I Can See it For You Wholesale

The weather in California lately has been uncharacteristically…weathery. We’ve had cold, and rain, and even snow in areas that don’t normally see any, ever.

This makes it the season for two kinds of shooting — (a) birds are often most active and available at the times which are least comfortable be out in, but are worth it anyway,

and (b) experimenting with lighting still lives. This is something I’m getting better at. I had to break down and buy a second flash (the somewhat too fashionable Strobist special (the SB-24), and while I’m still not particularly fast or deft when working this way, it’s a tolerable way of passing a cold afternoon.

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.

So, I finally gave in to the march of progress by buying a 285HV. As you can tell, I’m a bit ambivalent about it. I’ve been reading and re-reading the “Lighting 101″ section in Strobist, and I’ve ordered quite a bit of extra gear (although, as always, cheaping out wherever possible). However, for now I’m just experimenting with the flash itself and whatever modifiers I can cobble together from bits of paper, etc.

For example, this is a plastic bag diffuser:

And this is with the flash working through a couple pieces of curved office paper (you can dimly see the watermark in the reflection):

I’ve also experimented a bit with off-camera fill flash for birding, which is a real pain in the ass without an assistant: