A successful trip to a client in New Jersey. Good gear selection. Good efficiency. Good images.

Last week I publicly mulled over what equipment to take along with me on an assignment. I would be flying by myself to Newark, NJ, meet up with my creative director from an Austin advertising agency (who was flying in from a video shoot in Dallas, Tx.) and we'd make our way thirty miles south to shoot for a couple of days at a manufacturing/pharmaceutical concern. I ended up taking along all the right gear and I learned some new things from my (much younger and more tech savvy) client about traveling and making work life easier. Seems there's an app for that --- no matter what "that" is.

I ended up packing a couple Nikon bodies and a flurry of lenses but I only used the D750. It was perfect for the main goal of our shoot which was to make stylized portraits of the company's top executives. By stylized I mean they were lit in a way that reflects my lighting preferences and I don't think I ever used a lens aperture beyond f2.8 (at the smallest). We spent the entirety of the first day shooting these portraits in a giant, spotlessly clean, warehouse. I used diffusion scrims to block most of the light coming from the sodium vapor lights high up in the rafters and I used two speed lights for my main and back light. The main light was bounced into a 60 inch, white umbrella and the back light was used direct from high up (twelve feet) and at least 50 feet behind the subjects.

The main flash was the all manual, Cactus RF 60, which has its own internal radio triggering receiver, and the back light was provided by a Yongnuo flash and triggered by a  Cactus V60 transceiver. I thought I should have brought more batteries but when all was said and done the 16 Eneloops were just right. At low power settings like 1/16 and 1/64 the batteries lasted all day long. I can't show the portrait images yet because they need to be approved by the clients first.

I used two different lenses to shoot the portraits and most of you can probably guess which ones there were without me writing it. But for the infrequent readers of the blog they were the Nikon 85mm f1.8G and the older, Nikon 105mm f2.5 ais (manual focus) lens. I worked back and forth with the two lenses in order to vary the look a bit but both were used around f2.8 and both were quite sharp were focused and then dropped out of focus quickly behind --- which is exactly what I wanted.

We spent the next morning finishing up our portraits and then moved on to shooting process shots, working shots and research shots. Our goal will be to use these as splash page images for the website and in some of the company's other collateral. I started shooting with these with the Nikon D750 and the Nikon 24-120 f4 zoom but I really missed the immediacy of an EVF for fast moving images that we were capturing in available light. There is an efficiency to using the EVF that's not talked about enough but it makes all the difference to me in shots where we don't have time to put the camera on a tripod and bring in lights. I also missed the longer reach and perfect image stabilization that my two sets of mirror-free cameras provide.

I know it was a bit sneaky to have included a Panasonic fz 1000 to my camera selection on Monday night, the day before I headed out, but I was really pleased to have it along with me. After half an hour of shooting we dropped the Think Tank roller case full of Nikon stuff into someone's office and spent the rest of the day shooting about 1200 total files in a fast moving blitz through the manufacturing floors and the R&D areas. I could get very tight with the longer end of the Panasonic zoom and I could get relatively wide which made handholding the camera even more stable.

The built in, electronic level was very useful but the image stabilization is so good in this all-in-one camera that I'm thinking it rivals the I.S. in the Olympus EM-5.2 (See hand held shot above).

I have been reviewing the images I took since I got home a little while ago and I am pleased with all the various work we created. It should be an ample trove of images with which to create a first class website with.

The cherry on the top of the trip for me was the flight out of Newark this morning. Our Southwest Airlines flight left right on time at 7:30 am and was scheduled to get into Austin at 11:05 am. We ended up arriving almost one full hour early. Amazing. And the flight was half full. Comfortable.
I was home conferring with Studio Dog about strategy before lunch time. Very grand, I'd say. 

Returning to my roots as a minimalist lighting expert. I did write the book about it, after all.

Stuff to put into the Think Tank Airport Security case tonight for tomorrow's shoot. 

Two Yongnuo flashes, one Cactus RF60 flash, one Metz flash, 

three Cactus V6 Transceivers, lots of rechargeable batteries and (top left)

my trusty Sekonic light meter. 

Out of the blue, about a month ago, I got a nice note from someone at the company that makes Cactus products and he offered to send me some of their products to test. I thought about it for a couple of days because I've found extended loans of cameras for the purpose of reviewing has the effect of making me subconsciously feel that I should alter my approach to photography by learning a new, different, weird interface or menu or handling characteristic. Also, when testing cameras you tend to become locked into whatever lens the camera company might send you. Would I enjoy testing an Olympus camera if the company was hellbent on sending me only a 14-42mm kit lens? No! I would not. Did I enjoy working with the Samsung NX-1 and the lesser kit lens? Not really. So the camera you use is an essential driver. Do I feel the same way about lighting? No really. I think of flashes as more or less interchangeable as far as the light they put out and the way they handle. For most work I am a manual setting user and not a TTL geek user. I don't spend a lot of time figuring out every little way a flash could work and I don't like to leave the metering of multiple light set ups to the camera or flash's discretion. A flash is a flash is a flash. If they put out the same power and they recycle quickly then I'm pretty happy.

