Leen, originally uploaded by Gerard Maas.

This was an experiment with backlight in an old WW2 bunker (‘Fort V’ – Edegem, Belgium). I had this idea since a long time and Leen had the perfect dress to make it work. The location is a fortified tunnel that provides access to the inner part of the fort. It’s cold and humid, so I had to work quickly to prevent my model from catching a cold.

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I found this image lost in my archives and thought it would be good to share it. I added some explanation to help digesting it .
I think it helps to understand how high speed sync flash works.

High speed sync in action

The initial image shows the camera firing at x-sync speed: 1/125 in the case of the EOS 30E film camera that we are using for this experiment. Our point of view is located inside the film chamber, right behind the shutter speed, seeing whatever the film or sensor will see.

The first row shows how the pulsed flash bursts of the high speed sync function illuminates the subject as the curtains fly across the shutter. Notice how the curtain seems “ghosted” as the burst of flash continuously illuminate the subject while the curtains fly across the shutter. Of course, the faster the shutter speed, the smaller is the slit between the first and second curtain and therefore the dimmer that the image becomes. This the reason why HS Flash reduces the effective output of the flash unit.

As a means of comparison, the row below illustrates the same shutter speed but without FP flash. Here one normal flash is taking place, partially illuminating the subject through the slit between the shutter curtains. Appreciate how small the slit becomes when the shutter speed increases. The part covered by the curtain would become a black shadow in the final picture. This is the behaviour that you would see with e.g. studio flashes or wireless systems that do not support FP flash.

Speedlites can be used with a variety of modifiers to achieve professional results. In this home studio setup, we used an Ezybox and an Umbrella box, both from Lastolite, to transform the harsh light of the speedlites into soft illumination for our model.

Delphine - Portrait

Nature is a wonderful source of curious subjects. In this case, it was a pristine cicada cocoon hanging on the trunk of a tree. Being under a tree meant no direct light at all, so here is where speedlites come into action.

Empty Cicada Cocoon - Backlighted with one speedlite fitted with a custom grid

As nobody seems to guess what I’d like for Christmas, this year I put a little box under the tree with my name on it. It contained the new Viewfinder Photography’s Speedlight Kit. This kit comprises a set of light modifiers for speedlites: A beauty dish with accessories (3 honey combs, 3 colored snap-on filters, 3 internal deflectors (white, silver and gold), a snoot and a dome diffusor. The design is clearly based on the classical studio gear they resemble, but reduced in size to fit a speedlite.

Soon Disney will bring out a new movie with this kit. It’s called “Honey, I shrunk the studio gear”.

Sorry for the bad joke. Now seriously, it this kit any good?

I certainty didn’t have a good start with it. I took the dome diffusor (or giant white egg) to a family meeting for a safe test ride. As I often do, I put the flash on a GorillaPod to move around easily. One of the Gorilla legs succumbed to the combined weight of the flash and dome, and it felt down on its side. Like Humpty Dumpty on the fence, the egg difussor broke, leaving a hole for harsh undiffused light to escape. It was a silly slow-motion fall, I must add.

Viewfinder egg dome difussor broken

Probably, the most interesting piece of this kit is the mini beauty dish and the its accessories.

What is a beauty dish? In the “big flash” world, a beauty dish is a wide and shallow metallic reflector with a central deflector. The central deflector prevents direct light from the flash bulb to hit the subject, so light from the flash bulb is casted from the reflector and directed forward to the subject.

I took this picture of a huge beauty dish (with a honeycomb attachment) at Photokina last year:

As the name hints, beauty dishes are often used for portraits and the look they produce is ‘in vogue’ and sought for in the fashion industry. Certainly a good reason to try to translate that concept to the speedlite realm.

The mini beauty dish, is well… mini.

I put the mini beauty dish to work in a ‘water concept’ shoot I did recently. You can see it in action in this setup image (light source far right):


The beauty dish and honeycomb were key to provide the directional and focused light that made the image work. A wider beam of light would have introduced too strong reflections in the water flow and created a distraction from Stephanie, my model for the day.
Here’s one of the resulting images, where the effect of the dish is clearly visible:

I think the dish did the work of focusing the light in the right place. As you would expect from its size, it does not produce the broad light of the bigger studio versions, so don’t expect the ‘beauty dish’ look from this modifier. It’s functional to limit the spread of the beam from a speedlite and I see myself using it to introduce an accent in an image.

One thing I noticed is that the flash kept on firing at nearly full power all the time, even when the other flashes in the setup, powering bigger modifiers like the Ezybox 80, had to sweat a lot less (and therefore were recycling faster). The batteries of the 580EX in the dish ran out quite quickly. I do have my concerns about the design of a convex deflector to block the direct light from the speedlite. The space looks too small to let the light bounce back and get out through the -rather narrow- space between the deflector and the dish. It looks more like it traps the light instead of diffusing it. This will require more testing.

My conclusion? The most interesting part of this kit is the mini beauty dish. In this case, size matters, so don’t expect the same quality of light as from the bigger studio versions, but it can be quite useful to produce some light accents and make a portrait or scene more dramatic. As with every piece of kit, it’s a tool in the box. But in this case, some experience is needed to determine its best use. “Beauty dish” is certainly a bit misleading.

PS:
The snoot looks neat and its metallic construction feels quite robust, but I still have to give it a good use before posting any comments on it.