My friend Ben Chrisman was visiting this weekend and introduced me to the Apertura photo blog. These So-Cal photographers have some hot frames in their portfolio. There very first blog post stopped me in my tracks. I immediately wrote to Ray & Erwin of Apertura photo and asked if they would give me a a write-up on this rockin photo.

Ray writes:

It was a wonderful intimate wedding held in a small room in an Italian restaurant in Westwood. However, the room was pretty crowded with not much space to roam about and it also had a low ceiling to boot.

During the best men toast, I positioned myself to get the shot and kept moving around until I found this angle. I turned off the on camera flash and relied completely on the backlight for extreme drama. As much as I’d like to say that the flare on the glasses were intentional, it mas more of a happy accident.

Canon 5D - f/4.5 1/80 sec ISO 640
Flash 580EX II -1/32 power

I think happy accidents are a blessing and sometimes, these accidents are the difference in the excellent photojournalist and the average wedding photographer. Timing is instinctive and the quality of light used here is excellent. I love your balance of ambient and the use of the flash as it gives a sparkle of light through the glasses is exceptionally dramatic. You got an award winner here!

Check out some more Happy Accidents here:
Happy Accidents 1
Happy Accidents 2
Happy Accidents 3

And be sure to spend some time on Apertura’s photo blog for a little wedding imagery motivation. These cats work pretty hard to frame up some magical compisitions and will inspire you for sure!

Any comment love for these guys?

Cheers & thanks Ray & Erwin,

Mateo

This technique will help you visualize how to take a normal / standard exposed moment that you have seen a million times and add a little flavor to it. First step is to make sure you have evaluated the surroundings and know exactly where your ambient light exposures are in relationship to your flash power on your manual off camera flash. In this example, Sol has decided to underexpose the ceiling to contrast the glasses and the shape of the hands reaching out. Its crucial here to make sure that your exposure has some depth to make an impression vs a whatever frame.
Sol Tamargo dropped the ambient out of the background and had an assistant with a slave set to 1/16 power, extended on a monopod in the ceiling. I don’t know the actual distance, but likely 6-9 feet away. The key to this photo’s success is the angle that the light is coming from. I’m guessing it is 35 or 40 degrees from camera left, in the air over their hands.

ISO 200 1/200 2.8 | Sol Tamargo

The glasses light up, the ceiling goes dark, contrast rocks! I really love the subtle touch of the ceiling lights scattered between the arms. Those lights tie in the background and give this photo a magical feel! I also love the timing of arm coming in from the upper left. Love the fact that you squeezed the shutter before her toast clinked the other glasses. This is an excellent PJ decision that subtly changes the composition to be WAY more likable.

Great idea and nice shot Sol!

Cheers!
Matt

My wife tells me that I’m too fast for this world so this trick my not apply or matter to some of you. del Sol Photographers all use Manual photo control when shooting our weddings. We have grown close to cameras performance and when shooting, we find it helpful to be able to adjust your shutter and aperture settings while also working some photojournalism in there. I know that everybody will have their own way to adjust these controls… if you open your mind to a little change now and then, you may become inspired.

This technique also has a little flashflavor advise built in as well. With a manual power slave flash, your exposure latitude is pretty short, not allowing much room for error with the brightness to darkness of your frame. the closer that slave gets to the camera, the hotter its going to be and vice versa going the other direction getting further away.

For example, if you were shooting a group of people who were gripping and grinning, your flash could be 2 times brighter than you thought it *should* be however, drastic measures are needed and quickly inside the camera to make the photo you are shooting that second, perfect! I enjoy rolling my right index finger on the top right dial on my camera, allows me to adjust my shutter. Think of it as a finger-roll technique. If you want to shoot a test but don’t have time to test your flash to subject distance, keeping in mind that photo moments happen way faster than you can remember, you aim and shoot. Your light’s intensity may be considerably high or low in relationship to how it *needs* to be. Roll the finger on the dial (front or back dial) as fast as possible to stop down or open up. I have calculated that there is a scale of how hard to how soft you can roll the dial, thus resulting in a multi f-stop roll, a single f-stop roll, or a little bit of a f-stop roll…. or something like that. I call that rustic technique the finger roll.

Just thought I would share this idea. For me, shooting Manual flash slaves can be a challenge and this technique has helped me in situations where I was totally unprepared with the power settings of my manual slave flash.

Here is my secret: Notice the index finger’s position, on the shutter control.

I give my camera’s shutter the middle finger.

I honestly didn’t even realize this until one of my assistants pointed it out to me at a wedding the other week… I don’t even know what they heck i’m doing these days, but glad some body has figured it out for me. Thanks Diego for pointing that out!

DO you have any crazy camera quirks that help your game? Wanna share? Tell us about it.

