The thing no one wants to talk about.......video.

Meredith under the cool LED lights, on set, in my west Austin studio.

I read an interesting article by Jack Reznicki, here,  and to paraphrase, he's making the point that after years of deflecting his growing realization that video is quickly becoming the preferred imaging medium for a new generation he's ready to admit that video is part of the basic wiring of that new generation and will only get more popular as bandwidth speeds up and flat screens get cheaper and more ubiquitous.  He's thrown down the gauntlet, (to himself) saddled up and a few other confused metaphors, and he's out working on building a style and a name for himself in the video world.  Fish where the fish are.

When I talk about video to most of my peers in the business they get a "far away" look in their eyes and, when I press the subject, they rally their best undergraduate art school arguments about why still photography is different and unique.  I would argue that pretty soon all photography will be just still frames from video.  Of course, that's a bit hyperbolic but the reality is that photography is being subsumed by its very simplicity and popularity while video is in a new period of ascendancy.

But after trying my hand at the "new" video I know why my peers are so resistant to this medium.  It's harder to do well than still photography.  Let me say that again with the appropriate emphasis in place:  It's harder to do WELL than still photography.  And, maybe more importantly, to do it well requires collaborating (and sharing credit with) other professionals.  And that's something that many photographers are uncomfortable with or hostile to.  I know I am......

But it's to be expected.  We've spent our lives as loners.  We intersect with the pack to hunt down assignments and get a check.  The rest of the time we're experimenting in our caves....I mean studios....and diddling the dials of PhotoShop.  Now that our basic industry is saturated and devalued we're supposed to become part of a "team"?  (Remember that there is no "I" in team so be prepared to become assimilated by the Borg.....).  That, in a nutshell is why professional photographers aren't rushing to do video in droves.

I don't want to spend my life putting together crews of sound people, assistants, gaffers and grips.  I don't relish spending more time with more people.  What are we to do?  Hmmmmm.  Long pensive thoughts...

We could do what Robert Frank did in the 1950's.  While the majority of photographers were anchored in their studios with 8x10 and 4x5 view cameras and a jungle of hot lights he went out into the street (without assistants or a "team") and made a new art.  An art predicated on moving and seeing and capturing quickly.

We don't need to emulate the evolution of the video industry.  We don't need to follow the path of Phillip Bloom and Vince LaForet and embrace the way video has always been done, overlayed on a new set of tools (and let's admit that the only new thing Vince brought to the table was a new camera with better high ISO and more DOF control.....).  I can choose to implement a newer "snapshot" style that steals from all the good disciplines while maintaining the autonomy that I think many photographers have always subconsciously or consciously chosen for ourselves.  A new style of moving pictures.

I think about this because I just handed my son, Ben, another still digital camera to use.  He's been using a Canon SX10 and I don't think he's ever taken a still image with it.  I handed it to him a few years ago and the first question out of his mouth was,  "Will it do video?"  He and his friends have produced dozens and dozens of finished, edited videos with that camera.

I handed him a Canon SX20 yesterday and the first question he asked me was, "Does it do better video?"  Yes.  It does HD.  Will he take a still frame with the camera?  Doubtful.  Will he use the hell out of it?  You bet.  The batteries are already on the charger.

Ben and his friends are part of the generation in which all media moves.  All media, all moving, all the time.  He's in ninth grade and one of the courses he's taking is film making.  The school is teaching the students in his film making class how to use Final Cut Pro.  As a veteran user of iMovie, Ben is incredibly comfortable with the process.  And  the visual communicators of his generation will be as well.

I want to continue to wring out every good still picture I can out of photography.  But, to paraphrase the English poet, Andrew Marvell,  "O'er my shoulder I do hear video's winged chariot drawing near...."

Time to become multi-disciplinary in a new way.



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Additional information about my Elinchrom lighting adventure....

