Break it Down

I’ll admit, the latter hasn’t always worked out for me! Umbrellas create quite the sail on the top of a light stand in even the slightest breeze, and I’ve even experienced a sandbagged beauty dish being toppled by freak gale-force winds. Fortunately, the Canon and Paul C. Buff lighting equipment I use has proved to be quite resilient.

Alien Bee 1600 after falling over backwards with beauty dish from atop a 10' light stand. Light still worked fine!

The beauty dish required some tender loving with a mallet to work her back into shape!

Higher, Baby!

We encounter a new realm of safety requirements once we multiply the ~10′ max height that most light stands provide us by ten. I’m talking about arena catwalks. I cover a lot of events at the Wells Fargo Arena, under my Picture Iowa brand. Events, concerts, sports, etc. I’m currently the team photographer for the Iowa Energy basketball team, and cover their games for NBA Entertainment / Getty. Even though the area is lit extremely well for what it is, the lighting still leaves much to be desired, especially at the shutter speeds required for freezing fast sports action. So, for many events, I will install as set of strobes in the catwalk, approx 100′ above the arena floor.

Don’t Be Insecure

All equipment is safety cabled, in case any of the mounting points were to somehow fail. The absolute last thing we want is 5 lbs of equipment free-falling onto the fans below. With the safety rigging, the furthest anything could drop is a foot or so.

Set of Alien Bee strobes wired for catwalk installation. Two B800 and 2 B1600's shown, along with Pocket Wizard TT1 and TT5 radios. These are the sync cords shown in a mocked-up setup, not safety cables

Eye bolt installed through the umbrella holder for attaching safety cable

Safety cable routed through the eye bolt, ready to be attached to something sturdy

Throw That Light

The reflectors used on the strobes are larger than used in portrait situations. This focuses the light into a much narrower beam, so that the light is more concentrated and powerful at the location where it hits the floor. I won’t go into the details of how the amount of light reaching the floor is exponentially reduced as the distance increases, I’ll just say that due to the long distance, we need to harness all the power we can get.

You Said You Were Safe!?

One element of safety often ignored when mounting lights up high is a plexiglass shield covering the end of these large reflectors. This shield is to prevent the falling of any glass in the rare circumstance that a flash tube or other bulb should somehow break inside the unit. You’d think something like that could never happen though, right? Wrong!

Flash tube, completely gone! Notice two of the 3 holes still have the post from the flush tube inside!

What The Deuce!?

I recently encountered a situation where the flash tube actually entirely separated from the flash unit! Yes, the bulb completely fell out during use! This is one of the most freak accidents I can imagine happening under these circumstances!

Upon closer inspection, you will see that two of the posts that mount the flash tube into the unit, actually broke off from the bulb, and then the third post pulled out of the unit. Looking at the posts that remained inside the unit, and comparing with another tube, it almost would appear as if the bulb got hot enough to melt a solder joint!

Strobe partially disassembled to remove the flash tube posts. One has already been removed in this photo. The remaining post was practically fused into the hole.

All that remains of the failed flash tube

A good flash tube, for reference. The two posts you see on the right are what separated from the failed unit.

It’s Your butt

I wouldn’t go so far as to say you should install safety shields on all your lights when working with bare reflectors or umbrellas in normal portrait situations. Just be careful of their placement to keep clients, guests, etc clear of your gear. But, if you’re mounting equipment above where other people are sitting/walking/whatever, be sure to employ every last bit of safety equipment possible! It’s way cheaper than a lawsuit

I’ve come to accept that there’s no way I’ll ever be able to dedicate an individual post to all the amazing sessions over the last year and a half.  I’ll be making an attempt to better keep-up going forward.  But until then, I’ll be making rather frequent posts highlighting the portraits that had made their way onto my Photo-a-Day site. That’ll at least give a small glimpse into what’s been going on around these parts!

Based on the analysis of approx 348,000 of our images (the majority of our shots get indexed to a MySQL database storing the EXIF data), the top three lenses we shoot with are:

Canon 70-200mm F/2.8L: 47%
Canon 10-22mm F/3.5-4.5: 27%
Canon 24-70mm F/2.8L: 13%

This comes as no surprise, since for the majority of any given day you’ll find a 7D + 70-200 on my right hip and the 50D + 10-22 on the left.
Also, 27% of our images are shot at f/2.8. f/4 and f/5.6 get 21% each, with f/8 getting 10%.

Here’s a full breakdown of top lenses, f/stop and shutter speeds we shoot

Lenses
47%    70-200mm F/2.8L
27%    10-22mm F/3.5-4.5
13%    24-70mm F/2.8L
4%    100mm F/2.8 Macro
3%    300mm F/2.8L
6%    Other

F/Stop
2%    < F/2.8
27%    F/2.8
5%    F/3.2
11%    F/3.5
21%    F/4
21%    F/5.6
10%    F/8
2%    F/11
1%    > F/11

ISO
14%    100
29%    200
21%    400
11%    800
18%    1600
5%    3200
2%    > 3200

Shutter Speed
11%    1/640 s
10%    1/250 s
10%    1/200 s
9%    1/320 s
7%    1/400 s
7%    1/500 s
7%    1/160 s
4%    1/100 s
4%    1/800 s
4%    1/1000 s
4%    1/125 s
3%    1/60 s
3%    1 second +
17%    Other

Thanks to all our awesome clients of 2011! We’re super excited to experience 2012!

Thanks for an awesome day. I hope you’re enjoying your Alaskan cruise!

We shot a band promo over the weekend, and when reviewing my images off the wide angle, I immediately saw something was horribly wrong.  The center of the image was relatively sharp, but the right 1/3 of the frame was terribly out of focus!  The left was not quite as bad. but still not good. The depth of field when focused near infinity is so deep at 10mm, that the entire frame should be tack sharp.  One problem fixed, another problem introduced. I borrowed another copy of the lens from Colin to do a side-by-side comparison, before contacting Canon about their mistake.

Canon issued me a free overnight shipping label, so the lens is now it her way back to New Jersey.  Lets hope they get the repair right this time!

Here’s an example of the problem with my Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.
Click the image twice to enlarge, as the blog squishes it up…