotshoe from the wall

Okay, so now that I am switching gears and shooting more indoors and don't have monolights yet I wanted to devise a way to power my hotshoe flashes via AC (the wall outlet). With no adapter plug on any of my units my first thought was to add a plug. But I don't want to drill into my 2 new flashes that are still under warranty. So how do I hook up AC power to this DC powered unit?
Note: I am not responsible for any damage that may occur to your equipment. This is a demonstration of my hack/mod of how I did this using my equipment. Do not perform this on your own unless you are trained in electricity and electronics and willing to take a chance of ruining your equipment. I AM NOT HELD LIABLE.

STEP 1: POWER. In my trial, I am using a generic "battery eliminator" power adapter that you can pretty much pick up anywhere. It has adjustable voltage and in this case milliampere. Some also have a polarity switch.

Completed unit

STEP 2: How to connect it and basic electrical design.

So this is the inside of the battery compartment. Basically there are four AA batteries lined up giving us power. They can be in a straight line but it wouldn't work for the design of the unit so they are arranged in such a way to fit into the container and connected via little metal tabs pos to neg, pos to neg, etc, etc.


So our first job is to find out where the positive and negative terminals are inside the flash and viola, they are the ones that are the beginning and the end of the trail ie not connecting to anything else. See second photo


And by looking at the sticker for battery orientation, we can deduce the positive and the negative terminals.
So now that we know where we need to connect the (+) positive side of our power supply and (-) negative.. how do we hook this up?

STEP 3: DUMMIES As I said as I am not drilling any holes (yet) I opted to make dummy batteries to make an electrical connection. Since we only need to apply power to 2 terminals (tabs) (all the other stuff is just used to connect the batteries together) I just need to make something that will connect our two wires from the PS and fills the space like batteries would and still be removable so I can still use batteries when on-location. So I took a AA battery to the good ole hardware store and found that a 1/2" dowel is pretty darn close.

I cut up four pieces the same length as a AA battery and grouped them together to fit into the battery compartment and since wood does not conduct electricity well I took the wire from the power supply, trimmed back the insulation and wrapped it around these screws that will function like the "nipple" on the battery for the electrical connection...


and yes I know the negative post does not have a nipple but I need to make the connection so am using it in my case. Now to make sure that the orientation of the wires and screws will connect to the proper place in the battery compartment as seen in the second photo.
Now I have a way to connect my DC powered hotshoe flash to an AC wall outlet and shoot as much as I want without worrying about batteries :)

My First Cover

So the nice people over at the Isthmus chose my pic over gazillions to be on the cover of the 2010-2011 Annual Manual of Madison, WI.

Photoadventure 1 and 2

So much to shoot in summer and haven't been updating my post. Larry Chua (iloominimages.com) and I have teamed up to go on "photoadventures" outside of Madison. The first trip was to Parfrey's Glen. It started off just being a landscape shooting trip but decided it might be fun to get some models involved. We have so much fun we decided to continue the series.

Our second trip was to Devil's Lake to shoot at the unique geological features (Devil's Doorway) and incorporate the unique vistas from atop the 500 foot bluff.