This is my blog, it’s been home to my personal and professional visual works, adventures, advice, and personal photographic thoughts for years. There are almost 300 blog posts. I try to be as real as I can with genuine thought. This blog isn’t a marketing gimmick, it serves many purposes, ranging from visual entertainment to educational. I try not to speak out of line, and if I’m providing advice to my readership I do my best to ensure that information has integrity behind it. The one thing you will not experience reading here on my blog are lies and me feeding you, my clients and fellow photographers, a bunch of shit.

I’m a photographer, I’m paid to take photographs of people. I’ve photographed just about every age a person could be and in a dizzying array of situations. I do edit my photos in a post processing application. I’m asked to do very normal things to photographs in post, and I’m asked by some clients to do some very disturbing things in editing their images. However, contrary to many photographers out there, my job is 95% done after I’ve taken the picture. I’ve put in the time and effort required to make the photograph great at time of capture, so my editing load is minimal. For other photographers, taking the picture is only 25% of the completion. They spend countless hours in post. But this isn’t the “shit” that I’m talking about, the subject that has my feathers a bit ruffled.

A couple months ago, I watched a photography workshop. It was taught by a “successful” woman who has been a working photographer for many years. I don’t want to name names, that’s not the point. The topic… the idea… is the point, however, I’m sure the others out there who watched the same workshop will know exactly who I’m talking about. This particular photographer makes her living making “contemporary woman portraits,” which is just a jazzed-up way of saying she takes flirty/boudoir/sexed-up photos of women (she doesn’t call it boudoir because everyone else who takes these kind of images calls it that). Simply put, women come in, get their hair/makeup done, and get their photos taken. Nothing wrong with that, right, everyone wants look and feel good, and may as well get your photo taken in the process. It’s a fun time, I’d recommend all women do it at some point.

We’ve all grown accustomed to photoshop. It’s bled it’s way into our daily language, almost as prevalent as when we say, “just google it.” It’s a necessary evil for many people to do their job, and that is great. I’m not a huge photoshopper, I like to keep the integrity of my images from capture all the way through post. The most I’d do in post is erase an eye sore in the background, like a light socket, a power cord, etc. In extreme cases I’ll do some skin retouch, take out a pimple, maybe a bruise. I know others go WAY further than that in post. Yes, people will shave hips, thin arms, and they can make you transform like Optimus Prime. All of these things are now common knowledge to most, and for me, it was a, “it is what it is” idea of how things work. I don’t personally dramatically alter people in my photographs, I also don’t advocate it, however, I never got really upset at another photographer for doing it, that is… until I watched this workshop, and saw the digital delusion and bold faced lies happening as I watched in real time.

So back to this boudoir photographer. To have working examples of her work and how she does her job from capture to post, she had some in-class people volunteer to have their portraits taken ahead of the workshop, so examples would be ready to display for the viewership. During the photo shoots themselves, she did a great job in making sure the women looked the best they could with both presentation and posing. She NEVER showed any of the women the back of the camera (we’ll come back to this in a bit). She then proceeded to give a live demonstration of her typical editing flow via photoshop. Unless the women were already athletic/skinny she went to town on the ladies’ bodies. She brushed skin, thinned arms, eliminated hips/thighs, completely erased and re-fabricated chin lines, blew away any wrinkles, and even lifted eyes. Sure, well beyond my comfortable editing style, but… we are still not at the point that upset me.

As she was editing, she fielded some questions from the audience, with one asking, “do you ever show clients the back of the camera during the shoot?” It was quickly replied with a hasty, “Never! I would never show a client an unedited photograph.” Wow… ok, I had my suspicions, but I tried to ignore them, to see how she would justify this reasoning. Honestly, I was more curious as to why this was such a defined answer to the question. It was clear to this lady that under no circumstance would any client peep on the back of the camera.

Next was the big reveal. The photographer had a viewing with the women she had taken photos of, and this is where my jaw dropped. This is where, after watching someone quite literally re-invented a woman via digital manipulation, I got upset. As she started to show the women their photographs, they started to cry. Tears of joy ran down their face, with the reoccurring comment of, “I can’t believe that is me… I mean… I just can believe it.” Damn straight that’s not you! That’s you after a thorough asskicking in photoshop. I know, ’cause I just watched it happen. The icing on the cake is when the photographer replied to these astonished women with a, “Yep, that’s you. Can you believe that’s you? Look how beautiful you are! It’s just amazing, you are a beautiful woman. That’s you.” The balls on this lady… It’s one thing to take a chainsaw to a photograph, it’s another to say that the same photograph, post digital nip/tuck, is the same person which is presented in your digital frankenstein. It was that intimate exchange between the client and photographer that was truly upsetting. These ladies were literally crying tears of happiness as they looked at “themselves,” yet the whole time these images are not real, and the photographer is sitting there, starring them in the face and using a light, intense whisper of a voice for dramatic effect, “look at you, you are so beautiful.” Digital delusion presented for the whole online community to witness. The photographer was more of a dirty used car salesman if you ask me. It was a slap in the face to photographers, and a lie presented to her every client. Lady, I have no problems if you want to play digital plastic surgeon, but I definitely have a major problem with completely lying and misleading your clients. Chopping up a picture in post, trimming 20-50 pounds off of waistlines, and then telling your client to look at these images and appreciate themselves. And maybe the worst of the worst, this lady is essentially promoting this process to thousands of photographers watching online, who are seeking solid information for their own photography businesses. Mind you, this is a process that this photographer does to all of her finished photographs regardless of what the client asks for.

Sure, we know that every celebrity on every magazine cover has gotten the same treatment, hell it’s standard commercial protocol. But everyone knows it. It’s disgusting if you ask me, how we’ve brainwashed society into thinking this is how people actually look. The sad thing is that we KNOW it’s not how we look, yet we continue to want it and strive to be something we won’t ever be. It’s a really unhealthy mentality. Digital delusion has trickled it’s way down to the everyday photographer, with them taking your photographs, slicing them up, and going, “look how beautiful you are!” It’s so stupid and delusional that I have to sit back and laugh. How could a client possibility think that is them, and how can the photographer sit there and let them buy into their digital delusion?

“So what! So what if they are fraken-barbie-shop monsters! If they want to have a dream of looking nothing like themselves they should have it. Who are you to say anything else!” You know… you’re right. Well.. at least you are right about one thing. People do have the right to feel good about themselves, but it won’t ever REALLY, TRULY be found in a digital lie. The low point of all of this… you’re not a photographer. You don’t sell photographs, you sell the idea of what these women would look like after $100,000 worth of plastic surgery. Congrats, now you have a handful of photographs to take home to look at, all the while knowing that’s not you. Can you tell I’m a little passionate about my job?

Maybe… this… is the reason you don’t show your clients the back of the camera? I mean… after all, you wouldn’t want to show them an actual photograph of themselves, that would kill the whole illusion of what you got going on. The images that are sitting on the back of the camera, the ones you just took are… well… photographs, and the things you don’t want to show your clients. If you can’t show your client photographs then why are you calling yourself a photographer? Well, we all know that answer to this obvious question. For those photographers who do make good work, you’ve probably witnessed the positive change during a photo shoot when you DO share the back of the camera with clients. I don’t know if I could remember a photo shoot where I didn’t show a client the back of the camera. The shift in their attitude when they see themselves on the back of the camera is amazing, and super beneficial for me. They see themselves in this amazing photograph, of them, and the rest of the photo shoot is conducted with my clients full of confidence. I love it. Like after I asked Sabrina (pictured above) to make a silly face for me. We looked at her silly pictures together and shared a laugh.

If you ask me, beautiful is you. Beauty is real, it’s scars on your body, it’s the wrinkles on your face that tell your life’s story. Acceptance is happiness, it’s being contempt in yourself, who you are, and what you look like. Denial and delusion will only keep you reaching for something that is not there, where I believe happiness does not live.

I’m Matt McDaniel, I shoot portraiture. I will capture your true self, your true beauty, and the true you is the real beautiful thing in life.

I arrived to the location a bit early, as I usually do, to run through pre-scouted spots in the area. Light conditions change fast, and well… a location can look amazing one minute and completely lose it’s luster in a blink of an eye. I quick jog through pre-scouted locations are always done immediately prior to a shoot, ensuring they are still ripe for the pickin’.

Run and gun was the name of the game for this shoot. 10-20 clicks of the camera and we were off to the next spot. I wanted to capture six or so locations, so we got what we needed and moved on.

Bianca brought her boyfriend along for some shots. Interestingly, I’ve found this to be a very popular theme for that last couple years, shooting a senior portrait session with the student bringing their boy/girlfriend along. I don’t mind either, it really keeps my subjects loose and posing comes more naturally, making my job easier so I can focus on the technicalities of making pictures.

There is one flaw I’ve found in the PocketWizard FlexTT5′s hot shoe mount (the part that tightens to the camera end) is not built out of the strongest material. It performs just fine when mounted by itself to a camera to trigger other radios, however, if you slide a speedlite onto the Flex (it’s intended use), the added weight and torque that the speedlite can apply to the Flex’s mount can become to much and… it breaks, rendering that hot shoe mount useless. It’s kind of shocking that PW didn’t think this one through, or even make a change in future production of the product after what I’m guessing is a very large number of photographers having this issue. A speedlite/Flex rig can easily put a couple pounds of force on this single small piece of plastic (and especially stressful on the mount when the speedlite is situated sideways), and it’s only a matter of time before each and every Flex hot shoe mount will fail. Why it’s not metal to begin with is beyond me.

Good news is that you can call PocketWizard up, tell them your problem, and they will send you a new mount to replace the broken one. The bad news is that it’ll cost you $20 per replacement mount. The repair process is simple enough to do yourself in under 5 minutes, but frustrating that you have to do this to begin with.

I started doing my own research, ’cause even if I start shelling out for replacement parts, if I continue to perform my job within it’s normal bounds the new ones will break too, and that’s not cool. I found that Manfrotto makes a cold shoe mount that will fit the 1/4-20 screw thread in the bottom of the Flex. It’s called the Manfrotto 262 (click for link), and it’s only 5 bucks! This will provide you a METAL mount on the bottom of your Flex, so you don’t have to squirm at the thought of mounting a speedlite sideways on your flex any more.

Yes, the Manfrotto 262 is a cold shoe, meaning that you can’t send any communications though it, but the fact is that you’ll never have to. The only functioning hot shoe mount you’ll need will be the PW you have connected to your camera. The other PW’s you are sending signals to will only require that the top mount (where the speedlite mounts) to be “hot,” which it will be.

I would recommend anyone who uses FlexTT5′s to buy the Manfrotto 262 mounts, even if you haven’t experienced any mount issues. The new mount does not interfere with any operations you may put the Flex through, you won’t even know it’s there. I’ve purchased one for each of my Flex’s. Now I’ll use the metal Manfrotto cold shoe mount when I’m using Flex’s on the lighting end, and use the native hot shoe mount when using the Flex on the camera.

It’s important that I point out which is already obvious in the photos… the adapted mount does not have a tightening down type of fastener like the original hot shoe mount has. This means that your umbrella adapters will need to be able to tighten down on the cold shoe mount. A lot of umbrella adapters will have an adjustable slider that will allow you to squeeze the shoe mount to keep it in place.

There is a lot of grey area when it comes to the topic of rights, who has them,who doesn’t, why, and when. To keep things simple, I’ll just be talking about where you do and do not have rights to be taking photographs. It can easily be broken down into two sections – public and private property.

Public Property

Standing from any public location, anything you can see from that spot is fair game.

As a photographer, you have every right to point your camera at anything you want and take a picture of it while standing in a public location. What is defined as a “public location” may take some research for some particular places, so know your environment. Chances are if you pay taxes on the property, it’s most likely public, and you have every right to be there and taking photos. I should not have to go into detail here about the obvious things you’ll want to avoid, like going to a school and pointing your telephoto lens and kids on a playground. That’s just creepy, so expect to get hassled. Still, even then, if you are standing at a public place, you own those photos, and there is nothing the police can do about it, aside from asking you what your intentions are, and maybe asking you to leave for being a creeper. There is being a photographer and then there is acting indecent, so please don’t confuse topics in regards to proper actions as a citizen. There will be some exceptions to this very general rule, like airports, military bases, etc, that have been declared as places where photography is not welcome for security reasons.

Standing from any public location, anything you can see from that spot is fair game. If you are standing in public space and take a picture of a private property, it is fair game. If you can see over someone’s fence from a public location and they don’t like it, they need to build a taller fence. This seems obvious when we only consider the idea of walking around and looking at things with our eyes, people seem to understand that there is nothing they can do to stop you from looking at their private property as we stroll by. It’s also probably the reason we have blinds on our windows, we are preventing public space viewpoints into our private space. However, the moment people hold a camera up and take a picture of what they are seeing with their eyes, people will quickly start getting defensive.

This brings up a personal story I would like to share. I will often go out for a walk around shoot, just to clear my head and get some fresh air. A couple years ago, I was walking along a sidewalk in an industrial part of town (public space). Walking along snapping random pictures of things that caught my eye, I came across a metal scrap yard. The twisted heaps of metal looked interesting and I start taking photos. Before you know it, a very large, dirty, pirate-like guy comes charging straight at me from the nearest building from inside the scrap yard property. He carried the typical angry dude posture – arms flared, chest puffed out, stern look on the face. I naturally look behind me, as to see what is back there, ’cause he surely isn’t upset about me standing on concrete the city specifically placed there for my two feet to walk on. Yet he was, and marches right up to me, asking me what he thinks are all kind of rhetorical questions, along with a peppering of threats, including the seizing and/or damaging of the $6000 camera setup I was holding. Not only did this guy not understand my rights, he also probably had no idea he was threatening the unlawful seizing of my personal property which is most likely worth more than the car he drove to his job. Luckily I stand at 6’2″, 200 lbs, and workout, ’cause he may have just taken it upon himself to get physical with a smaller gent. He proceeds to yell at me (not inform) that this scrap yard recycles “secret and classified metal” and that I could get is big trouble for photographing said scrap heap. Granted he was totally in the wrong, I told him that I was unaware of this “secret” operation and that I’d move along, so he didn’t need to further worry himself over my espionage. If what he said was true about their activities there, they don’t do a good job of keeping it classified. All of the large gates to the property were wide open, the fences only 8 feet tall, and the heaps of metal were easily 50 feet tall. Just driving a car by the place, you could clearly see EVERYTHING. I was perfectly fine standing right where I was taking photographs, but it really, really wasn’t worth the time so I just kept walking. I could have stood there and taken pictures of the guy’s face while he was yelling at me and been perfectly within my rights. As comical as that thought might be, I’m afraid that action would have raised the guy’s temperature to a level where he would have gotten himself into some heavy legal trouble, and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of forcing the guy to fund me new equipment for the gear he would have surely broken.

If you are in a public space and someone has an issue with it, you have to make the call whether it’s worth standing up for your rights or not. Clearly, the recent highlights in the news where a photographer has been the target of wrongful actions upon them are occasions where they decided to put a foot down. These photographers eventually get justice through the court system and the ill-acted get their hand slapped one way or another. If it’s public it’s good, and it’s our jobs as photographers to document life, and in sense, keep people honest. When people are acting ill-mannered they often get upset when someone is there to capture it all, so you can’t blame for not liking it, but there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Private Property

All gloves are off when it comes to private property. You can assume that you do not have any rights on any private property, and it will always, always be a “permission required” situation. That’s, of course, playing it on the save side of assumption. Without prior consent, you do not own or have the rights to take photographs in a private space. Some venues are obvious, as far as it being ok to take photographs. Disneyland for example, the magical kingdom is cool with you taking pictures all day long in their property. Venues like museums will stipulate when and if it’s ok to take photos. It will always vary. Look for any signage that stipulates photo/video rules, and if someone asks you to stop making images on their property, respect their wishes. It will start to get especially hairy when you are not only taking pictures of places and objects, but people inside a private space.

Myself, being a portrait photographer, I pay close attention to taking photos of people while on private property. I’m often hired to take photos at private events, therefore, I’m privy to take photos of the event and people for the company holding the event, they are paying me to do so. People attending a company’s event are voluntarily acknowledging to that company’s wishes and activities which take place. If people do not like it they can leave or bring up issues with event directors, who will then direct me if needed. People attending the event also know I’m there on the company’s behalf, so it’s not a big issue. When it comes to events or property where you have not been invited by the management or company occupying the space, you need to be careful, especially if you plan to retain rights to photographs taken and even make money of said photographs.

When I’m planning a portrait shoot at a private property location, I speak directly with management, and well ahead of the day you plan on shooting. Discussing your intentions with management is good, but the ownership is best. Do not ever try to get an ok for permission to shoot in any private location from a standard employee. This has disaster written all over it. Discuss when and why you are shooting, and what you are planning on doing with the photography. That way there are no surprises. Not to get into another subject, but this is where rights to the physical photographs come into play, therefore, saving your ass from any unforeseen fallout down the road. Some kind of written agreement is always best, so nothing is left to hearsay. What if you talked to one manager and got the ok, only to show up two days later for the shoot and another manager is on duty and has not been informed of the situation? Having some kind of agreement on paper is always preferred if there is any sliver of a doubt something can get mixed up.

More often than not, simply asking management or the owner of the property will create a relationship that lets you right in. If you come into a place with cameras blazing, expecting everyone to be cool with you walking into their property without prior consent, expect to get met with restrictive attitudes. It’s been my experience that just asking gets you in 90% of the time. If I’ve ever been turned down it’s been for very reasonable concerns, and they take the time to tell you why.

Regardless of a public or private location, no one, under any circumstance, has the right to delete photographs from your camera. If you happen to do something that is unlawful enough to have your gear seized, police still do not have any right to delete anything. At that point, seized gear would be considered evidence, so deleting files would be considered tampering of evidence.

I hope that helps some of you along your photographic journeys.

From my own experience I can tell you that the AC3 has doubled my shooting efficiency. If you shoot with the MiniTT1/FlexTT5 system, you are out of your mind if you don’t integrate the AC3 into gear set… like now. It will make that big of a difference, I promise.

Additional PocketWizard Tech Details:

The MiniTT1 is a transmitter, meaning it will only send radio out, so it can only be used on the camera end of things. The FlexTT5 is a transceiver, meaning it can pull double duty sending and receiving, so the Flex can mount on the camera end, is the only one that can receive radio, and it will always be the unit attached to the lighting gear. This means that you can have a Mini and a Flex working together, or you can have two Flex’s paired (of course, you can have many radios all working, but the minimum is two, and only one Mini because it goes on the camera). The Mini is only $25 cheaper than the Flex, but it is smaller which makes it nice when mounted on the camera.

ZoneControlling A Speedlite:
2 – PocketWizard Radios
1 – AC3 ZoneController

ZoneControlling An AlienBee:
2 – PocketWizard Radios
1 – AC3
1 – AC9

ZoneControlling An Einstein:
1 – PocketWizard Radio
1 – AC3
1 – PowerMC2

ZoneControlling An Elinchrom:
1 – PocketWizard Radio
1 – AC3
1 – PowerST4

*** Important note – AlienBees require both a FlexTT5 and AC9 together to enable ZoneControlling on the light. Einsteins and Elinchrom lights do NOT require a PocketWizard FlexTT5 on the light, just the PowerMC2 or PowerST4 unit. Booyah!

While talking about the AC3 controls on the video, I talk about the 3 modes each zone can be in – off, manual, and auto. Off and manual are pretty self explanatory. The auto mode will allow you to use a PocketWizard feature called “power tracking.” Power tracking will allow you to set your lights to automatically adjust with any Aperture or ISO changes you make on the camera. For example, if you are shooting at F4.0 but then decide to shoot at F5.6, your lights will automatically add a stop of light. I don’t use the power tracking mode, but i’m sure there are a lot of people out there that will find it handy.

There are so many ways that the AC3 can improve your entire photo shoot. I barely touch on this in the video, because quite simply, I could go on and on about it. Even on those shoots where you are laying on the ground to get that interesting perspective and you find you need to adjust your light power. Without moving, just spin the AC3 dial, done. This is where I would like to point out that, yes, I’m voicing all of these things as “convenient” scenarios which the AC3 provides. The truth is if something is easy you are WAY more likely to do it, rather than if something was harder to do. Make sense? Let’s take the laying on the ground and shooting example I just gave. If you are on the ground and notice your light is not providing the right exposure, are you going to continuously get up, change the light, shoot, get up, change the light? I bet not as many times as you would if you could just spin a dial on the top of your camera, getting your exposure exactly where you want it. There is a limit for all of us in most real world situations where we draw the line as to what we feel is “worth” doing or even repeatedly doing, and the rest are “corners” that we cut. If the AC3 can make some of those time consuming things, like eliminating a 50 foot walk every time you need to adjust the power on your backlight, you’re much more likely to fix it until it’s perfect, rather than settling for something that is tolerable. Often times it doesn’t even boil down to our own limits, but time. Time is usually a pressing constraint in all corners of life, and the AC3 literally seems to rip a hole in space-time, allowing us to get so much more out of two hours of shooting.

So, the AC3 makes us more efficient shooters, allowing faster and better photos with less work, and ultimately fabricating more time to use as we see fit, whether that is spending more time with the client to make more amazing photos, or if that is relaxing at home. When I first started shooting with the AC3, my thought was, “gee, this is nice.” I didn’t feel like it wasn’t life changing, I didn’t feel like it was a big deal, just nice. But… the full realization to understanding how much faster and easier the AC3 made my shoots was clearly apparent when I tackled a shoot without the AC3 after getting adjusted to using it for a couple months. I had forgotten how much footwork the AC3 eliminated from each and every shoot. It’s like the rest of things in life, I guess, you don’t miss it until it’s gone. You can better believe I was packing that AC3 the very next shoot. I can easily say the AC3 was 80 bucks very well spent. Once you get comfy using the AC3, you’ll feel stupid that you ever shot without it.

If you have questions about the AC3 or any of the other PocketWizard gear that is required to make your specific lighting setup work with it, hit me up with a comment below, or see pocketwizard.com.

EFN also has it’s own organic farm, where they grow food specifically for food donation on 8 acres of land out in Puyallup, Mother Earth Farm. They host a fun event every year to kick-off the seasons, called the Horse Plow. Sure, with the invention of tractors horses aren’t really needed any more to plow fields for planting, but EFN likes to keep things old school. They make a day of it, invite the community out, and get some fresh air. With this event happening in April, it’s really touch and go with the weather, and you can imagine, it’s hard to predict a nice day to hold the event a couple weeks out. Three years ago, the first year I was doing work for EFN, the event had to be called off due to nasty weather. Luckily, the last two years we’ve had great weather, and the plow events went great.

I really enjoy photographing the horse plow. The farm has so many things to capture. Aside from the plowing, I took some time to capture all the little details that are hidden around the farm. Even though we just hit Spring, there were some beautiful things to document. Just wait a couple months from now, you wouldn’t recognize the landscape. They do things right at Mother Earth Farm, even brining in a couple bee hives to help populate the farm. It’s quite amazing the first time you discover just how important of a role bees play in agriculture. Without those little guys buzzing around, there wouldn’t be much growing at all.

The kids really enjoy the horses. The draft horses are so large, kids’ reactions range from delight to sheer terror once they get close to the horses. This year had a pretty good turnout, considering we are out in the middle of no where, a lot of people came to watch.

Enjoy the photos, and if you have some time, search for “EFN” on my blog search to see some of the other posts I’ve written about the organization.

My off-camera lighting journey started in overdrive. It was go big or go home when it came to integrating lights in my shoots, meaning I started out and exclusively used larger studio strobes for my work (as opposed to using speedlites, also called hot shoes). Not that it was a regrettable choice, I love the big lights and I still use them for 75% of my work, but I invested heavily and exclusively into those lights and light modifiers. When it came to that other 25% of the time, when I’m not shooting commercial work or I don’t need the horsepower from big lights, I wanted to use the way more convenient, smaller, and lighter speedlites. So I bought a handful of speedlites a couple years back for just those occasions. Aside from the initial expense of the speedlites, I also had to take into account all of the light modifiers. If I wanted the same type of control that I have with my strobe lighting set, would I have to go all out and purchase the speedlite variation of all the strobe medication gear to accomplish this? I owned like… 12+ light modifiers specifically to fit my studio strobes. I initially had no problem shelling out money for the strobe light modifiers, as big lights and big modifiers gave me awesome light, and I was willing to pay for it. Once I started researching speedlite specific light modifiers, my jaw dropped to find they cost just as much, if not more, money for them! I couldn’t believe it. I knew that speedlites were very popular, but man, the photo market is all to wise to that fact, and all of us photogs are paying for it. Markup on small light gear for those tiny little speedlites is out of control.

I decided to invest a bit into the speedlite modifiers market, but knowing they are only 25% of my shoots, it wasn’t nearly as drastic of an investment as my strobe gear. I also bought more universal gear, like the Westcott Apollo soft boxes, which use a standard umbrella mount for lighting, rather than a proprietary speed ring that all of the strobe market uses. The umbrella mount allows me to use either speedlites or strobes in them. That means less gear buying but almost as importantly, less gear that I need to pack to each shoot. Some times I may not know exactly how I’m going to light something, or I have to troubleshoot a concept, and I’ve often interchanged strobes and speedlites in mid-shoot. Universal modifiers are awesome. So I have a lot of gear at this point, two different lighting systems that don’t particularly like to share modifiers. But you can better believe that I’m going to interchange modifiers between the two systems whenever I can. Now, for my DIY light modifier…

The Alien Bee reflector (with grid), mod’d to fit a speedlite. There isn’t a lot of “modification” going on, which is why I like it and still falls within my acceptable boundaries for using it with a client present. Simply put, it doesn’t look ghetto, and I don’t look like a cheap ass. The only modification is the addition of a foam ring with some tape. As you can see via the photos, this basic reflector dish has 100% intention of fitting the specific mount of the Alien Bee lighting system. Knowing that simple grid spots specifically made for speedlites cost $30 per grid, I took a closer look at the Alien Bee dish. If I could get the dish to quickly and securely mount to my speedlite I could use my Alien Bee grids (I use 10, 20, 30, and 40 degree grids, and I have two sets). I held together a dish and a speedlite, it wasn’t a bad fit. A little extra room on the top and bottom, obviously due to different shapes, but not a huge hurdle to overcome. The dish is super light, so the adapter needed to marry the dish and speedlite didn’t need to be anything beefy, in fact, it just needed to be more of a secured padding that was snug enough to fill the remain gaps in the dish once the light was in it and keep it from falling off. It also needed to be a rig that is reliable, had easy repeat usage, and didn’t take a hour to mount and unmount.

This is where the fun begins, right? Toggle on the McGyver switch and hunt the house for viable options. Just about any foam would do, just as long as it wasn’t too forgiving. The foam I actually ended up using was from the inside top of my MacBook Pro box. I ripped that off (it’s glued to the top of the box) and cut it into 1-inch wide strips (cutting down the longer side of the foam). The single piece of foam is enough to make at least 3 of these foam adapter rings. Given the thickness of the foam, it was going to require more than one strip. I took two strips of the foam, wrapped them tightly around the head of the speedlite (one over top of the other) to get a proper fit for the adapter foam ring, and duct taped it. Most of the ring is reinforced with tape, leaving a couple spots of foam to grip the dish a little better. That’s it! I made two of them in 15 minutes and I can now mount Alien Bee dishes and grids to my speedlites for further control.

Below is a photo of the finished foam ring. That is two strips of the foam, each strip wrapped twice around the head of the flash unit, making it essentially 4 layers of foam.

This mod is not the most logical, I’ll have to admit. Typically we are using hot shoe lighting because it quick, easy, and it all fits in a rather small bag. The plus to shelling out for the dedicated speedlite grids would be to retain that mobility and size. More often than not though, I’m usually packing both strobe and speedlite lighting gear in my car, so it makes sense for me to be packing around the dishes and grids anyways. Chances are if you shoot Alien Bees too, you’re probably in the same boat, so it might be worth a try. I’m sure this same technique will work for most strobe lighting dishes, as they are usually about the same size. The size of our foam ring might need to change to accommodate any differences in dish sizes.

As you can see by the photos below, there is no light leaking out of the back of the reflector, and with even a modest 30 degree grid, you can see the light control and nice gradient light falloff. The only reason I’d use a dish without a grid on my speedlite would be to use the dish a flag (or gobo), to prevent stray light from the speedlite going directly into my lens. The speedlite has internal zooming capabilities that can focus the light beam even tighter than what this dish allows, so again, the dish is just making sure that light spill is minimized to the 80 degree spread of the dish, rather than 180 degrees of the speedlite head which has no lip.

Photo left, reflector dish with 30 degree grid. Photo right, reflector dish, no grid.

A lot of commercial photography is shot on either a white or black background, reason being it’s VERY easy to add more space to a design canvas if needed. Ex – shooting a model on white seamless will allow a designer to plop the image onto a white canvas any where they want, and no one is the wiser. You can add or subtract designing real-estate until the cows come home. With that said, you really don’t have to shoot as consciously with your composition (you don’t have to worry about leaving any negative space in the image for the addition of graphics and text). You can shoot nice and close, providing maximum resolution and detail, and giving a graphic designer one more reason to love working with you. Shooting on a true  solid color is ideal for this editing flexibility, however, sometimes you want something different (even in the studio), or often times commercial photogs find themselves out in the wild shooting on-location. For these situations, it’s key that the final concept be well-understood. And again, it’s always a great thing if you are the designer and the photographer, as the layout is floating around in your head, and you can at times improvise even while shooting, as new design ideas pop up in your head and you can then shoot and frame for those ideas on the fly. A great luxury. Of course, if you are shooting for Nike or some huge name, the concept is concrete, which has been reviewed and ok’d by corporate big wigs. But if you are a smaller operation, you can get away with some… “creative flexibility” up until you shoot the last frame of the day.

The work presented with this post is for a design I actually came up with on my drive in to the studio. It was more playful of an idea than usual, but I thought it grab more attention than just a girl standing in a dress. These ads were designed to promote a prom dress event hosted at London Couture. Sure, we can just show a girl looking great in a dress, but like all marketing, you have to “suggest” ideas for people, effectively telling them what they should be thinking, right? So this is a very basic concept, a girl day dreaming about her ideal dress for prom, and bam, you see it and it’s at London Couture, waiting for you. This injects the idea – the dress you are dreaming about looking amazing in is right here at London Couture.

Walking into the studio, I knew I needed two key shots, as this would be a compilation of two photographs for the main design. One, close-up of girls faces (in normal clothes) thinking and looking-off, deep in happy thought. Second shot, a full body shot of girl feeling amazing in her dream prom dress. The “thinking” photos were very fun to shoot when I asked the girls to run through a serious of facial expressions. This brings me back to one of my points – shooting (and framing) for a product. Since I shot this on a gray background with gradient lighting, it would be very time consuming to add more canvas space if I needed it in post for text, so when I framed the girls tight on their faces, I knew I needed space for that little thought bubble above them. I left a lot of negative space above them for that very reason, and you get this very pleasing gradient of color where the light falloff is taking place. Also important to note is that this light falloff area is very important (where the background goes dark), because I shot the girls on the same gray background in the dresses. If the background for the “thinking” shot and the “dress” shot had the same exact colored background, it would be really hard to make out any kind of separate to the two images, and the little thought bubble would pop out as much. I was going to shoot the girls “dress” shot on a white background, but their dresses were very light colored, and would be better photographed on a darker background. This is another improvised call I made on the spot, and another advantage of being the designer as well, composing my final graphic design on the fly in my head while shooting, and knowing what I can get away with.

