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© Coal Miki. Found on Flickr.com.
The Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2 is a portable infrared wireless transmitter designed to wirelessly trigger Canon Speedlites. For the most part, it does that well. But unfortunately, there some severe limitations that makes it a waste of money. If you’re in the market to purchase a ST-E2, wait and read this post first before making your purchase, you won’t regret it.
Lighting, when it comes to flash, is a whole different language for photography. You can speak it (on-camera flash) or be fluent in it (off-camera flash) and even then there are varying levels of proficiency. By no means am I an expect or profess to know everything, but rather I’m a lifelong student who wishes to share what I’ve learned so far. For the most part I’ll be focusing on the Canon Wireless Flash system, in other words, triggering your Canon Speedlites using the built-in Canon flash trigger. I’m going to assume that you have a basic, intermediate, or even advanced understanding of off-camera flash, why you are or should be using flash that way and the general concepts of lighting. If not, I suggest that you check out David Hobby, better known in the photography world as Strobist, and his amazing blog on off-camera lighting here. You can start the Lighting 101 lesson here.
In order to get the full benefit out of this series of posts, you must use Canon and also use Canon Speedlites. For those who use Nikon and Nikon Speedlights, go buy Joe McNally’s The Hot Shoe Diaries
This past Saturday, the crew got together and did two photo shoots with two amazing models, Jane and Stacey, on Treasure Island. Some of you might recognize Jane, as she was a contestant for Miss Asian American (MAA), winning Miss Photogenic for the 2009 MAA. Stacey on the other hand, has a ballet background that we most definitely will be putting to use in the next photo shoot with her. Treasure Island, named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name, is an artificial island in California that sits in the Bay between San Francisco and Oakland accessed via the Interstate 80 freeway. It is home to some 1,453 residents, and is a popular tourist attraction as you can see sea lions on the shoreline and also get a very nice view of San Francisco along with the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge (Interstate 80).
There are many condemned and decrepit buildings with warning signs of asbestos strewn upon boarded up doors and broken windows making for an urban explorer’s wet dream and, in our case, a great site for urban portraits.
I get this question quite often and it usually takes me a while to answer because of all the components needed to do off-camera flash lighting; so the better way is to just make a blog post.
David Hobby (Strobist) has an excellent in-depth series of posts that explains everything you need, why you need it, and things to consider on his excellent blog (the post starts here) and I’m not going to that much detail. Think of this as rather a friend asking another friend: what do I need and where do I buy it sprinkled with a few thoughts here and there.
Wedding photographer extraordinaire Ryan Brenizer invented this really cool technique while on his honeymoon which is dubbed “The Brenizer Method”. For those who may or may not have heard of it and are not sure of what this technique is exactly, it’s essentially using a telephoto lens to create a very shallow depth of field as if shot with a wider angle lens. This technique makes a dSLR image look like it was shot by medium format.
One of my favorite photography tools isn’t a lens or even a camera, it’s a light meter. People thought the light meter was a thing of the past with auto exposure and the advent of digital photography, but that can’t be farther from the truth. Despite all the advances by Canon, Nikon and the other major photography brands, there are still a number of situations where the auto exposure meter of the camera is off, sometimes completely.
Every photographer, at one point or another, has had to deal with white balance issues. There are four distinct camps of dealing with WB: 1) fix it in post processing, 2) use the camera’s built-in WB settings, and 3) do a custom white balance, and 4) shoot exclusively in B&W… (kidding…sort of…), a combination of #1, #2, and #3. For the most part, I’ve been in the #1 and #2 camp; more so in the #1 camp. As anyone else who is in the same camp as me will attest to how incredibly frustrating and time consuming it is to fix white balance issues in post processing even with excellent software such as Adobe Lightroom2. So what do I do to combat this? Come inside and read more.