Cheers!
mateo

I am such a bad professional. I ripped the bag open to reveal my new set of RP’s just 45 minutes before I walked out the door to a wedding 2 days ago. I ran around my place like a crazy man testing for a few minutes, but really didnt do much pro testing on these units before I unveiled them at a pro gig… shame on me eh? My client will be so disappointed that I tested a new product out at her wedding…

Shame on me…

here is my first TTL RP frame

The down light is from a ceiling lamp in the bathroom…
the rp slave is located just in below the bride’s right arm, next to the sink in the bathroom…

I didnt use the RP’s too much at this gig, but I did play a little
More test results coming!

Cheers!
mateo

Edited to add…. If you are a pocket wizard junkie (like myself) TTL is a foreign language that takes some serious time to learn to speak. If you want to use baby steps to learn to speak the RP language of TTL, then try this technique…

This is a REQUIRED element for those testing the RP who are use to the PW system….

good luck

Jaco writes:

Don’t you just love it when it all comes together? This image was a bit of luck on the one side. I had the lights set-up on the dance floor as I normally do. I like to use off camera flash on the dance floor and have them pointing at each other to get some cross lighting. This creates a more 3D look. I kept on moving around on the dance floor and decided to move the 2 lights to the same side pointing at me. As luck would have it the DJ blew some smoke on the dance floor when the father and the bride started to do their dance. The groom and his mother joined them and I saw that they were moving in a circle on the floor. I lifted the camera and waited for the moment when both the couples where in front of my lights. I did fire off a couple of shots just to make sure I had it. The smoke added some real drama to the image.

I have always been a big fan of video light photography. People like Jerry Ghionis had a big influence in my style of photography. But now off camera flash has added another dimension to our work. Thanks Matt for creating this blog and inspiring us to be better at what we do. Viva FlashFlavor.

Here is another:

Nikon D3
ISO 2000
F-stop F4.8
Shutter 1/13

Thank you for making inspiring images for us to see! Check a look at Jaco’s website if you need some inspiration this week:

Jaco has also taken his time to give us a tutorial and a review on the skyport. Check his handy work out:

Here is a link to his blog post where he has a few more video tutorials on the Skyports. Thanks Jaco!

Any questions for Jaco on this system? I’m curious to see if anybody else has been using / experiencing good results with skyports?

Cheers!
matt

The secret to success for the creative artist is finding 1000 true fans. The content of this article is 100% copyright Kevin Kelly Genius, Blog Author, Book Author, Wired Magazine Co Founder amongst other affiliations… Kevin writes about obtaining 1000 true fans:

…the gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

To read the rest of this amazing eye opening and career starting article, please go read Kevin’s Kelly’s article about 1000 true fans…

Kevin nailed it here folks. This has been the key for my survival and the motivation behind all of our development since day 1. This article is only 1 month old however, it is the answer to any artists search in life to find clients.

Flash flavor’s motivation has been nothing short of a straight line down the path of finding 1000 true fans… My motivation with Flashflavor has the Karma approach in mind. If I give and give and give, if I’m lucky , on of these days what goes around comes around… I’m not selling anything (yet) on FF… However, I guess one of these days I’ll be offering a workshop or selling some sort of software and hopefully, my “true” fans will shine for me I must be getting somewhere because as I write this post, we are receiving 1000 unique visits every day Hey!! thats a start!

Now take some time, and bookmark Kevin’s blog on your RSS feed or write about him on your blog. While you are at it, bookmarking Flashflavor would help me out in many many ways, por favor!

Cheers & start finding your true 1000 fans!

mateo

We are a studio with 4 maybe 5 shooters at a given time. It is crucial to us that we have our ducks lined up in a row! Yeah, a Sb-28 is just the same as the next one but I have found that ALL my equipment seems to come to life and we experience problems with our gear at almost every wedding. How do you identify the problem what it is happening to? For at least 4 years, I worked with a pile of gear in and out of bags. When I found my wife, Sol Tamargo, I knew that something had to change. After the 2nd time of “hey, you got my batteries” or “do you have my pocket wizard, I’ve only got 2 and I should have 3″ or whatever.. I was SICK of that.

If you label your gear, you will actually know what is yours… novel thought eh? Ok, lets say that you are a 1 man / woman show and you know exactly what gear you have and therefore there is no need to label anything… Sounds like my thought train for my first 4 years. Guess what? Your WRONG!

Why? Everything we use BREAKS at one point or another. Especially in the world of pocket wizards.. I have pulled my hair out a time or two switching cables, changing receiver units, checking batteries…when something fails, its important to identify it and move on. We have experienced MAJOR problems with the Pocketwizard system specifically. The short PC cords are poorly made for our work environment. With tugs, pulls, and catches, these things fail.. oops, there goes another $20 to buy a new one. So we started labeling our PC cords… Yep, i have them all labeled. If we have problems with one on assignment, I pull it out of operation, make a mental note of the cord’s labeled number, tuck it away in a special place, and switch to a backup.

