Woke Up It Was A Fisheye Morning

The local heat wave has finally broken, and to celebrate, I resumed my morning walk with a camera on my shoulder. I mounted my small  10mm F 8.0 Pergear Fisheye lens on a lounging Fuji X-1 body. I also had a Flash Q20 II. Whether conscious or  not, I brought the flash because I knew that I'd be looking for interesting foreground subjects juxtaposed against a wide expanse of background. With a flash in my pocket, I could use it whenever an interesting foreground subject was conveniently positioned in the shadow of something much bigger. This particular flash has a unique trick; The "foot" serves as a wireless controller when detached from flash's main body.

For most of my shots, I was able to just keep the flash head pointed straight ahead, which was the case in this shot.  Now the lens has a fixed aperture of F 8.0, so if I choose to use a flash at the minimum sync speed of 1/180 of a second, I may need to adjust my ISO setting to get the desired exposure of the background, which in this case is the sky. Then I can adjust the flash illumination by increasing or decreasing the flash output, or by increasing or decreasing the flash-to-subject distance. In this case the flash was mounted on the camera, so output adjustments were made in the flash.

When working at distances as short as one foot, this tiny flash can have an enormous effect on your exposure. And due to the rotating head feature, you can achieve a different look by rotating the flash head straight up and bouncing the light off of one's open palm. This may not improve the quality of the light significantly, but will effectively position your light slightly higher above the lens axis. Notice that the light in this photo is still quite harsh, but the higher angle improves the highlight slightly. Before my next outing, I am going to find some place to stow a sheet of aluminum foil to serve as a better, more color neutral bounce surface.

Order your replacement here.

Kaput: I had not used this particular FlashQ unit (I own two) for quite a while, and when I attempted to use it off camera, the detached foot/controller refused to communicate with the flash itself, in spite of my resuscitation efforts in the field. My luck was no better when I tried it with a different flash, so I must assume that it just died from unknown causes. Luckily for me the foot/remote was available separately, and I just ordered one. Having a spare controller can be advantageous if you have two cameras and to give each one the ability to trigger you off-camera remote flash, a tactic I've used many times. It galls me to think this component would be fini after only four years of infrequent use, but it was, and the solution will cost me about $30.00, a small price to pay to get this show back on the road.

The next day, I carried the same camera with my other FlashQ that would work off camera. In this shot there are few vertical lines, and therefore few hints the shot was made with a fisheye lens. These shots were made by my taking a wild guess to the subject-to-film plane distance, since the lens only had two defined distances: .3 meter, and infinity. Halfway between these points is halfway between those two delimiters.

I'm starting to get the itch to buy another fisheye lens. There are three newish APS format 7.5mm manual focus lenses that are available at a good price. There are several full frame fisheyes that could potentially make my Sony A7 much heavier and less wieldy, and are a bit more expensive.

Perhaps my Pergear Pancake Fisheye's days are numbered.

Lighting Twin Planes

My circumstances don't always allow me to experiment with lighting on the grand stage. So when an opportunity presents itself, I take advantage of the situation. In this case, the subject was the director of a local theater production, and my editor wanted a photo to accompany an upcoming article.

Sometimes the Ghosts of Past Assignments come back to haunt me. In this case, I photographed a theater coach who was maximizing the visual impact of a fight scene in a modern urban remake of Macbeth. As it turned out, I couldn't achieve the look I was trying for, and my placement of the subjects (three total) looked ungainly and contrived. I scrapped the image and went instead with this photo of the Combat Coach isolated on the stage. I made the photo during a lighting test, and was never meant to be submitted. It turned out to be a lifesaver when my planned group photo failed to deliver. I learned a valuable lesson: Always make a second shot with a different pose in case the planned image doesn't deliver.

For the record, the lighting on this shot was complex. For the subject in the background I used two gridded speedlights, one serving as the key light and the other the kicker from behind. Once the output was locked in, I alter the exposure by simply moving the lightstands nearer or farther from the subject. In this shot I was able to conceal the particular key light by aligning it behind my main subject's head. For the record, I could have placed a low-output speedlight on the floor in front of my secondary subject and given  her some "legs to stand on", My main subject had the usually gridded kick light, in addition to a silver umbrella collapsed around the speedlight to give a more directional key light. Finally, a speedlight with a small Lumiquest softbox was placed at my eye live to provide some fill light.

When it came time to make the solo shot, I simply opened the umbrella and used in a  conventional manner. Normally I do not use umbrellas as a reflector, and did not expect the hard highlights on my subject's head. I could have eliminated one of those hot spots by re-positioning the kick light more to camera left while keeping it out of the frame. The lights that were used to light the background were now positioned to provide a wrap around highlight to my subject's head.

For this shot I located one of the rolling storage cases and pushed it onto the set. To simplify matters, I kept my subject in the same place and rolled the case up to meet him. This simplified the placement of the lights, since they were already in position from the first shot.

I was able to salvage some of the "double exposure" shots by changing to a square format and completely cropping out my second subject. Some of the shots had some empty space separating the binders, so the cropping  borders were pretty obvious.

Homework: My lighting equipment is still in the trunk of my car, so I may take my main lighting kit to a quiet parking lot and do some serious experimenting. Among those points to ponder:

• How much light do I really lose when using single or multiple grid spots? I had always used them to contain my light spread, but  never thought about how much the grids decreased the flash output.
• How bad (or good) are umbrellas used in the conventional reflected manner? I have several silver umbrellas, and frankly, I never use them because I much prefer the light provided by a shoot-through umbrella. 
• Finally, I need to better organize the contents of my main rolling lighting case. The zippered pockets in the case lid are really helpful, but I may need to organize the contents for the umpteenth time.