The last time I wrote to you about lights I'd just dumped a two decade accumulation of Profoto lighting equipment and ventured toward the cheap side of the lighting universe.  I started out with one Elinchrom D-Lite-4 IT monolight and I decided that I liked it.  Pretty well.  It took a while to get used to handling a lighter and less robust lighting machine but the upside was the novelty and the digital controls on the back.

On friday I did my first corporate portrait with three of the D-Lites.  I used one as a main light in a 28 inch Fotodiox Beauty Dish, covered with a diffusion "sock" and feathered quite a bit.  I used a second light into a 60 inch Photek Softlighter with it's diffusion cover and, I used a third light with a couple layers of diffusion over an 8 inch, 50 degree reflector as a background light.

I had all the modeling lights on full and things were zipping along well.  I was shooting quickly and banged off about 35 frames over the course of five minutes.  That's when the fan came on in the fill light/Photek box.  A few minutes later the fan came on in the beauty dish assemblage.  All the lights kept banging away until we finished frame #110.  Then I was done.  The fans ran for a minute or so more and then stopped.  I looked at the frames on my monitor.  Even though I was shooting quickly I got into the pattern of waiting for the recycle "beep" to sound before shooting each frame.  The frames on the monitor were absolutely consistent.

The optical slaves worked fine on the two flashes not connected to the sync cord.

I'm using them again on Monday to make portraits of fourteen people at a medical practice here in Austin. I'll have them up and running for the better part of the day.  That's about it.

Walking around, looking for trouble.

These are all handheld images taken this afternoon (after a long day of commercial shooting) with the Olympus EPL2 and the kit lens or the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens.  This is what I do to relax after a day at work.....

I knew I would get in trouble when I posted this afternoon's blog.  Apparently, I just didn't understand that, while the red dot might not affect me personally, it would render the EPL2 ineffective for skyline shots at night.  This is the Frost Bank Tower.  At twilight.

And this is the Frost Bank Tower about 35 minutes after sunset.  Wicked flare from the street light....

Funny what you'll find in a typical parking lot in Austin, Texas.  Kit lens.

I love the clouds in the winter and I love the view from the pedestrian bridge.  You could tell we had a nice 60+ degree day in Austin because the downtown hike and bike trail was packed with runners, walkers and bikers.  Sorry, no HDR....  Just good timing.

We Austinites are fascinated with high rise buildings.  Especially condo and apartment towers.  I guess it's because we had so few in the city until recently.

 I tried some more dot photos.  I didn't get the red dots but I froze the pigeon near the center in the bottom third of the frame.  That's gotta count for something.

Someone questioned my last test with the sun over to the side.  "What would happen if the sun was in the center of the frame?"  they asked.  This is what it looks like with the sun in the center of the frame.

Pretty Sky.  Softlight.  Fresh Cookies. Sumatran Coffee.

 Gosh.  I couldn't even get the street light to misbehave.

I've lost my chance to show the red dot at sunset for today.  But I was already out walking and the camera felt so good around my neck I just kept going.

 There's so much energy in downtown Austin these days.  The W Hotel just opened and everyone is hanging out at the bars.  I dropped by to get a Bloody Mary but it was too bloody crowded so I decided not to stay.

 The IS has its mojo working.

 If you want skies to do this neat color thing then chuck the AWB and keep your camera on "daylight" as the sun sets in the west.  It's really cool and warm at the same time.

I thought I got it.  I thought the dot showed up.  See the street light on the left?  Look about one third down from the top and the same amount to the left and there's a soft, white dot.  On further inspection it's really the light on top of the moon tower in Clarksville.  Foiled again. But nice OOC black and white...

I walked from 5 to 7:30pm and then it was time to go home.  Dinner.  An interesting one.  Lentils and rice with a yogurt sauce and grilled onions.  A salad of fresh avocado and grapefruit slices with a drizzle of oil and vinegar dressing and fresh shallots.  