This kind of mindset works with ALL your gear. We have tons of slave flash units. Flash tubes go out (afterall, the SB-28 has been discontinued for years). PC posts break, zoom heads go out, flashes get thrown in the ocean…heck, a plethora of problems greet you at every wedding. Its about dang time that you can identify your problem unit, put it aside, and address it later in the shop if necessary.

Ok, I hope your getting the point. Check out these photo examples of my gear pile and their labels. I purchased my label maker for $29 at a local office store… you can too

LABEL IT.

WE even label our rechargeable batteries. These things have a life expectancy so at some point, they will fail. We recommend that you put a few different color rings around them when you buy them new, make a note somewhere citing the date when those colored batteries were purchased. It helps if you can identify which photographer gets which batteries… Also, I’ve included our trusty labeler in the lower left, next to a few of our batteries

You can see that we actually label our gear with the first initial of the photographer who owns that particular unit. Everything has a label, lenses, camera bodies and tripods! Give this a try Hope this helps?

Cheers!
mateo

David Ziser was also featured (a talented photographer and photoshop artisan). I have featured David’s work here before on FF. I was hoping that I would get a chance to meet him at WPPI as well but with 1 zillion other photographers buzzing around everywhere, it was rather impossible to accomplish all my must see photographer goals…next time David!

SO, if you are in the neighborhood of a bookstore, pick up or sign up to receive a copy of photoshopuser magazine. Those guys working with Scott Kelby really have it going on… OH, I had a chance to meet up with Dave Cross at the Leaving Las Vegas shoot a few weeks ago. I’ve watched numerous episodes of him on Photoshop TV… Also, a special thanks for RC over at layersmagazine.com for asking / motivating me to write this article!

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for the Magazine. Sol Tamargo & I have this very dramatic vision for the future of our Trash the Dress sessions. I’m not sure how long our clients are going to keep asking for them, but with the insane amount of worldwide buzz going on, I dont see it stopping anytime soon, especially with the destination wedding environment. We have 25 TTD sessions booked this year! Look out for some more crazy video’s coming soon!

Cheers!
mateo

PS, the photoshop guys & gals did a super job on the graphics… thanks again

We spent an hour or so the other day with these units. Ordinarily, Flashflavor photo subjects will be wedding related. I ask for your forgiveness with this post as we didnt have time to organize any test bridal models during the short term planning we did to organize this shoot.

I spent some time with a few other photographers to get some play time with Radiopopper (RP). We each got a chance to set up a makeshift subject and shoot each one of these subjects to test the strengths of RP. We tested firing 3 different flash groups TTL using the 580 EX II as the master unit and 3 remote slaves all in different groups, set to different ratios. Group A, Group B, and Group C. I didn’t actually do any test shots with these flash settings but hopefully, I can get a copy of the images from Stillmotion to showcase here.

When it became my turn to play with the flash, we found our way inside Battista’s Hole in the wall, a rustic Italian food joint with some serious history in Vegas. I wanted to add a little life to my test subject and on the spot, I found a cute little old guy who made a SLAM of a subject. Sorry to bother you with the details but I believe if you add a story line to a test subject, the impact of the lighting efforts actually make a lasting impression. Call me a dedicated photojournalist if you will

In these photo examples, I used 3 flash unites in 2 different flash groups, Group A + Group B. (Remember, this is TTL folks). Group A 1:1 and Group B 1:4. We had 1 Radiopopper transmitter attached to the ST-E2 and 3 Radiopopper receivers attached to 580 EX II’s.

In this setup shot, I was shooting a Canon 5d with a ST-E2 wireless transmitter on the hotshoe . I had a RP attached to the top of the ST-E2. Group A was set to 1:1 and Group B was set to 1:4. Basically, I’ve told Group B to fire with 4 times more light than Group A. Group B’s units are placed behind subject on bench and camera right. I dialed my exposure in so that the ambient would hang out. What impressed me most about this is that we were limited here with time, with little or no actual test time to get ti done right. I shot 5 or 6 frames in this spot in the restaurant and I liked his expression best in these few frames. The RP allows you to set it and forget it. If this had been a Pocket Wizard setup (i still love my PW’s), I would have needed more time to set each unit up and get the job done. I took 5 minutes with this guy. With this kind of pressure, I’m starting to love the RP!

Here are my frames (all shot at ISO 400, 1/100th at 1.4)

Gordie has been playing the accordion at Battista’s for an outstanding 27 years. His listeners range from hookers and prostitutes to drunkards and party goers to the occasional superstars. His favorite musicians were the Oakridge boys! Batista’s ceilings are adorned with props and the walls are covered with their menus and wine bottles and different photos from the past. Battista is filled with low lighting and a moody atmosphere. I wanted to take a chance to add some light that would accentuate the mood that was plastered all over the walls.

