Shooting in harsh sun? Bring a flash. Preferably one that offers HSS with your chosen camera...

 

Even in ancient times we depended from time to time on flashes.

What a heavy package to carry around...

I almost stumbled hard this past Saturday. I was hired to photograph both behind the scenes (still photographer on a video set) and to also set up and shoot b-roll style still shots of teachers and children in and around an outdoor garden. Photos of teachers showing grade school children all about big flowering broccoli plants, gardening smarts, and environmental stewardship. There were groups of four to five children for each of four teachers who came to Austin specifically to participate in this video and photography project. And we were on site, outdoors, from 8 a.m. till after 5 p.m. The groups, by age, came in scheduled waves throughout the day but the crew, and the photographer, were outside battling the ever changing light, the noise of the city (audio for video) and the need to direct kids who ranged from five or six years old to high schoolers, all day long.

So, how did I nearly screw up my job? I assumed that the film crew would handle lighting for all the set ups and I would be able to waltz right in after they got their master shots and snap away. I brought an LED fixture but we ended up moving too quickly from set-up to set-up and there's no way a 300 watt continuous light source was going to go toe to toe with the direct Texas sun. Especially if I needed/wanted a modifier on it.  I almost didn't pack a flash. I almost came totally unprepared for the harshest light I've seen in the last month or so. 

Cue shoot saving compulsive packing behavior. At the last minute, on Friday, I walked back into the office and put my hands on a Leica SF64 flash. It's more or less a standard hot shoe flash but it's dedicated to the Leica cameras. I grabbed two sets of charged Eneloop rechargeable batteries and stuffed them, along with the flash, into the small backpack, along with the lenses, cameras and camera batteries. And, as it turns out, everything I needed to photograph, beyond the set up shots put together for the four main interview shots, needed to have the picture saving modification of fill flash. Desperately needed it. I burned through one set of flash batteries by noon. After lunch we started again with me on the last set of double A batteries. 

Most of the flash work was done in the HSS mode because I wanted to use wider apertures and faster shutter speeds. To its credit, the SF64 didn't miss a beat. I was trying to keep the fill about a stop and a half or two stops under the ambient light, especially on backlit shots because I thought it would look more natural and I was pretty sure I could compensate a bit with shadow recovery in post production. 

After the project wrapped up I spent the next day converting the files from raw to Jpeg. I used the shadow slider... a lot. And it all worked. I plowed through about 14 Gigabytes of raw files and tried hard to edit down the number I'd be sending along to clients. But I did end up touching nearly every file with one correction or another. 

I got a text from my friend who was the director of photography on the video side. He mostly works in corporate video production during the week which tends to means shorter sessions and longer edits. He was operating the video camera for the entire day. Shooting handheld for the b-roll video. We compared notes. Seems we weren't in as good production shape, physically as we remembered being in during the times in our lives when we were doing daylong, and sometimes ten hour shoots four and five days a week. Cameras can be heavy. Put a big, burly zoom on a Leica SL2-S, along with a large-ish flash and after a few hours you'll really feel the weight. Add a second big camera and longer lens to your left shoulder, on a strap, and the burden gets more obvious. 

With a good flash along for the ride I was able to shoot a bunch of work with fill flash at exposures like f4.0 at 1/1,000th and beyond. I wound up yesterday evening with about 1100 finished shots. I archived that folder and this morning starting trying to put the folder on a crash diet. What I finally sent over to the client via FTP was about 385 images. And I'm sure they will still think that's too many as well....

The second mistake, the one I did make, was not bringing along a second flash to back up the first one. And now I feel kinda dumb because there was a second Leica flash sitting right next to the first in the equipment cabinet. Bright, hard sun? Bring a flash! Need a flash for work? Bring a second one along just in case! Got something that needs batteries? Bring double the number of batteries you think you'll need!

I'm happy for my compulsive, last minute packing behavior. It made Saturday's shoot much less fraught.

Now setting up for another portrait. This one is inside.... ahhhhhh.

silly weather note: On Friday evening the production people looked at the weather and saw that our morning start would be accompanied by sub 30° weather. Being nervous Texans we mostly suited up with our "winter" stuff. For me it was long underwear on top and bottom under thick pants and a thicker sweat shirt, topped off with a down parka and an ever changing selection of gloves and hats. 

But, of course, Texas weather changes quickly. Full sun for the entire day took the temperature from 28° to about 65° by midday. We were peeling off layers like onions. By the end of the day we were all wishing for T-shirts and sandals. But no one started the day shivering on the set. 

Two of our P.A.'s (production assistants = low on the org. chart...) were tasked with setting up propane powered outside heaters. Like the ones restaurants use on outdoor patio dining areas. The heaters were new in their boxes and required assembly. A novel set of devices on a film set. At least in my experience. The final assembly of the heaters was done by about 10 a.m. By then we were in the 40s and no one saw much need for extra heat. Off to the side they went... 

That's about it. Another weekend in the trenches. First full day job of the year. Fun.

Praying that the flash batteries keep working....

My friend Fadya. Just for fun. Because I found this photo and the one

above it right next to each other in the folder....