A fun, Texas-style assignment. And portable lighting.

This is Dr. Russell Cunningham.  He's a rancher, a Texan, and a competition horse rider.  Oh yes, and he is also an accomplished oral surgeon.  I would probably have never met him if not for an ongoing project I've been doing for the practice in which he is a partner.

To make this image my trusty assistant, Ben, and I threw some gear in the trusty Honda Element and drove out past the town of Dripping Springs to the ranch.  Ben dragged the cases and sandbags out of the truck while Dr. Cunningham and I discussed the set up.  We shot in the open shade and went back in and filled with the Profoto 600b battery powered electronic flash firing into a Photek 60 inch Softlighter 2.  It's basically a 60 inch umbrella with a black backing.  It also comes with a diffusion cover to soften the light that bounces off the reflective surface of the umbrella.  I used the umbrella in fairly close and set the control box at half power.  I set a basic exposure for the sky and sunlit background and the used a light meter to set the flash level on Dr. Cunningham and his horse.  We brought two thirty pound sandbags along because we knew if the wind kicked up we'd need them.  We needed them!

Ben hung onto the stand and the umbrella while I fired away with a Canon 5Dmk2 and the 24-105mm L lens.  This lens has some cool features.  It's got a great range for most editorial situations.  It's got a really good image stabilization system.  It feels solid.  But the thing that keeps me reaching for it is that it's so darned sharp.  Even at f4 the detail I get in the center of the frame is really wonderful.  If I didn't suffer so badly from GADD (Gear Attention Deficit Disorder)  I could easily run my whole business with this lens and the 70-200 f4L lens.  They're a nice match.

The ad ran in color but I like the feel of the black and white treatment so that's how I processed it for my portfolio.

Every month has been different.  This one really feels like Central Texas in the old days.

My continuing love affair.......with the Canon 7D. Enhanced by the 60mm efs and a few LED lights

I'm taking a risk today.  I'm posting from my laptop and the screen isn't nearly as well calibrated as the monitor in my office.  I'll assume this looks like my model, Selena, and that the flesh tones are somewhere in the ballpark.  Apologies if it's bright purple.....

I don't have a scientific method of measuring the different ways in which various cameras handle color, I just know what colors I like to see and always how I like the contrast of the files rendered.  Now I'll head into heretical territory.  I recently did a big job for an ad agency.  24 portraits in two days.  On site.  I used two cameras.  My main camera was a Canon 5Dmk2 with a 100mm f2 lens tacked onto the front.  The other camera was my old Kodak DSLR/n with an even older Nikon 135mm f2.8 on the business end.  The exercise went like this:  Shoot the bulk of the frames with the Canon camera and, when I felt like I had what I wanted, pull up the Kodak and shoot an additional ten frames.  All the frames were shot under the same lights,  Profoto monolights in the 600 w/s and 300 w/s varieties.  I used a gray Lastolite target and did a custom white balance for each of the cameras.  I shot both of them in RAW.  I processed both sets of files in Lightroom 3.0

And what to my wondering eyes did appear?  Softer, smoother, more accurate tonalities and colors out of the Kodak camera.  Much easier to post process into pleasing files.  And whether it was a different "shoulder/toe" curve parameter or just more dynamic range, the Kodak beat the snot out of the Canon 5d2 in terms of holding juicy detail in slight overexposures.  Now, if I really dig in and spend the time I can get the two cameras to look a lot a like but when I show the files as 12 by 18 inch prints my art director friends choose the Kodak prints every time.  Every time.  The Kodak came onto the market in 2004.  In camera years that's like a decade ago.  The Canon is barely 18 months old.  Amazing.

