All that’s needed is the annual rush on architecture awards submissions and ta dah! it buckets down. There is definitely a history of this, the BOM has been tracking it too, they call it La Niña but really its all started when one of my architecture clients picks up the phone and calls me.

Proof is in the numbers; 2011 – I photographed about 7 projects for architects towards the end of January and beginning of Feb 2011.

BOM says “February recorded more than double the historical average to be the 7th wettest on record. Most of this was due to a significant rain event across NSW in the first week of the month, with daily falls of over 40 mm recorded at the Airport on both the 3rd and 5th, and ACT totals reaching 103 mm at Mt Ginini and 83.6 mm at Tuggeranong on the 3rd. Rainfall also increased towards the end of the year as a weak La Niña developed, with November the 8th wettest on record for Canberra. Much of this was due to a low pressure trough that brought 45 mm to Canberra Airport on November 6th, reaching 91.6 mm at Tuggeranong.”

This year I photographed a couple less and the rain was constant but the overall amount less. See the trend! Feel the pain….I have a love hate relationship with architecture photography, stemming from the fact that I can’t control the weather. I’ve managed to control the light on large scale buildings but the weather still challenges my control freak tendency’s.

Here’s just a couple of the 200+ images we shot.

Here’s a couple I’ve just spat out from the last day of shooting we did here in Canberra. Topics covered a bunch of stuff, mostly based around some of the area’s the Gov. is funding.

I’ve taken to pulling out some, or all, of my 5 Einstein lights to do my buildings now that I have the vagabond mini’s things are so much more mobile and quick to adjust. I’ve been using them inside buildings but also to light up exteriors at dusk and even during the day. They truly are powerful lights. I always found buildings a bit like landscapes to shoot in that your always waiting for the light. With my own set of battery powered sun’s I don’t have to wait and I don’t have to have it look the way nature intended.

This shot was taken at the DEEWR office on Marcus Clarke st in Canberra. Its a round meeting room, why round, why not! I really wanted to show off the shape as best as possible and so finished off the set up (of the first shot here) with the ring flash just to bring the middle of the frame up a bit to show the curve. I think it works, maybe because its a bit of a different subject in that its not your every day space but also because I like the light set up and having control over these sorts of environments with my gear is bliss.

and this one of the entrance to the room. Hope you like them.

Not sure what the cover pic will be but here is one I like.

I’ve been accumulating Alien Bee’s for years now and when they announced a year ago (now almost two years ago) they were going to make a new light, at the time called the MAX, I immediately put my name down for three of them based on the experience I’ve had with the Alien Bee system and the specs of the proposed MAX I was sure it would be a winner. Months later and the crew at Paul C Buff had issues with some of the technical parts of the light and some aspects of it mutated to make the light they now sell as the Einstein, which I’ve been lucky enough to have received my order.

So, I’m not going to give you a review on it because well I’m not qualified and there are many who have already, I will say it’s a brilliant light and I love using it as you will when you get yours. One of the things that interest me most about the Einstein is its flash duration, namely T1 numbers. I’ve been itching to do some extreme tests on it before taking it to jobs that are going to demand fast stopping flashes for a paying client so I got a model I worked with recently, Melissa Tan, to come into my COLD Canberra studio last week for a very demanding job so I could try a shot I’ve always wanted to do and at the same time really test the Einstein at what it does best.  Needless to day she did a great job on what was a demanding shoot made harder by the time of year and lack of adequate heating in my studio.

GEAR

Canon 1D Mark II N

70-200 f2.8

3 x Einstein 640 flash units (version 1)

1 x Paul C Buff silver beauty dish w/ diffusion sock

2 x Potoflex softboxes w/grids

Cyber Commander and CSXCV transceiver modules

For these shots we just went with a simple three light set up seen in the diagram below. (made with Strobox on an iphone)

The main light was an Einstein shot through a Paul C Buff silver beauty dish with the diffusion sock attached. The beauty dish was slightly to camera right and about 8 feet off the ground.

The two rim lights were both Einstein’s and were shot through softboxes positioned about 45 degrees to the side and behind the model. They were on stands about head height to the model and were gridded to stop the spill hitting the camera lens.

