Notes from the Field

Over a year ago, I started playing with High Speed Sync on my Canon cameras and Speedlites. I was trying my own hand at what I had seen Joe McNally and David Hobby out to the dessert of Dubai with multiple Speedlights on something that I can only describe as Satan’s light stand.

My first attempt at high speed sync. Shutter is at 1/8000 of a second and I am using two 430EX Speedlites just to camera left.

In the year since, I have worked with Syl Arena, in Radio Popper/High Speed Sync shoot, as well as crawling on the ground with Joe McNally, holding his Nikon Speedlights during a shoot. There is something about the quality of light when you shoot at 1/2000 of a second or higher.

(A quick note, I know that Canon calls their flashes Speedlites and Nikon calls their Speedlights, but I am just going to call them flashes to save some brain cells.)

Now I am not going to go into the how’s and why’s of High Speed Sync. Joe McNally has done two great posts on the subject, as well as Syl smashing pumpkins at 1/8000 of second with the Rail of Light. Check out those posts for more tech info.

So a couple of weekends ago, I got to work with Marissa Robinson, a model that I had worked with a year ago in Virginia City. That was Marissa’s first shoot and she has progressed into a tour de force in the local modeling community. I took Marissa to a part of Reno that serves as the spooky woods for many a photographer. Because of the walk and the terrain, I choose to use my Canon flashes, rather than lug around my White Lightenings and a big battery pack. I can take an entire shoot’s worth a gear in two bags now when I choose to work with the Canon’s flashes.

Now I didn’t intend to have this shoot turn into a High Speed Sync shoot, but I was just not happy with the light I was getting from the flashes and how much extra ambient light I was getting from the sun. It has been said that Nevada is brighter than the surface of the sun on a cloudless day. Even with the cover of the trees, I was still fighting the sun, and the sun always wins.

So, using my past experience, I press the H button on my Master flash and away I went. Now as you will read this in the above mentioned articles, but the minute you go High Speed, you lose flash power. So you may have to move the flashes closer to your subject or kick up the power. I find that when I use high-speed sync, that I get out of TTL mode and go right to Manual on the Master flash. I also work in groups, so my on camera Master flash is in group A, the main flash or flashes are in B, and any rim or hair light is set to C. I can divide the power up how I see fit, without leaving the shooting position.

Hit button, get icon, go above 1/200th of a second. Questions?

I also go back and forth with having my Master flash actually fire contribute to the exposure of the image. I hate on camera lighting, but sometimes it works in my favor. In most cases and for this shoot, it stayed off and only pre-flash to the Slaves.

Once I am in High Speed Sync, I start playing with my shutter speed first, to control the ambient light without the power of the flashes. If you are not sure about how Shutter Speed and Aperture play into using flashes, then you need to check out Zack Arias and his One Light Workshop DVD and classes. I have been a self taught photographer all of my life and Zack’s DVD was one of the biggest helps in getting over the hurdle of, “What in the name of Samuel L. Jackson am I doing with this camera.” Once thing that was made so clear to me from Zack was the concept of Shutter Speed controls the ambient light of an image and the Aperture is going to control the flash power.

So I dial down up the Shutter Speed till the ambient has been beaten down and I like the feel of it, me 1, Sun 0. Then I kicked the flashes back on and started to play with their power.

This is where having a fast lens really helps. If you are not sure what fast means, it refers to the maximum aperture of the lens. Anything lower than F2.8 is considered fast. The lower the number, the faster the lens. I have two primes, a 50mm F1.4 and a 85mm F1.8. I love the 85mm, which you can read about here, for most portraits and only go to the 50 if I need a wider angle.

So if the power of the flash is control by the aperture, you get more flash power as the aperture drops. So a flash of 1/1 is going to have less pop in an image at F8 than F2.8. The added benefit is that you will get a faster recycle more battery life out of your flashes if you are at a lower aperture.

And I told myself I wasn’t going all light geek on you at the beginning of the post.

Left image at 1/200 of a second. Right image at 1/2000 of a second.

So not only have I been working with High Speed Sync, but I have also bought some new toys for my Speedlites over the past few months. My main light was inside a Lastolite Ezybox, the 24×24 version. I love the Ezybox and came to know of it from reading Joe McNally’s posts and working with him directly. The nice thing about using the box, is that it gives a much more directional light than using a shoot thru umbrella.

I found at times that the power of the main flash would be too low, no matter what I did with it’s power settings and my aperture. So I pulled both pieces of diffusion on the box and it created a harder light, but Marissa could take it with no problem.

The second piece of gear that I have is the Wizard Bracket made by a great guy, Gregg Zivney. I met Gregg at the Paso Robles Workshops back in April and he gave me one of these brackets. This thing is like a Lego for lighting geeks. You can modify it to hold two Speedlites and a pocket wizard all the way up to four Speedlites and a pocket wizard. When Gregg first gave me the bracket, I put three Speedlites on a monopod and used a Speedlite on camera to trigger them. I put the whole thing in TTL and went hunting. It was named a “The Trident of Light” by the end of the workshop.

Two 430EXs and one 580EX on a Wizard Bracket give you the Trident of Light! Both Images shot at 1/8000 of a second.

For this shoot, I put two 430EXs on the bracket and had them act as a hair/rim light for the model. No diffusion on the flashes but I did zoom them in to 50mm, so the light was a little more control and didn’t return too much light to the ambient of the forest.

Marissa at 1/1000 of a second.

Once I got the combo working, I let Marissa do her job and we went to town. I would change locations and Marissa would do wardrobe changes and then we would play with the light a little more. I never got out of High Speed Sync the entire time, but I did play with the Shutter Speed as the locations changed, finding that I wanted to see more of the background or less depending on the scene.

I do want to point out to Nikon shooters that you controls on High Speed Sync are found on the camera, not the flashes. This were I think Canon has a leg up on Nikon. If you are using a Canon camera, with a flash attached, it will not let you go about the max shutter speed for flash. Only when you hit that H button will you be able to go above the max shutter. On Nikon, since the camera controls this High Speed Sync, you can go past your normal max shutter speed and have the flash power drop.

So a year later and some new toys and I am still learning everything I can about High Speed Sync.