Postcard Front

Postcard Back

I quickly photographed the girls and was done with that concept. I photographed two girls because it would help to breakup tedious marketing. For London Couture, we typically produce , at a minimum, a pile of both posters and postcards. I used one girl for poster ads, and I used the other for the postcard design. Same idea, just different visuals, which in hopes, gets people to stop twice to read the same information. But… I didn’t stop my shoot there. Often times when working on a design, I’ll want some random detail photos, providing me the same basic feel and style of photography as the main concept, but branches off a bit with a fresh perspective and produces great bonus material. Sometimes the additional shooting of the details is greatly needed, and can save my butt from making everything all like it was all creating from one “look.” For this particular shoot, I asked the girls to leave the dresses with me, and I photographed individual dresses (again, framing them with ample negative space, because I knew if I were to use these extra detail shots, it would be for mostly informational, text-heavy design pages, and wanted just a little spice on an otherwise plain background). In this case, for the back design of the postcard, I used a shot of a hanging dress. It was framed perfectly, I plopped it into a canvas, tossed on the text, and it was done, no additional work needed. Total time for the shoot was about an hour.

12 x 18 Poster Design

I mentioned on-location product shooting earlier in the post, and that is even a trickier animal to tackle with all the eye sores out there trying to creep into our composition. Of course there are many ways to approach and design around that, but I love it if I can manage to deliver photos for graphic design that can fill the whole design and not have to be boxed or otherwise drawn over to create space for text, etc. Sometimes it’s a compromise, framing a shot that is less photographically powerful, “taking one for the team,” in a sense, to produce an over all better marketing product in the end. Next week I will post up another London Couture design that I produced from a on-location shoot, and I composed it with pockets of negative space for just the right amount of text, so stay tuned!

For this specific photo task, I knew the following:

• I will be shooting both ground level and aerial shots, aerials from a helicopter.
• The location is only reachable by foot, requiring a 15-minute hike.
• The location will be focused around a giant landslide.
• My focus for ground level shots will be the people working in the environment.
• My focus while shooting from the air will be a mile-long landslide.

Now I’m kind of a gear junkie, I have lots of camera bodies, lenses, and a mountain of lighting rigs to choose from for my shoots. As nice as it is to have all of this at my disposal, it sometimes makes gear decisions tougher when narrowing it down for jobs. Selection for this gig started with the process of elimination – based heavily on the environment and weight. Whatever I want to bring is going to have to fit in my backpack and I’m going to have to lug every pound of it up a mountain. Doing a bit of backpacking in the past, I knew that I didn’t want it to be a “pack my bag with as much as I could fit” situation, rather I aimed for a “how little could I pack and get away with good shots and not hate myself for leaving something behind” situation.

Up above is a photo of everything I took with me (minus a couple spare batteries and memory cards). Here’s a list of what that entailed.

• One camera body – 5D2
• Two lenses – 24-70 2.8 L, 70-200 2.8 IS L (including lens hoods)
• One polarizing filter
• Two 580exII hot shoe flash units
• One 8′ light stand
• One 60″ convertible umbrella
• Three PocketWizards
• One TriGrip reflector

This gear combo is heavy but not unrealistic for a 15-minute hike. The lenses give me great range, from 24-200mm, and I have off-camera lighting equipment if opportunities arise for me to use it.

Now, the backpack I used was a legit hiking backpack, capable of easily packing 60+ lbs, but it lacked padding that is desired when packing this type of delicate equipment. To work around this I wrapped my camera and lenses in t-shirts, my hot shoes slipped into socks, and the other gear fit into the little compartment pockets of the back, which kept it all separated to ensure nothing banged together. The light stand, umbrella, and lens hoods all were fitted to the outside of the pack. See picture below, the bag all loaded.

This setup worked great. I almost used all of the gear while shooting as well, minus one hot shot flash and the reflector.

Four of these programs are going to be our focus for the launch of this showcasing project. They range from out-in-nature geological to in-the-labs highly technical, and will place us in some interesting locations and situations to produce our visual work. First up to bat was a program centered around a geological phenomenon. Back in the 1930′s, just outside the town of Bellingham, a large landslide started to take place. I say “started,” because it’s still going on, it’s still sliding. Yes, this is a slow-motion, mile-long landslide 80 years in the making. But that isn’t the weird part. It starts to get a bit odd when you analyze the water runoff that is flowing through the giant thing. Turns out that the sediment laden water contains amazingly high levels of asbestos. You know… that poisonous crap that was wildly popular in the groovy 1970′s home construction, touted for it’s fire resistance and insulating properties (among others). A rushing creek of water flows through the slide, picking up the asbestos and carrying it down to the surrounding valley. The contents of the creek are so dangerous that it’s playing a large roll in the destruction/contamination of the farm lands below the hillside. So the earth mass keeps sliding, grinding-up and producing ample loose poisonous sediment (yummy), feeding the water, and playing a continual negative roll on the community. It’s much like a glacier as it slowly moves across the earth. This is why the WWU geologist are out there, in fact, people from around the world have travelled there to study this anomaly, as it’s apparently confusing the crap out of everyone as to why here and why not everywhere else. I guess this type of event is only happening in a couple spots in the world. And who said Bellingham is just a college town…

Turns out that the sediment laden water contains amazingly high levels of asbestos. You know… that poisonous crap that was wildly popular in the groovy 1970′s home construction, touted for it’s fire resistance and insulating properties (among others).

