The Friedman Archives Newsletter
April 2009
In this issue:
Pocket Wizards and Radio Poppers
Many people write to me and ask how they can utilize Pocket Wizards (the working
professional's choice for radio triggering of flashes) with the Sony cameras and
flashes. Most of those who ask don't realize that the original Pocket Wizard was
designed to trigger studio strobes, and so when you hook them up as described
below you lose all the benefits of automatic (TTL) flash exposure - you have to
manually tell your flash how much light to output.
To make Pocket Wizards work with the Sony flashes, you need to convert the hot
shoe on top of your camera to a "standard" hot shoe. For this you can either use
the Sony FA-HS1AM or the
"Hot Shoe Adapter III" from Gadget Infinity.
You'll also need a special cable to attach the Pocket Wizard receiver to the
off-camera flash, such as this one:
http://www.flashzebra.com/products/0119/index.shtml .
If you're looking for the reliability of radio triggering but don't want to give
up automatic TTL flash exposure, I highly recommend the best of both worlds:
They're called Radio Poppers (www.radiopopper.com), and they way they work is
just brilliant. The transmitter is actually a very tiny device which you stick
onto your controller flash. Every time the flash goes off (even if it's to send
the Morse-code-like control signals), an induction coil in the Radio Popper
transmitter senses the rush of electrons through the flash's light tube and
therefore "knows" exactly what the flash is doing, and sends out the identical
signals via radio waves. The receiver, which gets mounted to an off-camera
wireless flash, "hears" the radio frequency signals and translates them into
corresponding pulses infrared light, feeding them to the flash's IR sensor.
Thus, you have the best of both worlds: completely automated TTL flash exposure
and the reliability of radio (which requires no line-of-sight and doesn't get
washed out in bright daylight). Voila!
Update: When I wrote the above paragraph, it was
right before the company introduced their new PX line of equipment. It was
also about the same time that the company started to admit an unexpected
technical problem: Their sampling rate wasn't compatible with all brands of
wireless flash protocols. Very quietly they slipped into their
documentation that their products were only certified for Canon and Nikon
cameras, with certification for others "coming soon". This limitation
seemed strange to me, but I was never able to get in touch with a technical
person to understand this limitation better. Word on the street has it
that these work just fine with the Sony system. I'll let you know what I
find when my evaluation units arrive. :-)
The Importance of Fill-Flash
This is probably old-hat to most of you, but when it comes to situations where
the camera sees the subject very differently from your eye, I find that you can
never hammer this point home often enough: Fill Flash Matters!
Have a look at these two images of my new favorite test subject : See how dark
the baby's face is under the eyes in the left shot? It sure didn't look that
dark
to me when I was standing there! That's one of the biggest problems with
photography - the film or digital sensor can't see nearly as wide a range of
light as the human eye can. That's why in outdoor scenes, it's important to
ensure that what's in shadow doesn't render as depressingly dark. Lighten your
shadows by turning your camera's flash ON (as in the right image). When the
light is strong, the camera's flash will do its best to lighten the shadows so
they look more like the way we remember seeing them - all automatically.
Once you understand how the camera reacts so differently to light, you can never
again look at Hollywood images of people wearing hats and not think to yourself,
"They must have used a giant mirror outside the frame to fill in
those shadows and make the faces visible!" (Which in fact they did all the
time when filming "Little House on the Prairie" - have a look at the
youtube clip below, and watch how the lighting on Michael Landon's face gets
brighter as he pulls into the spot where the fill light is waiting).
Next Seminars - Nashville and New York
Two more Friedman Archives High-Impact Photography Seminars are in the works,
one for Nashville and one for New York City. The tentative dates are as follows:
Nashville - Sept. 12-13, 2009
 Southern California Seminar Attendees |
We're still looking for meeting space that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (or a
Zeiss lens), but at least you can put these dates on your calendar so you can
attend these events.
The Friedman Archives Seminars have amassed a reputation for being a fun and
approachable way to get your creativity going and to learn the basics of
photography in an intuitive way. And, based on attendee feedback, the seminars
are being improved by incorporating more in-class exercises and feedback
sessions to reinforce the learning experience even more.
You can register your interest in attending (before the official signup forms go
online) by clicking on the dates above. Want the seminars to come to your city?
Send an email expressing interest to seminars@FriedmanArchives.com .