In it's defense the Canon 5d2 has great detail and for most things, very decent color.  But it was enough to shake my nascent confidence in Canon's supposed supremacy as a portrait camera.  So I was expecting the 7D from Canon to be no great shakes.  But I was wrong.  When I go thru the same process and do the same white balances with the 7D it creates files that, while not quite as detailed as the 5d2, are much more pleasing in the eyes of this portrait photographer.  And I'm still trying to figure out why that is.  It's a newer sensor but not by much.  They have the same Digic 4 processors.  And the lenses are the same.  But I guess it's one of those things I'll never have a solid metric for because I'm pretty sure the guys at Canon don't want to get into a dissing war between their various cameras.

Suffice it to say that I started shooting with the 7D more and more.  That moved me to buy an interesting lens, against my better judgement.  It's the 60mm macro, EFS.  EFS means that it only covers the optical circle of the Canon cropped frame cameras.  Won't even fit on the front of a 5D2.  But it just seemed like the perfect portrait focal length for the 7D and other cropped sensor cameras.  It's nice and small and fits on the body well.  Not too front heavy.  And it opens up to 2.8.  Here's a photo sample from last week:

It's shot at 3.2 and some slow shutter speed but it looks good and handles well.  The combination works for a lot of the faster, candid portraits I sometimes do and it doubles as a macro rig when I need to get close.  The other two shots in this blog were done with the 70-200mm f2 (non-IS) which I mentioned recently.  It's an incredibly good lens and, if someone handed me $2400 and asked me to buy myself another long zoom I'd pass right by the new 2.8 type two, snap up another $600 f4 and stick the rest into something else.

In a previous review I wrote at length about the handling of the 7D and the responsiveness of the auto focus but my recent romance with LED panels has caused me to think more about the color handling characteristics of various camera models instead of the more common threads of discussion which tend to center around resolution and dynamic range.  I've found that both the 7D and the new 60D are much better in AWB than any other Canon camera I've had the chance to handle.  Much better.  And when I'm in the studio shooting under the non-continuous spectrum of my wacky LED lights I find that the cameras, when left to their own devices, hit the proper white balance right off the mark, unlike the 5d2.  If you throw the Kodak I mentioned into the ring you'd have the opposite of the AWB Bell Curve.  In the absence of a custom white balance shooting with the Kodak is like shooting thru a kaleidoscope.


So I did a little reading to see what I could find out.  Here's the factoid that I'm hanging on to:  Both the 7D and the 60D make use of Canon's Intelligent Focus Color Luminosity metering system.  It's part of the autofocus system but it uses color sensors to more effectively understand what's in the  frame.  It's only a suspicion on my part but I believe that this new measurement tool is also somehow tied into the overall camera white balance tools and this gives the newer cameras an edge over the other cameras in the system that don't share this technology.


Let's talk about flash for a moment.  I know a lot of wedding photographers swear by their 5dmk2's and I can understand why.  It's a good camera with a sensor that's capable of capturing a lot of detail.  But when it comes to flash and autofocus in dimly lit venues I can't see why these photographers don't rush to pull the 7D out of their bags.  The flash performance is a full generation ahead of the 5d2.  The autofocus lock on is two generations better and probably on par with the system in the 1Dmk4.  The flash makes use of the same IFCL metering system that I talked about above and in combination with the flash exposure lock button flash becomes as easy as shooting Nikon.


I put the camera and 580 ex2 flash thru their paces in the dimly lit ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel last thurs. night.  Legendary attorney, Joe Jamail, took the podium in a crowded ballroom to give a speech about UT's president, Dr. Bill Powers.  Before he launched into his speech he squinted at the spotllights illuminating the small stage and asked, "Can you turn those darned things down?"  They did.  And it dropped the overall illumination a lot.  Even though Mr. Jamail was in a dark suit and the stage was backed with black curtains the camera/flash combination did a great job nailing the exposure using the FEL spot pre-metering and locking in the settings.  I try to take only a few flash shots because, no matter how discreet you try to be, it still gets annoying.  I switch over to a preset custom banks which changes my settings to 2800 K color temperature, ISO 3200, spot metering and "Camera Neutral" color setting.  And I will say that, with a little noise reduction edged in, the camera performs quite well at what would have been extreme nose bleed territory for a cropped frame camera only a year ago.......


