Deconstructing, Part XXIV: Photo on the Go with Joe McNally: Adorama Photography TV.
Hi this is Joe McNally for Adorama TV, and in this segment gonna talk to you
about flash duration how the speed of light can make your pictures sharp. Adorama TV
presents photo on the go with Joe McNally where you'll go
behind the scenes to see how great photos are made so I'm about 60-65 stories up in the central business district of Beijing
and they've let me up there too do a construction picture you know
cuz there you know rebuilding really the city a Beijing lots
skyscrapers and what not anyway I go up there and I'm working for
a client based in Beijing and they want to get some sort of snazzy dusk picture and they're doing some welding some you
know and some cutting, theres sparks everywhere
up there so I suggest a position to do this in and I realize that I'm going to have to
blend the city what's the driver here the ambient light
level right so have to accommodate the darkening
City and I also want that to happen because what
is that resulted a longer shutter speed which then the
sparks create tracer lines and you have the possibly for
a very graphic picture but what's the danger zone your picture
will be unsharp a shot this available light i'd have an unsharp mess on my hands so what I did was I placed a flash on a Justin clamp.
Handy keep them in my bag, clip them to
my bag and so I put one simple flash on a railing you know or whatever I
could find on a construction site it is of to camera right so here's the deal, alright here's the ledge let's do a kind of a
bird's eye view here this is the ledge here's my welder okay he's got his helmet on he's here with
the spray is coming out here the sparks
here's another column that is working on here and he's got the weld operation going there here's you know the city of Beijing and the
traffic and everything sixty five stories below there's a railing here and we're
standing on a girder I am outside the railing with him I don't have a safety harness so I go jump outside the railing well maybe not jump and I get my camera wide lens, shot this at 12 millimeters and I brace myself here's what I did: I hang on to the railing with my left arm okay I brace the camera my right and
I lean out this way over traffic my fixture reaches over and grabs my belt and that's our safety harness right there.
Unfortunately I'm about
200 pounds in my fixture was maybe 130 pounds of I was going he was going
anyway the flash on the Justin clamp is right
over here I'm hitting this guy's shoulder with a hard blast of light know like light shaper
nothing like that everything is just very direct I send
the signal from my commander flash from my position out here hanging onto the railing
trigger that flashes him he retains an essential
sharpness I get the sparks flying into the street
and the glow of the city it's a two second exposure hand-held.
I wouldn't have a prayer of shooting that sharp if i didn't use flash so the mechanics are fairly simple
one flash freezing my subject or sharpening my
subject and then the rest of it just becomes unavailable light exposure the key or the challenge for me is to
hold my camera steady during that time and let the flash do
its work of sharpening the image for me Hi Joe McNally here for Adorama be sure
to check out at Adorama's latest contest to win prizes another key to the picture the weld itself it's like the power
of a thousand suns and so what was happening as he was
welding this here was getting white hot light on it so what do I have to do had a corral
that exposure so I found another piece a girder like a
chunk of steel and we drug it over here and we laid
it down over his weld so in other words he's
welding and the steel is on top of it and it
forces the exposure to stay underneath that and not climb up
this it also had the benefit of
forcing the sparks to go out into the street and that was it one light and the power of the speed of light, flash duration.
This
is Joe McNally for Adorama TV flash gives you a chance to stay sharp even when you're hanging off a building
with one hand and a two-second hand-held exposure Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost be sure
to visit our easy to use online printing service
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