We've had to put off all plans for international travel until 2010, at which time we
definitely plan to schedule seminars for Amsterdam and Copenhagen (possibly the
UK as well).
Northern California Seminar Attendees
(These group shots, by the way, were taken using multiple wireless flashes. Everyone who owned a wireless flash was invited to set it up on a table and point it toward the group. Keep in mind that in situations like this where you have multiple flashes all acting as one group, they will all fire with the same level of output -- the camera bases its flash exposure calculation on the one flash which produced the brightest reflection from the subject. Hence the apparent splotchiness of lighting, plus the multiple shadows in the background. In the future I'll try to have everyone place their flashes the same distance from the subject they're trying to illuminate. Earlier I had tried to have everyone pointing their flashes to the ceiling for a humongous bounce flash effect, but the harsh shadows on the faces under the eyes make it look like we were outdoors on a bright, sunny day at noon.)
A900 book
is finally out!
Well, it took six months, but my largest book to date, on the 24-megapixel Sony
Alpha 900, is finally out and available in both electronic and printed versions
here. This book was particularly challenging because I knew a large percentage
of those buying the book would be repeat customers who probably didn't need a
primer on the basics of photography, and so I completely reorganized the book to
be a reference book that skipped the basic stuff and concentrated, in greater
detail than usual, on every feature and setting, giving as much insights as
possible. In short, I wanted it to be the opposite of the manual that came with
the camera.
My! I do not mean to rag on Sony for producing a 'poor' manual. In my
experience, ALL manufacturers of consumer electronics devices have learned over
the years that people simply don't have the time to read large instruction
manuals, and so they go out of their way to convey the operation of the device
using as few words as possible. (Believe me, that's much harder than taking the
time to explain everything, including the history behind a setting and
circumstances in which it would be beneficial.) Then these minimalist works get
translated into other languages, and that's where any clarity issues start to
take form. So I understand why the manuals end up the way they do. And I
certainly don't mind, since it creates a market niche which I enjoy fulfilling
very much!
Chasing the Fine Nines
The holy grail in terms of computer server availability (and communications infrastructure in general) is the coveted "Five Nines" - that is, 99.999% uptime. This translates to about 5 minutes of downtime per year as being acceptable.
Last month was not a good month for the Friedman Archives website in terms of the five nines. First, the site was infected with some malware which tried to do evil things to computers that visited the site. Soon after that was resolved, the entire site was down for almost 24 hours because my domain name (which had automatic renewal enabled) mysteriously expired without any notification or explanation. (I found out only by accident!) After working frantically to get things restored (involving other technical problems I don't care to get into), the site was restored but with a different kind of malware affecting it. A day later that, too, was resolved. Then my webhost experienced a network outage lasting about 8 hours. In all, I blew the 5 nines goal for the year by a factor of 600 in less than a week!
Here's the interesting part: The expired domain occurred on my redirect server. This is a server I had set up so I could redirect all web traffic to a backup server on a moment's notice should my primary server, well, experience a network outage lasting about 8 hours or so. :-) So in my efforts to create some redundancy in my infrastructure to avoid disaster, I inadvertently introduced a new source of failure. As the systems engineers say, "It's always something!"
Try an
A900 on for size...
Many of you who are perfectly happy with the digital camera you already have may
have been fantasizing about investing in an Alpha 900 camera, just because -
well, just because. Let me tell you now that, unless you're doing commercial
work which must be blown up to giant proportions, this camera may very well be
overkill for you. The file sizes are huge, your computer will appear to work
slower doing your normal post-processing, and you'll eventually need to upgrade
all of your hard drives to accommodate all the extra space.
But if you're still thinking about it, you can
build your own paper model of an A900 and hold it in
your hands. :-)
By the way, in my quest to find a lightweight traveling lens for my A900, I dug
through my Minolta collection and found an original Maxxum 35-70 f/4 zoom lens,
one of a trio of legendarily cheap and sharp lenses which Minolta had originally
designed for Leica. It has its disadvantages - minimum focusing distance is
about 1 meter (although there is a macro mode), and it's not quite as wide nor
does it let in as much light - but if you need a superbly-performing walk-around
lens that doesn't weigh you down like the expensive Zeiss 24-70 f/2.8, put this
short lens on your short list.
Until next time...
Yours Truly,
Gary Friedman
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