I don’t recall my power settings as I’m still getting my head around the new Cyber Commander system (it takes a bit of getting use to) and so was a bit pre occupied with that. I did also work my power output based on t1 speeds instead of working aperture. I placed all three lights on a power setting that gave me 1/10,000^th of a second flash duration (which I think was about 4 stops under full power.) And no that’s not a typo, that’s 1/10,000^th of a second, faster than the fastest shutter speed on any of my cameras. I needed to keep them all at the same duration otherwise I might get ghosting in the faster moving bits of water so this is how I set it up and to fine tune my lighting ratio’s I just moved my softboxes closer or further away from the model. Typically this is a less than ideal way to work as your effecting the quality of your light along with the amount but as the two lights to be moved were both softboxes, were working as rim lights and were relatively close it wasn’t a concern. I could have further increased their size by putting them behind a panel had I needed to back them off a lot  but as it was they stayed a workable distance from the subject so there was no need.

With the lights all on this setting I was also able to take advantage of the 8 frames per second and the flashes kept up without a problem. In fact I have tested these lights on a similar setting with martial artists and have shot a sequence on the Canon 1D mark IIII at 10fps for a sequence of 18 frames and the lights didn’t miss a beat and there is no exposure difference. Just think of the possibilities for sports images!!

We trialled a few different liquids, all having been heated in the microwave to ease the pain. We did some shots with straight water, flour and water mix and flour and water with food dye.  All produced a nice effect but the clean up was a nightmare!. Glad I finally got to try the effect though, still think I could make it better with a few lessons I learnt on the shoot but I think I’ll wait til summer to try it again. Now I’ve got my Einstein’s the high-speed photography world just got a lot smaller.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on some of the first Vagabond Mini battery packs make by Paul C Buff in the US and thought I’d try them out on a shoot I did last week for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations in Adelaide, Melbourne and here in Canberra. The purpose of the shoot was to promote their Language, Literacy and Numeracy Program and saw us travel through three states shooting 20 ‘models’ over three days.

Perfect test run for the battery pack/Einstein combo. The budget didn’t allow for an assistant, although we put the producer to good use, so I was limited in what I could take in terms of gear. I opted to pack one small hard case with 3 Einstein heads, 8″ reflectors, cables, Cyber Sync system and 2 Vagabond Mini’s and a charger. The total weight was 25kg, just about right on domestic baggage limit and I would guess that almost half of that comes from the case alone.

The batteries held up to the Qantas baggage abuse and didn’t skip a beat on the shoot, we fired roughly 2,000 frames on the trip although I did charge the packs each night I didn’t notice any noticeable increase in recycle time. I’ve owned the original Vagabond for years and the brick that it is was really tough to use on location, the new mini’s are a gem. I’ll probably use them even when I can plug in on location, for smaller shoots anyway. One thing that did bug me, and I’ve seen it written elsewhere, is that the mounting for the battery to connect to your stand is useless, I’ve been hanging mine off the tightening nobs on the stand but will figure out a way to secure the pack to the stand that wont allow it to swing around when moving the light position.

If your an Alien Bee, White Lightning, Zeus or Einstein owner I cant recommend these enough. Get your name on the waiting list for some.

Here’s some of the specs

On March 4-6 Vincent Laforet will be giving the second of his workshops on HDDSLR titled ‘Moving from Still to Video’. Should be a cracker and you can enroll here

Vincent did this amazing video called ‘Reverie’ with the Canon 5D Mark II before it launched, just to get us all thinking about the possibilities of a DSLR that can shoot very nice video

enjoy ‘The Ice Book’ by Davy & Kristin McGuire

And hey, I’m a photographer so lets put up a pic.

This is the AIS Women’s basketball team, it was commissioned by AIS basketball to become a poster of this years team. It was a fun shoot and the girls did really well. Thanks for the fog machine Steve, its probably a bit cliche but I’ve not used them before so I think that means I can give it a whirl once or twice. Actually we’re going to have to re-shoot this because one of the girls is no longer a part of the team due to medical reasons so it looks like I’m going to have to better myself on the same shot in a couple of weeks. I’m always up to try and better myself with each shoot but I can’t say I’ve ever had to re-shoot something so this could be a bit harder. We’ll see.