So on our first capturing adventure we went, to visit this landslide with a WWU crew. We arrived to the end of the twisting road, the closest we could get to the slide by car, and we mounted our backpacks (full of our production gear) to traverse the last part of the journey on foot. BTW, I will also be blogging next about my backpack setup for my photo gear, and what I decided to take with me and why (for all you photogs out there), so stay tuned for that. It would be another 15 minute hike up the heavily wooded hillside before we’d reach the bottom of the slide, and where we’d do the brunt of our visual documentation. The lead professor for this project gave us a few quick pointers as we were about to begin our hike, reminding us to use these special brushes to clean off our shoes when we returned back to the cars. The creek bed would be very thick with clay, clay which traps the asbestos, and we wouldn’t want to track it back home. When you hear things like this, little flags start popping up in your head. You mind starts to churn…hold on a sec here… so what have I just got myself into and will I be unknowingly diving headfirst into a health hazard zone? The entire production team was quickly briefed on the landslide situation prior to, but it obviously hit a little more on the real side when you are being instructed on best health practices when you are presently standing in the zone. Questions started to quickly arise from just about everyone in regards to our education of this place, which was pretty funny to be a part of.

It clearly didn’t hit me that we’d be that far up in the hills. We are in the middle of March so temps would be a little chilly, but not too bad, that is… in town. Up in the hills it was a lot colder. Forgetting to connect the dots, I wore just cargo pants and a sweatshirt, and there I was hiking through snow in the middle of nowhere… great. Fortunately a 40lb pack and hiking up hill will keep you on the warm side of things, until you stop.

Arriving at the location, we quickly realized how little room there was to work in. The bottom of the landslide is starting to squeeze itself into a ravine, with steep, heavily wooded sides, leaving the creek bed as the only workable clearing for us to occupy. Ironically, this mile-long landslide, hundreds of feet wide, left us with really only a 20-30 foot wide creek bed at the bottom of it to really capture the WWU team doing their research. The landslide itself isn’t something you can climb on, as the bottom of it is a giant mass of super soft clay and dirt. The professor told us that if we were to try and hop onto it, we’d immediately sink up to our waists. The creek spits right out of the bottom of the slide, and this is where the bulk of the studying is taking place, measuring water and surrounding soil samples, as well as documenting the slow progression of the moving slide.

Once we had our heads wrapped around the possible shooting spaces, we went to work documenting the students doing their various research, as well as the surrounding environment. Everyone was tired and cold and there was little in regards of visual impact  for us to capture from this perspective. You see, the slide really bulges at the bottom, with a very steep rise, so you don’t see much from the creek bed’s perspective. We were hoping that from the bottom of this thing you could look up and see this super impressive vista of a slide, but upon arrival we quickly learned that you really can’t see anything at all. You just know that there is a mile worth of mass headed that way and the resulting impact and concern is the water runoff which is flowing right by us. This is where the helicopter comes in.  From the ground, all of the attention was paid to the WWU students doing their research, but from up in the air, we’d be able to document the slide in it’s entirety and get up high enough to see over that giant front lip. Both Andy and myself hiked back down the mountain and took a turn going up in a helicopter to take some aerials for the slide.

Not only is this thing a mile long, but from bottom to top there is over a 500 foot elevation change, so… a 50 story building worth of height to this thing.

When you get up in a helicopter you completely loose perspective on size. From up there, miles can easily be confused and recognized as very small portions of space. It’s very disorienting the first few trips up, and you are constantly having to ask the pilot where the hell you are. Everything looks amazingly and completely different. We were over the slide before I knew it, and from the air, the thing didn’t look large at all… that is, until I was able to finally spot the WWU crew at the base. They were ants in relation, and then I was immediately able to appreciate the sheer scale of the mass of earth creeping down the hillside. Not only is this thing a mile long, but from bottom to top there is over a 500 foot elevation change, so… a 50 story building worth of height to this thing. My goal from the chopper was to focus mainly on the slide, snagging some shots for both visual impact for our media, but also to snag some solid high resolution photos for the researchers’ work. It’s not every day they have a chopper at their disposal, so I saw this as a way I could get them some solid photos for their work. I was also able to zoom in and snag a couple of the ant-sized crew working in the creek bed. You couldn’t really tell what they were doing beyond some kind of organized function.

The water is truly thick with sediment. The creek looks more like it’s carrying milk than it is water, as you can see by the photos. I captured photos of the water at the mouth of the landslide as well as miles downstream, yet the water seemed just as murky.

Most of this specific trip for me, photographically speaking, was much more of an event-like documentation process. Whereas I’m usually busting out a lot of lights to create more ideal lighting conditions, this was much more of a capture what you can manage. There was just about zero opportunity to even find more ideal ambient light conditions because of the restricted nature of the limited space. Back lit, front lit,  side lit… you kinda just shot what was there, and not much working around your subjects for better light. I did bring some hot shoe flashes along for the journey, as well as some other gear that I’ll share in my next blog post, and I was able to use lighting for a few portrait shots of the students doing research.

These kinds of gigs are always fun and informational experience. Being a photographer in general has placed me in some locations and situations that I would never find myself in otherwise. You also end up learning a ton about things that you never knew existed. Future programs that we will be capturing will be much more flexible as far as our creative capturing flexibility goes, and I’ll be able to control lighting conditions, which I’m looking forward to. So keep a lookout for more on this WWU project!