Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” ―
Welcome to another edition of the series of posts where I share some of the stupid (photographic) mistakes I’ve made over the years and that, for some reason, always seem to involve attractive women. (You can find some accounts of my life mistakes in a series of posts entitled “Things I Promised Not to Tell.”)
Stupid is as Stupid Does
This particular Stupid Photographer’s Trick involves two phenomenon I’ve encountered over the years when photographing models: The first is the Stupid Photographer’s Trick itself, of which I have seem to have become a leading practitioner and the second is what might be called photographing One-Hit Wonders. This has scenario has me working with models when I was either the first or one of the first people to photograph them and, a short time later, that model went on to fame and fortune in the modeling world and I never photographed them again. It’s not that I didn’t want to photograph them. Its just that as they became so famous and in demand they were no longer available for TF shoots with me.
How I made the film portrait (at right): In this case I actually had two shoots with Kirsten before she was discovered by the model photography world and today’s featured images are from our second and last shoot together. But not before she was featured on the cover of my now out-of-print book Available Light Glamour Photography, which is available used or for Kindle.
I made the (above right) portrait of Kirsten in my former home’s makeshift basement studio using a Pentax 6×7 with a Pentax 75 f/4.5 SMC lens and Kodak Ektar 100 film. The dark background at the bottom of the above right film portrait somewhat hides this faux pas because what you see is not vignetting, it’s unexposed film.
The exposure for that images was 1/60 sec at f/11 and ISO 100 but clearly I needed to shoot at the Pentax 6×7’s correct sync speed of 1/30 sec, which I didn’t discover until after the film was processed. Nevertheless, the large negative and fine grain of Ektar 100 roll film allowed more than acceptable (and square cropped) images to be made from the film.
How I made the digital portrait (at left): The camera used for the portrait at left was a 12-megapixel Olympus E-620 Four-Thirds DSLR with Zuiko 40-150mm f/4-5.6 lens at 114mm. The JPEG image was cropped to match the 6×7 format of the Pentax 6×7 in order to make a comparison of the two images easier. The exposure was 1/60 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 125, which was well within the range of the Oly’s maximum flash x-sync speed of 1/250.
It’s all about sync speed
Any electronic flash has to synchronize with a camera’s shutter so light can pass through the lens onto the film or image sensor. In order for the firing of an electronic flash to coincide with the shutter opening, the shutter speed must be set at or below the camera’s maximum sync speed thus allowing light to strike the sensor (or film.) If it’s set faster than that shutter speed, only the ambient light—not the flash—will be captured by the image. In low light, like the ambient light in my former basement home studio, you may only see part of the photograph that was exposed by the flash, as you can see in the above right image. My bad.
PS: Just a reminder: The Holiday Edition of the Pixel, Grain & Cookies podcast is live now on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos, featuring a look at how Barry Staver and I photograph people. It includes some interesting as well as hilarious anecdotes about how Barry created some of his iconic images,
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), please click here. And if you do, thanks so much.
My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography and includes information on all of the cameras used as well as the complete exposure data for each image. New books are available from Amazon for $23.82 with used books starting around ten bucks.as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.