Didactylos’ Strobe

Strobist.com - Learning How to Light

For some time now, I have been following the Strobist blog. David Hobby, the longtime newspaper photographer, has caused quite a stir in photographic circles with his guide to and thoughts on lighting. From What is Strobist?:

This website is about one thing: Learning how to use off-camera flash with your dSLR to take your photos to the next level. Or the next ten levels.

Here, you’ll find everything you need to know about how to more effectively use your small speedlights. There are more than 1,000 articles about lighting. Over two million photographers from around the world have learned small-flash lighting techniques from this site. We’re thinking you can, too.

I have gone through his Lighting 101, On Assignment, and Boot Camp sections and try to read through his new posts regularly. I have learned a lot and been inspired to think off the camera. Besides the obvious discussion of lighting issues, Hobby’s tips even extend to tracking good shooting locations with notes on times of day and year when the light is best. I do not have an extensive set up, just a single off-camera Vivitar on a stand and a couple of different triggers. I have documented my Strobist adventures in some earlier posts.

The Strobist Light Meter

Attempting the Strobist approach has some additional challenges for the visually impaired photographer. Besides fumbling around the equipment and managing multiple vision aids to change settings, my main challenge centers on the Strobist light meter. Traditionally, a light meter is used to gauge the proper camera and flash settings to achieve a particular exposure. According the Lighting 101 lesson, Balancing Flash Intensity With Ambient, Pt 1:

Flash meters are great, but they are one more thing to carry around. And if you get used to lighting intuitively, you’ll find you really do not need them.

The Strobist solution is to “just eyeball your way to a good balance. ” Herein lies the rub. Eyeballing relies not only seeing the scene being shot, but also the feedback on the camera’s LCD. Being visually impaired means that this park of the feedback loop is missing. The very enthusiastic Hoppy Hobby goes on to say:

One the one hand, lighting is a little like horseshoes and hand grenades. Close enough is close enough if it looks good. You will quickly start to learn to judge what your display (and histograms) are showing you. But the advantage to working this way is that it is fast and intuitive.

Intuition building might be the only silver lining. In an earlier post, Stitching Sight, I have discussed the importance of intuition to the visually impaired. So I need to find a system to help build that internal light meter, to bridge that gap in the feedback loop. A few possible ideas might work here. The one I currently use is the least complex and the least useful. Currently, I try to use the zoom feature on my camera. The may get me closer to the subject, but does not make the LCD any bigger. I also need to waste time switching to my low vision reading glasses. It is just not as effective as getting the image onto a larger screen. For now, this translates into waiting until I can get home and can upload the photos to my computer and onto my widescreen monitor.

There are several options for getting the image onto a larger screen during the shoot, but they all have drawbacks, especially from the Srtobist’s Traveling Light point of view. Either way, more equipment needs to be lugged to the shoot. For those with deep pockets, there is the Epson P-3000 40GB Multimedia Storage Device. This solution only increases the LCD scrren to 4 inches, but is very portable, offers in-the-field backup and is well-designed.

Another solution is to add a laptop to your shooting kit. While this does not work at all in for candid or action shots, this offers a larger screen and reasonably quick feedback. Since I find laptops fairly difficult to use, II d o not own one. I have used a borrowed laptop to check my images during shoots before, but not systematically. The quick and dirty way to use a laptop on site would be to swap out the camera’s memory card and upload any new photos every few minutes for review. There is a better way, tethering, which I am looking forward to testing out and discussing later. Tethering simply means using your computer to control your camera. This is mostly employed in studios, where mobility is not a big issue. A camera can be tethered with a cable or wirelessly. Cameras all come with inexpensive cables for uplaoding photos and these can be replaces with longer and faster ones, or simply extended, for tethering. Depending on your computer’s operating system and camera brand, you may need to purchase software to shoot tethered. Either way, using a laptop gives you an LCD the size of your monitor.

Manual Mode

Unless you can afford and wish to rely solely on the expensive lighting systems, like Nikon’s CLS, off-camera lighting requires manual control of both the flash and the camera. The Strobist approach, with its need for intuition, depends entirely the photographer beuing able to manually control exposure setting and flash power on the fly. As Hobby makes clear in Lighting 101′s Two Things Your Flash Needs to Have, the second thing your flash need is a manual mode.

You have a strobe that can be set to manual power and “dialed down,” (…). This is pretty much mandatory. If your flash does not have a variable manual control, you are gonne be one unhappy (and very limited) puppy.

Manual control gives the photographer complete control to make the best image possible as well as to screw it up entirely. All those knobs, dials and menu settings are tricky to manage at the best of times. For a visually impaired photographer, these settings are near impossible to work on the fly. there are a couple of things that help here.

The first thing is anticiaption, as is so often the case with limited eyesight. Gauging the probable light conditions and likely images to be shot, I set the camera and flash to what I expect I will need. During the shoot, any adjustments will be limited. As I learn more and develop better intuition, these last mintue adjustment become less signicant and easier.

The second thing is familiarity. The more familiar I become with my camera and my flashes, the easier it is to adjust them without looking. Familiarity with menus means that I know what sequence of buttons will change important settings, such as ISO, white balance and on-camera flash manual setting. Customization can help here as well. MAny DSLR cameras allow certain button, like the flash button, to be customized, so you can change when those buttons do. Gluing something tactile onto important reference points on dials makes finding the right setting very easy. Lastly, manual focus, something with which I have yet to experiment, can be done with tactile markings on your lens’ focus ring.

To Be or Not to Be a Blind Strobist?

As Hobby puts it as the start of Lighting 101:

Intimidated by the idea of off-camera lighting?

Don’t be.

NB: This post’s title refers to the fictional philosopher, Didactylors, who, though blind, carries around an empty oil lamp. It is not meant to imply that I use only two fingers (δύο δακτύλων ~ di dactylos).

Tags: accessibility, blind photographers, strobist

This entry was posted on December 10, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under blind photographers, large print, tim's photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.