I decided that I could compartmentalize the way I work with lights and I decided not to try and press the test gear into every shoot. And I further promised myself that I wouldn't change the way I work just to investigate features that I might never want to use in real life. With that all in mind I sent back an e-mail and agreed to accept and test the gear.

A couple weeks later I got a box from Fed Ex that came all the way from Hong Kong. Inside the box, and beautifully packaged, were three Cactus V6 Wireless Flash Transceivers and one Cactus RF60 Wireless flash. I pulled out the user manuals and started reading. The transceivers are radio triggers; they can be used on camera as a master to trigger other transceivers or they can be used as slaves to trigger attached flashes. The transceivers are set up with 16 channels and four groups. A master can control certain flashes by changing their power levels. The transceivers are programmed with some of the most popular Nikon and Canon flash profiles and they control the flash power levels through hotshoe contact communication. You can change power levels separately for each group of flashes and transceivers. So far so good.

For my uses I can stop right there. I can put one of the V6's on the camera and use the other two V6's to trigger attached flashes. I can also trigger the RF60 flash with a V6 on the camera. And that's mostly the way I end up using my flashes for most work. I am so old school with this stuff. I want to set the levels on the flashes and make a test frame---then adjust. But the V6s can do more. You can assign each V6 a channel and you can enable or disable each channel or any combination of channels from the master in the hot shoe. Wanna see what one set of lights looks like? Turn off the other channels and blaze away.

With approved flashes (Nikon users will find SB-800, SB-900 and SB-910s on the list) you can increase or decrease the manual power level for each group. That means if I use the RF60 flash as a master and hook up three compatible flashes on three V6s, and then assign  different channel for every V6 I can, from camera, control the power levels of all three slaved flashes from the camera location, individually. Nice.

If you are using a compatible TTL flash (say an SB-900) you can put the SB-900 in the V6's flash shoe and take advantage of their TTL "passthrough." Your flash will communicate directly with the camera in the normal TTL mode with all the usual stuff and you will still be able to trigger and control flashes connected to other V6s remotely.

There's one more thing about the V6s that's pretty cool but I haven't played with yet and that's the ability of the transceivers to "learn" new flashes. Someday soon I'll get around to writing about it but for right now I'll just extol the virtues of the V6s. They work. They are easy to set up. The flash shoe on the unit is a great flash interface. I like that the V6s take two double A batteries. I used the V6s as triggers pretty extensively while I was shooting the annual report project for a public utility back in April. I used them indoors in industrial spaces, and outdoors in electrical substations and they never failed to trigger.

Using the battery powered flashes and the transceivers on several recent jobs that required moving quickly and setting up and tearing down just enough stuff to get the job done reminded me that I've been so intrigued by new technologies like LEDs that I'd skirted using the tried and true tech like flash for too long. Practically speaking, this is the stuff we learned on and it's like riding a bicycle--you really don't forget how to set up and execute with flash.

I'm packing up to do a shoot tomorrow and I was looking through the light inventory trying to decide what to use. My first thoughts were about LED panels because there is a certain charm in continuous lighting but then I thought about how easy the job would be with a Think Tank rolling case full of shoe mount flashes and I decided to go all in on that methodology.

I'm only taking four flash units. Two are inexpensive Yongnuo flashes, one is the Cactus RF60 and the third is a Metz flash. The Yongnuo flashes have built in optical slaves while the Cactus and the Metz require external triggers. I'll take along a bunch of Eneloop batteries, a small softbox and a few collapsible Westcott umbrellas and I should be set. We're going to attempt to make portraits on location with very, very shallow depth of field. I can't use the ambient light. I scouted it yesterday and it's not photography friendly. It's all ceiling fixtures with florescent tubes. Not pretty tubes either.

I want to bring lights to leverage the ability to create light direction and light quality as well as color purity. I chose the flashes over LEDs in case I want to shoot with windows in the background. A couple of stout flashes and some sunscreens over the windows gives me more than a fighting chance at overpowering or matching existing exterior light. Especially with the cloudy weather we're having lately. The beauty of this plan is that everything; cameras and flashes, will fit in one case with wheels. A bag of small, light stands is the only other luggage I'll need to get through an entire day or portrait shooting.

But it's not like this is all new to me. I did actually write a bestselling book about lighting with small lights. It's a bit dated now but I think it's still a good read and the foundational concepts are still right on the money even if the gear has changed a bit. Here's a link to my very first technical book on photography:  Minimalist Lighting.

And yes, it's still in print!