So where does this new found appreciation put me in terms of grabbing cameras for assignment?  Well, if resolution, sharpness and final reproduction size are all critical my choice will be the 5D2, hands down.  If I have to get the tiniest slice of focus and put everything else out of focus I'll also grab for the same camera.  But if I can shoot under 1600 ISO, need fast AF, need good out of camera color balance and good white balance, and if handling is critical it's the 7D all the way.  With my 20,  my new 35 f2 and the 60mm macro EFS I've got a nice, small and light "classic" photojournalist's set up that doesn't break the bank.  Throw in a couple of wide ranging zooms like the 15-85 and the 70-200 f4 and a 60D as a back up body and I have system I'd feel comfortable with on a very large portion of my jobs.


Thank the photo dieties,  they all take the same batteries.  Just a few random observations from a week of daily shooting....

Lit with a single LED panel blasted (ha, ha) through a Chimera diffusion scrim.

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

On location with a box of lights and a few ideas.

If you've been following the blog for any amount of time now you know that I get bored using the same stuff to make photographs with.  The idea of doing the same thing over and over again is not very attractive to me.  I know that for everyone like me there are a bunch of people who want to master one set of tools and use them until the end of time.  I guess you could have done that in decades past but the pace of change seems to accelerate with every passing day.  The things we can do with the newest tools were unimaginable seven years ago.  The high ISO performance of the cameras.  The low "buy in" cost of lights.  Even the avenues to learning have exponentially increased.  You can embrace change and have fun with it or you can hope that "this will be the last camera and lens I will ever have to buy!!!!!"  and stick your head in the sand.  While the profession is rife with nostalgia I have only nostalgia for the fees, not for trying to make good, quick work with a recalcitrant Hasselblad 500 CM and a 2000 watt second Norman flash pack.....

I've been playing with LED lights with the same enthusiasm that I had when I started playing with Nikon SB800 flashes and I came to realize that I could replace my heavy duty (and just plain heavy) studio flashes with a Domke bag full of battery powered, hand holdable, computer controllable flashes.  I think I'm starting to get a handle on the color rendering and the difference in power output vis-a-vis flash and I've been impressed with what can be do with a very high tech/low tech product.  

Why do I say "high tech/low tech product"?  Well, the technology of LED lighting is pretty cool and all based on semiconductor processes.  These are really the first semiconductor lights to hit the market in a wide scale way.  And I say low tech because they offer all the real functionality of a light bulb.  You can turn them on and you can turn them off.  One some models of LED panels you can also dim them. And that's all they do.  They don't calculate fill, they don't auto expose and they don't do anything smart.  The panels just sit there and put out light.   That's a pretty low tech set of features to give to a generation raised on "smart flash" but there are some benefits too.  Since the light from the panels is continuous you can actually see what you are getting while you're shooting.  With continuous light you've instantly cut your "recycle" time to zero so you can really lean on that motor drive if you want to.  If your camera will do 10 fps so will these lights.

Anyway,  I love to take risks so when one of my favorite agencies asked me to help them with a project I told them I'd love to do it if they let me use my new toys to do the job.  Surprisingly, they agreed.

I packed some big LED panels and some small ones.  Here's my box full of the small ones:

I've been buying little panels since I first got interested in shooting video.  They come in handy and I like em.  The first generation I bought are the littler ones.  The come from Dot Line Corp.  I call them DLC 60's because they have 60 LED's on them.  I've done some fun stuff with them and I love the fact that I can click all four panels together to make a small soft bank or a thin or thick strip light.  They are the most primitive panels I own because they have nothing but an on and off switch.  (FTC statement:  All these panels were purchased from either Amazon.com or Precision Camera.  No manufacturer or merchant has given me any free lighting product.)

