Well, if your subject is just too big, too wild, or too smelly for a studio, you'll have to take it outside. This also applies to the things that are fixed in place - powerhouse turbines, mountains, railway bridges. No good trying to move the mountain...
If you've been following the series this week on reflectors in the studio, you'll probably wonder what we have that second head in the two-head Profoto or Elinchrom set. Well this when - when you need to throw fill light in from a distance and you can't get a reflector to do it. Or when you need to flood a subject with light entirely. I won't go into lighting rations for several reasons: a. I don't understand them. After 1:2 the only rule of thumb I know is buckle my shoe...
Well, you've got your product there waiting for your magic, and like all products, it has an outside and an inside. If you're selling either one of these you'll want the people to see what it looks like. So you deliberately set up 8 separate strobe banks controlled by a computer to shoot from all sides. Two air conditioners play on the set to prevent the thing from melting under the modelling lights and a one-bar heater is on you to prevent frostbite from the air conditioners. Every time you switch it all on, Collie Power Station has to shift down a gear. Who said it wasn't a man's life in the regular product shooters...
You've all played billiards or pool, right? You must have - I've seen some of you and if those aren't signs of mis-spent youth I don't know what is...
I got older early in life. One of the benefits of this was I discovered that I did not know it all. And that I could get into a rut. And then I figured out that you could listen around the edges and read the next page and pick up ideas. They might not have been good ideas, but at least they put you in a new rut instead of the old one. Thus my new studio routine was born. I instituted it after reading Steve Sint's book on product photography. Sint is a commercial shooter in New York who does weddings and products. He publishes through the Pixiq company at present thought some of his work is by other publishers. He writes well, and amusingly, and had never put me wrong. I can't do all the things he does, but whenever I do something he recommends, it works. He does, as I say, tabletop shoots. That is what product illustration and some concept shooting amounts to. Also what catalogue shooting really is but no-one ever admits it. The difference between what Mr. Sint...
" Here at Flapoflex Camera in Bull Creek Prefecture, we dare to design camera no-one else will touch ". Our advertising department has promised to improve that slogan and we eagerly await their advice. Until then, here are some of the projects that our design teams have been working on: a. The Grip And Grin accessory grip. The one digital camera accessory that every working press photographer needs. Assuming that you are a working press photographer, and have not been thrown into the street by the Murdoch or Packer families, with your hat after you, you'll want one of these. The G&G attaches to the bottom of a DSLR or mirror-less camera. It takes the place of the normal battery grip that your maker - Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, or Sony - make but it does what you need rather than what they need. It does not have a second or third lithium-ion battery like the proprietary grip - it doesn't attempt to supply extra power so that you can run your continuous shot mode for 15 minutes. We assume you know when to...
And we'll show you how to do it so that you get real results...
During the past few years this column and newspaper advertisements from this firm have offered chargers for camera batteries that have been touted as " Universal ". Made by well-known accessory firms, they have been the answer for people who have lost the original charger that came with the camera. The staff have made no judgements of the clients for this, as they themselves have forgotten things in hotel rooms, wedding receptions, and down the back of the couch for years. The " Universal Charger " is generally adjustable as to the actual contacts that hit the batteries, and can pump electricity into AAA, AA, C, and D cells as long as they are the rechargeable sort. It can feed lithium-ion cells of all sorts of shapes, and unless the manufacturer makes a deliberate lock-out gate on their camera battery, you should be all right. But there is a catch, sez Ernest. It involves the charger being smarter that the owner and the owner sometimes failing to know it - also failing to keep up a reasonable charging schedule. Here's the scenario: a....
Half a volt, half a volt, Half a volt onwards...
I have a strong suspicion that a couple of the camera batteries that power my Fujifilm X 100 camera have gone to join the ancestors. The battery charger accepts them, turns on a green light, but does not charge anything. I have been told that this is the result of letting them go flat for too long, and that the charger does not recognise them as needing its help. There may be some kind of Frankensteinian procedure that will restart them, but we will need to wait for a thunderstorm and then we strap the batteries onto a wooden table in a locked laboratory...