Michael Forsyth's News

This past Saturday and Wednesday (the 20th and 24th) both the Men’s and Women’s basketball teams played their last two regular season games at home, and won all 4 games. From here they go to the Peach Belt Conference quarter finals this Tuesday and Wednesday.  I tried a bit of a different technique with these, syncing at between 1/320 and 1/500 of a second (yes, the D40 does hit these speeds fine) and boosting the strobes to 1/2 power to drop the background down a little more. I think it worked out pretty well, although the flashes really suck down power in this configuration. Since this was also the homecoming game and the stadium was packed, I spent a little more time than usual between games shooting some of the people and other things going on. The pictures of everything else going on really helps to bring the action and pulse of the game closer. I added this gallery thing here too so things stay a little bit more organized with some of these posts that have a lot more photos in them. Keep an eye on the file names to know when they were shot (all of my photos are named as YYMMDD_[sequence #]

Basketball season is wrapping up, the men’s team is at 20-4 (13-2 Conference) after last night’s game. It has been an exiting year, and its always more fun to shoot a winning game. I have one more game to shoot, the last home game of the season. These are from the game on 1-29 against Francis Marion.

I put a little bit of a high key thing on this to make it snap a little more.

I know I haven’t updated this in a while, I’m finally caught up (almost) on all my work, so keep an eye out for more stuff in the near future.

We got some snow down  here in Milledgeville, kind of unusual for us to get any real amount of snow this far south. It’s funny how everything stops because of the weather, I didn’t even have to work (and I walk there). I set up my camera in my window and tethered it to my old laptop running linux, and used gphoto2 to shoot a frame every 30 seconds (for a little less than three hours). The final video is run at 6 fps. Let me know what you think!

I figured I might as well put out one last blog post before the new year, just for good measure. I have been reading VisionMongers over the break, It’s a great book for inspiration for just about any field were the emphasis is on creativity. Yes, it is based on photography, but I could see almost anyone finding relevance in this book. I have also been reading a few of David’s e-books, which are also a good read. It has given me a lot of ideas for my work for the upcoming new year. I know probably everyone has said something to that effect every year, so I give it about the same chance as a wounded fish around a bunch of sharks. Only time will tell.

I figured that since this is my photography blog and all, it would be pretty useless without any pictures, so here are a few that I have been working on as of recently. I have mostly been shooting a few things around home, playing in Lightroom a little, and trying to relax before school starts up again in January. The one thing I am looking forward to is shooting for the paper again, I really enjoy the challenge of deadlines and assignments.

The photo above is the result of some change in perspective stuff I have been playing around with. The bottom of the camera and lens were actually in the water on this one, shooting through a lexan window on a waterproof housing big ziploc bag. I liked the way it turned out, let me know what you think.

I have a little side project I thought of today that I think I’m going to work on before the end of the break, stay posted for more on that as I work on it a little bit.  I suppose I should back everything up now, you know, just in case… yeah, right!+

I have been enjoying this Christmas break so far, I haven’t got much done at all but I have taken a few pictures while I have been around town. I figured I should update the site at some regular interval before everyone stops reading it.

I snapped this first one of our Christmas tree, I just defocused my lens as far as I could and shot it at 1.8, it kind of looks interesting in a wierd way.  I really like how even the disks of light are.

Christmas lights out of focus at f/1.8.

Other than sitting around, I went to Atlanta a few times. I always find it interesting how fast people drive on the interstates around here. So I basically learned that its better to drive yourself to the hospital if at all possible, as cars were flying past the ambulance on the interstate while it was en route to somewhere presumably important.

Ambulance

Horses. And hay.

This last photo I put in honestly because I found it hilarious to look down the road and see two horses in front of me. The pickup truck also had a large roll of hay on the back, presumably as a snack for the horses. Its not every day you see this on the interstate… or maybe it is, depending on were you live.

I have had a lot of recent success using a couple of battery flashes to light my school’s basketball court. I have been placing the flashes at the corners of the court by the bleachers. This works best with two lights, but one works fine if you keep it to your back. The important thing is getting some light coming in from the sides instead of straight down.

Flashes at the corners of the court. They are both set at 1/4 power.

Unlike the court strobes in the ceiling of the court, these small things can’t replace the arena lighting. They do provide much more reliable and quality light, converting the nasty whatever color light to daylight. They also provide plenty of fill on the players and work great to stop the motion. the second light gives a great highlight to the ball and the edge of the players as they come in closer to the end line as well.

The flash puts some nice light on the players close in. This was with the 35 1.8. You can see what the light would look like without flash in the shadows.

I have been using some of the Yongnuo RF-602 transmitters and receivers for a little while now, and they perform pretty well under most conditions. They operate on the 2.4Ghz band, but I have never had any interference problems, even using them on a college campus with tons of wireless devices on the same band.