Just before I started working on this project I also bought two new panels from an Amazon vendor.  These are the slightly bigger units in the photo above.  These panels have 160 LED's each.  They put out about one full stop more illumination than the smaller units and have a number of features including:  A dimmer knob that seamlessly allows you to drop the power from full to next to nothing.  A battery check button with a four LED read out on the back.  The ability to take a ton of different batteries.  A filter slot and supplier diffusion, tungsten and slight green correction filters.  And an articulating mounting foot.  

In practice I find the 160 LED lights to be a wonderful compromise between the lower power of the smaller panels and the size and bulk of the larger A/C panels.  The only thing that would materially im prove this product would the be ability to link together multiple fixtures the way you can on the DLC 60's.  

Pricing on Amazon can be wildly kinetic.  When I first looked at these lights they were in the $90 price range.  The next time I looked the price plunged down to $64 each.  That's what prompted me to buy them.  The vendor I bought them from, Fancier, is now showing "out of stock" but several other companies sell an identical unit and their prices seem to have settled in around $79.  At $64 each they were an absolute "no brainer". 

The 160 LED light is sold on Amazon.com by Fancier, ePhotoInc., Cowboy Studios and several others. I've ordered product from each of them and it's all worked just the way it should.  Here is the way the filter slot works.  Nice.

A side view that shows the dimming switch (also, off and on) as well as the shoe mount.  It's articulated so you can put the LED on a still or video camera and tilt it back to bounce the light off the ceiling.

See how the Sony camcorder battery fits into the back area.  If you open the surrounding door you discover that you can also power the units with six double A batteries.  The unit gets warm during operation but not uncomfortably so.

So, I packed up a complement of large and small LED panels and we went to visit the Austin Technology Incubator.  We had a big shot list.  We needed to do portraits of the staff, some of the start up businesses that are currently resident there and even head shots of interns and advisors.  The location was the old MCC building in north Austin.  It originally housed the Micro Computer Consortium and is a great venue to shoot in.  There's a four story atrium that runs thru the center of the building.

We decided to do our first round of portraits on one of the bridges on the third floor just outside the client's front door.  The agency wanted to have images for a website and wanted very narrow depth of field in each shot.  In the past I would have used small flashes in small soft boxes for this kind of work.  Yesterday I just put a couple of small panels on a stand, covered them with diffusion material and brought them in toward the subject until the illumination on their faces matched the intensity and feel of the background.  I was trying to leverage existing light and added light together.

Here's a sample:

The light is a little harder than I would have lit five years ago but I'm working a bit hotter and a bit contrastier than I have in the past.  Yesterday we worked all day long at ISO 1600 on both the Canon 5Dmk2 and the Canon 60D.  The 60D shows a bit more noise at 100% on screen magnification but responds very well to noise reduction in Lightroom 3.0.

Before we started shooting in earnest I stepped back and made a few wide shots with my art director as a stand in.  You can see how simple the set up is for this shot.  If I wanted to go softer I would have added another two panels to the mix, interconnecting them on the same stand and then put a frame with diffusion about a foot in front of them.  You can see that we're working under the shade of the "bridge" from the next level up while the background is getting full light from the building long skylights.

That's the main reason for adding in the fill light from the panels in the first place.

Here are a few notes about using the LED panels:

1.  If you are expecting to use these to overpower the sunlight on a location you will be profoundly disappointed.  They aren't a replacement for big fill flash in sunlight.

2.  The auto white balance on the newest Canons (60D) is incredible.  It's better than the 5Dmk 2 by a good margin.

3.  You'll need to group LED panels or use them in closer than you might be used to with flash to get the right levels.

4.  It's great to have a continuous light source without being anchored to a power cord.

5.  It's great to shoot without having to worry about radio slaves and syncing.

6.  The goal is to become masterful at mixing ambient light with the light from your panels.

7.  You know how the Eskimo people supposedly have something like 50 words for different kinds of snow?  Well I'm starting to build up my vocabulary in the same way when it comes to the different diffusion options.  From very sheer white material to various thicknesses of ripstop nylon to products called "Luxe"  there is a whole world of diffusion out there that most still photographers don't know about.......and every variation has a slightly different look.

