Gang lighting?

Hold the phone....another 'two posts in one day' situation...and it's all Syl Arena's fault!

Just the other day we brought you news of Syl Arena - you remember, the guy with 12 580EX II Speedlites and a bunch of Radio Poppers doing high speed sync portraits in the middle of the day at 1/8000sec? Well it seems that 12 Speedlites in a ring just wasn't going to work for everything, so he's progressed to 12 in a line...to photograph his son, smashing pumpkins, in the middle of the day, at 1/6400sec!

You may want to ask why he needs such high shutter speeds, surely the flash will freeze the subject? Sadly not. This is a high s(p)eed sync situation! Syl did what we should all do when shooting something like this - try out different settings. As such, he tried everything from 1/400sec up to 1/8000sec and discovered that 1/6400sec was where it got sharp!

With each Gang Light post, Syl is eroding the myth of Speedlites and showing where a bagful of Speedlites can really trump a Studio pack - especially on location.

You need to be aware of flash range if you're going to play with high speed sync. By way of example, if you go two stops faster than the max sync speed your flash range is reduced by a factor of 2x. Go four stops faster and the distance is reduced by a factor of 4x.

Since distance and power are analogous in this situation you can see how getting up to 1/6400sec (that's five stops beyond the sync speed of the EOS 5D that Syl was using - though he claims five and a third because his EOS 5D only syncs at 1/160sec) really needs a lot more power than can be produced by just the one or two Speedlites - and hence the gang of 12!

-blabpictures-

High speed sync

Now this, this is all kinds of crazy. And no, I'm not talking about the fact that there is a double post today. This just had to be shared....

Many of you may know of a guy by the name of Joe McNally - a truly great photographer and someone who has mastered flash on location in almost every conceivable situation. Now we like Joe, even though he shoots Nikon... But for those that see his work and think "hmmmmm am I missing something with Canon and the flash system?" The answer is no and Syl Arena is the guy to prove it to you.

How does 1/8000sec sync flash in the middle of a bright day using Speedlite 580EX II flashguns sound? Interesting? Yeah, we thought so too. It seems that Syl managed to get hold of 12 580EX II flashguns on loan from Canon USA and a bunch of RadioPoppers as flash triggers and he built a ring light on a wooden frame. Well, he's calling it a ring lite, but it's more like a square light to me - but I'm just splitting hairs.

He used the RadioPoppers to trigger the Speedlites and so get enough power output for high speed synch at 1/8000sec. Pretty cool, huh?

So why would you bother? Well, high speed sync allows you to achieve a shallow depth of field when using flash in bright daylight with a fast aperture lens. Alternatively, you can turn day into night just by upping the shutter speed so you don't record as much ambient light.

We'll do more on high speed sync flash in a future post or two, but for now, we just wanted you to see this!

-blabpictures-