I love how the backlight has added some dimension here. Remember, set it and forget it mentality.

Initially, when we choose a location in the restaurant to shoot Gordy, we found a spot that seemed perfect. After my first several frames, I had botched exposures and misfires. After expressing my concerns that something wasn’t right, Kevin King (RP Creator), pointed at the link light on the side of the RP and noted that it was blinking, indicating that there was some type of interference. The moment I started to actually test this baby, I found a circumstance that actually challenged its performance. Apparently, the link light on the receiver unit that indicates it has a link with the other will stay a solid yellow upon its initial link up. After a fire, it will turn off and back on to indicate that it has linked up. If it intermittently blinks then it indicates interference. The receiving unit may or may not fire, depending on the circumstance. We walked literally 15 feet to another location in the restaurant and the problem went AWAY… hey, that was easy enough.

Ok, so now I’ve found a problem on the first frame I’ve tried to expose. In all honesty, this inst my first experience with Interference while transmitting to a slave flash unit… On numerous occasions, I have been using pocket wizards and experienced some sort of interference where my slave units WOULD NOT FIRE. I can recall one specific wedding where Sol Tamargo & I were both trying to trigger our Pocket Wizards. We each have 5 pocket wizards and 4 or so Slaves, each. So thats 10 pocket wizards, 8 slave flashes. In the heat of the moment, we tested all of our PW’s and slaves, traded sync cords, did just about anything possible to make it happen… NADA. There was some sort of interference going on and we could not nail it down. I’m not sure what went on as we never figured it out, but the point is that interference has happened to me before when using a device that transmits via radio signals. The bottom line is that I’m not too worried about this potential problem with the RP at this point. I’ll need some more testing time to give you more thoughts on this.

After my turn was up, Ed Pingol stepped up to the plate and took the RP’s outside. He wanted to test the high speed sync abilities and used 2 slave units. I don’t have any of the TTL settings at this point, but I do know that he used a ST-E2 on the hotshoe and 2 groups on the slaves, A & B. One unit was 3-4 feet away, camera right and the other unit was 6-8 feet away, camera left. I was a spectator

Camera: Canon EOS 40D | ST-E2 set to High Speed Sync
Exposure: 1/8000 sec
Aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 100 - Focal Length: 17 mm

The model is my wife, Sol Tamargo

I’m loving the use of high speed sync with these RP units!

Well, for now, I’m going to close with those photos of my HOT wife…thanks Ed! Thanks Kevin for giving us a chance to play with your new toys! I look forward to working with these units at my next gig. I will be doing a writeup on what it is like to use the RP’s in a live environment where the pressure is ON!

Thoughts or comments about the TTL system and Radiopoppers innovative way to use Radio Signals…. please give us a shout or feel free to drop off your ideas.

I’m really curious as to how many of FF’s readers actually use Manual slave flash operation or TTL…

Cheers!
Mateo

**Update**

I didnt have too much time when I originally wrote this post, so I’ve added one more image that showcases a long distance field test in “ideal conditions” meaning open range without any interference. In this photo example, i’ve added a field test shot at 300+ feet. I’m the spec off in the distance under the arrow holding the flash that is actually being triggered at that distance. We tried several frames where I would stick my hand in front of the antenna and some where Kevin would face the opposite direction to test if and when the slave would trigger. Anyway, here is the football field test…

F3.5 1/4000 ISO 50 ST-E2 trigger on Camera.

photo by Kevin King

and a zoom of this frame to see the slave being triggered.

***Update 2***

I got a few frames from Stillmotion’s tip top shooter, Amina Myriam Wojcik. We were all tag teaming along with the crew who was testing the RP’s. Here are a few of her photos and her 2 cents… She shot these with a Canon 5d and a Tilt and Shift lens… She also has added a cool X-process flavor to her shots…
Amina writes:

At WPPI, I had a chance to check out the Radio Poppers. The group went on two shoots with them, one at a really cool restaurant called Battista’s Hole in the Wall, and on in the desert just outside of Las Vegas.

But it was super fun, and we all got some awesome shots out of it

Above four images credit: Stillmotion’s tip top shooter, Amina Myriam Wojcik.

Thanks Amina & the still motion crew for your help!

Kevin let me play around a bit with this killer device and he even told me that I may be able to get my hands on a set pretty soon so I can experiment with them at my next wedding on the 29th. I hope to be doing some killer testing on this device as I just may have a new weapon to my arsenal! r….I fired this baby off TTL at 1/8000 at 1.4…(i’ll have to get Kevin to send me a few of those shots to post here as I was using his camera for the quick test).

I’ll keep you posted on my results…keep an eye on this guy, radio popper may be a big friend of FF very soon!

Ps, jump over to strobist to read about David’s meeting with Kevin recently….

Cheers!
matt