8.  Lithium Ion camcorder batteries are cheap, recharge pretty quickly and last a long time.  I've got them for most of my little LED panels.  We shot 700 frames from 10 am till 5 pm yesterday and all the panels made it thru the day without needing to be recharged or have the batteries switched out.  It was pretty amazing performance.

9.  People blink less with continuous light sources.

10.  Everyone I met was interested in LED technology.

In one of the shots we did in the late afternoon we set up nine different panels.  Some were just scattered on the floor.  Others beamed in from down the hall.  A few were set up in a fashion similar to the way I'd light with other light sources.  It was fun to experiment and really easy to see what I was getting.

I'll repeat it again for all the people who love to do things the same way over and over again.  This stuff looks different.  The shooting style changes.  The areas of focus change.  The shooting techniques change.  And none of this is really a bad thing.  In some ways it's just the continuing evolution of photography brought about by digital technology.

We're past the bleeding edge with this technology and we're joyously embracing the ever accelerating changes.  Hop on in.  The water's fine.

By Popular Demand. Behind the scenes stuff. Or, "Does this lens make the photographer look fat?"

Since I posted photos from my shoot yesterday I've gotten dozens of requests for "behind the scenes" shots that would show how everything was positioned.  Fortunately my friend, Amy Smith, was assisting me on the shoot and she kindly provided some behind the scenes coverage.  I hope these will be help you more accurately visualize how I was placing the lights and how it affected the overall look of the shots.  

The first one is a studio shot done with my favorite light source, the big-ass 6 foot by 6 foot scrim.  I'm using a Photoflex frame and one layer of white diffusion. As you can tell I like to use the light source as close in as I can.  I have black panels on the shadow side to make sure that too much bounce from the studio's white walls doesn't fill in too much and degrade the contrast I wanted.  These are quick edits and no,  I haven't edited out fly-away hair, etc.  If the images were heading straight from here to a client we'd  retouch them first.  

While strobes might yield more depth of field and add a bit of sharpness I think you would agree that these images look more cinematic and life like.  Afterall, we chase fast lenses in all the reviews and forums,  doesn't it make sense to use them close to wide open from time to time?  Isn't that why we spent the extra money?

Yes.  You can do this with a small flash.  Really easily.  Almost as easily as just tossing up three small light panels and taking a look through your camera's finder....... Funny.  I worked at color correction and did a custom white balance.  Amy was shooting jpeg and seemed to hit the right WB everytime.  Live and learn.

I call this, "lights on a stick".  Love the wooden tripod.  Goes so well with the tennis shoes.

It's cruel to use small lights without even the tiniest bit of diffusion.  I didn't want anyone to report me for "cruelty to models" so I added some Rosco Luxe to each panel.  I think it's endearing that the little panels I use snap together to make bigger panels.  I have two more coming this week........

I'm no fashion photographer.  That's for sure.  But I kept hearing about clamshell lighting and I thought I'd try my own variation with my LED lights.  I tossed a couple of 500's on the floor, covered with some half stop diffusion and I put the 1000 through a two stop Westcott Fast Flags diffuser and blazed away, screaming, "Pout for me baby and I'll make you a star!"  Or something from "Zoolander".  I can hardly remember......

And guess what?  I had enough light to shoot hand held.  Miracles happen every day.......

That's it for the behind the scenes stuff.  Is this something you want?  Should I post more set up shots?  Just curious.  I'm not really comfortable flashing gang signs, participating is extreme snowboarding and saying "bro" and all the frenetic stuff we see on other blogs.  But I am happy to show you where we put the lights.......