RF-602 trigger and receiver

The trigger that fits on top of the camera is a pretty small thing, about the size of the new pocket wizard mini TT1, although not as nice looking. The receiver has a screw lock connection for a sync cord on the back, and a hot shoe on the top. This is great  because it eliminates the need for sync chords, while still providing the option. The SB600 I use has no sync port, so the hot shoe triggers my flash. On the bottom there is a plastic hot shoe connector (cold shoe) and a tripod or light stand socket.

This was my max range test. The arrow points to the flash. It is on the other side of a practice field and down a hill.

There are plenty of reviews online stating the range to be around 200 meters or so, and I found that to be pretty accurate as long as you maintain line of sight with the flash. I decided to try a test I had not seen done before on the internet, so I placed the flash on a stand with the receiver well behind a brick and cinder block wall, next to a transformer. I figured if there was going to be loss of signal or interference, this is the kind of condition that it would occur under.  My conclusion was that the range was decreased significantly, although they still had plenty of range for what I need. In real usage, they have never misfired on me. I use them often to light basketball games, and they fire every time no matter where I am in the stadium.

Flash behind the wall. Note the transformer to the right of it.

My school’s basketball teams played at Mercer on November 5th, and I got sent out to cover it. I didn’t use any flash, Mercer’s arena has like 30 metal halide lights around the ceiling pointed at the court, enough to get a solid 1/320 @ f/1.8 ISO 400. Both teams lost, the men by 3 after just missing a 3 point attempt at the buzzer in a last minute attempt to tie the game.  All shots are from my 35 f/1.8, about 3 feet from the end line.

GCSU Bobcats Basketball

GCSU Bobcats Basketball

GCSU Bobcats Basketball

GCSU Bobcats Basketball

This past Saturday I was lucky enough to get a photo pass for the Grace Potter and Brett Dennen at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. It was a really great concert, the lighting, sound, and venue really came together to make an awesome show. I still have a few of Grace Potter’s songs stuck in my head as I’m writing this (specifically Mastermind). I was able to get into the pit in front of the stage and work with my wide angle for a little while. I think I got some really great stuff, I sure was happy with the results! Here are a few of the pics I shot, ill also have a gallery with some more shots here. Except for slight color balancing  and some minor exposure adjustment on a few, these are straight from the camera.

The show had really nice lighting.

Grace at the Mic.

Grace decided to throw some flowers to the audience.

This is my favorite picture of the night. Love the expression!

Brett Dennen

I like the light coming from behind on this one. Streaks are from a gobo on the light.

I have always been aware that my D40 has an electronic shutter above 1/125th or so, and that theoretically that gives it the ability to sync at any shutter speed. I know people have been doing all this off camera for a while, but I haven’t seen anyone using it on camera for quick fill flash. As to why Nikon limits it to 1/500, I really have absolutely no idea. I built a small mask to cover all but one hot shoe contact, essentially tricking the camera into thinking there is no flash on it. Obviously you loose TTL, but gain the ability to forget about sync speeds all together and just let your creativity run free. With this kind of sync speed, you can shoot portraits directly into the sun (although there will be a little bloom from the sun) and actually expose your subject and the sky perfectly. Using a standard sync speed, say 1/250, that would require using a tiny aperture like f/22 and a studio flash such as an AB B1600. The only other way to do this is to use CLS, which I don’t have the capability for, and even then I suspect this may work better (and defiantly simpler, no menu’s).

f/6.3, 1/4000s, flash at 1/16. I left the EXIF data attached for those interested. There is a little bloom from the sun, but other than that everything works fine.

The small peice of plastic I used to enable all this came from a package of markers, and is the same thing that batteries come in. I had to sand it down a bit so the flash could still slide into the shoe. The idea is to only allow the middle pin to make contact, allowing triggering without the camera’s knowledge of the flash. After sanding down, the flash is a pretty tight fit in the shoe. You could also use tape or paper, but I opted for something that could stand up to repeated usage and be easily removed.

This is the hot shoe mask I made, it fits in the hot shoe, then the flash slides in on top of it.

Due to the duration of the flash itself, there is no power to be gained over 1/16 power on the flash at 1/4000 sec. and 1/8 at 1/2000 sec. for the other shutter speeds, it falls somewhere in between. This is great, as it takes a lot of weight off the shoulders of the flash, and of course, no waiting for recycling. For off camera lighting, the sync speed is limited only to your triggers response time.

Sun is just out of the frame on the left.

Special thanks to David Hobby and the Strobist group, I don’t know if anyone else has done this but the idea came from bits and pieces of information gleamed from that site, specifically this page.