I Can See it For You Wholesale

I just got a Cactus V2s wireless flash transmitter and receiver — not exactly top-end technology, and not crazy reliable, but crazy-cheap, and that’s often what matters most.

I tested them out using a Lollyphile Absinthe Lollipop, my Vivitar 285HV, and a couple pieces of paper towel:

There were a couple of failures to trigger (2-3 out of probably twenty or thirty shots), but otherwise, they work just fine…

Here’s one directly backlit:

The same image in color with less cropping:

Here’s a front-lit version:

The black and white image is by far the best, I think. It’s also the one which I find most heartening in regards to flash photography and me. The reason I find it heartening is this: shooting with strobes is (so far as I can tell) all about controlling the process to control the results. It’s like previsualization in that respect, and that’s a problem for me — why engage in an activity when you know its precise outcome in advance? Where there is nothing unexpected, there is no sense of reality. (Per Simone Weil.)

In this case, the flash is revealing the inner structure of the lollipop in a way that I could never have fully previsualized — the flash can, in this instance, be a tool of discovery, rather than an instrument of control.

I’m still living in denial about the utility of flash. This doesn’t trouble me often, because when I’m out and about, I don’t usually mind shooting at f/1.4 and cranking the ISO if I have to. But some things just don’t look good that way, and food is (usually) one of them.

I face other barriers when trying to photograph food, one of the most prominent being that, while I can sometimes cook delicious food, I have never been able to cook food that is at all photogenic or even amenable to food styling. This issue is easily circumvented, however, by using someone else’s food, which is what I did here, with these cookies, which were both delicious and attractive.

Unfortunately, the kitchen they were baked in was small and dim. The only light available was what slipped in through the window past a lot of tree branches — and, even less useful, a bare incandescent bulb that I know by experience to be very hard to white balance after the fact, even shooting RAW and with a reference point.

Fortunately, while I still labor under the burden of my anti-Strobe prejudices, I finally got over my anti-Tripod ones, and so I was simply able to kill the incandescent, bust out my Manfrotto 055XPROB with its horizontally postionable center column, and slap my 55mm f/3.5 Micro on there for a few ten-second exposures.

It took me a while to get usable perspectives. In order to get all the cookie I needed without getting a bunch of unpleasant visual clutter, I set up almost directly over the cookies. I had to make sure that neither the camera nor the tripod was between the cookies and the dim window light — the difference between illumination and shadow was insignificant to the eye, but (when I accidentally blocked what light there was) very significant to the sensor after tens seconds. : )