Hi this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted
Lens we’re gonna show you how to fire your strobes using sound.
Yes, every time we break a piece of glass, [Glass breaking]
Every time we break something the strobes are gonna go off. The strobes are just going
and it keeps going off as long as we’re breaking things. That’s the way it’s gonna
happen today. As long as we’re breaking things the strobes are gonna go off.
So let’s get started and see what we can do.
[Music]
For today’s shoot we’re using the Miops trigger. We first put the Miops trigger at
the camera. So the trigger would fire the camera when it heard the sound. And then the
camera, using the pocket wizard, would fire the strobes.
[Glass breaking]
That loop was too slow. So we took the trigger up to the window. And now we plugged our pocket
wizards into the Miops trigger. When the Miops Trigger hears the sound, it immediately fires
the strobes. It’s perfect. But we can’t make that exposure in a bright room. We got
to turn all the lights off. And be able to expose our camera, put it on bulb. So we have
two components going now. We have to open the shutter of the camera, and then we have
to fire the strobes. So in order to open the shutter of the camera we used the TC80N3.
We just simply hit the button, opens it up, camera’s set on bulb. When you hit the button
it opens, when you release the button it closes. We’re in complete darkness now so we can
open the camera, then when the ball hits the glass it gets the sound, sets the Miops trigger
that fires the strobes. So here are our camera settings for this shoot. F11, the camera’s
set on bulb for shutter, and we’re at 400 ISO. Okay let’s take a look at our lighting
setup. First off we have a Baja B4 in the background. The -- the goal of that Baja B4
is to light the ball, light the glass, light the ball as it goes through the glass, and
just give a nice glow on all that material as it pushes towards the camera. That really
is the light that’s going to light the image. Everything else that comes after that is fill
light. We did use a reflector that I’ve never used before. It’s an RNR-285 narrow
degree reflector. That reflector is made to keep your light in a nice pool. We don’t
want it flying all over the studio. We want to just be on the ball, on the glass as it
goes through the pane of glass. So it looked very good. Secondly we put a grid up front
on a Baja B4. That grid now just acts as a -- a kind of a fill light to just open up
the light. I didn’t want to open up the whole scene. So we just opened up the light
on the ball on that area w-- that it was coming through the glass pane, and just was a nice
little light area. So now let’s look at how we setup our Miops trigger. First off,
we went to sound mode. I started out at 99 being almost complete sensitivity. Was way
too much. Uh, i-- if you even cough --. If y-- i-- it just sets the strobes off every
time. It was just way too much. I brought it down to about 86 which was a lot better
because you could walk around and not set it off every time you bumped something or
made any kind of noise. But when the ball hit the glass that set it off without any
problem. So 86 turned out to be just about right for sensitivity.
Here’s Johnny! [Glass breaking]
So when you’re putting a Miops trigger on sound you’re going to get about a three
millisecond delay for every meter, or about three feet that you are away from the event.
Or the thing that’s breaking. So automatically our trigger is about two and a half, three
feet away from the glass. So it’s going to give us about a three millisecond delay.
But from there we start a delay at zero. No delay. Which is about three second millisecond
delay because of the distance. Then we went to five, to see how that would look. Then
we went to ten, to twenty, to forty, and then last of all eighty. Try to get the ball further
out through the window. The problem is, even though we had a constant, which was our trigger,
I’m throwing the ball through the window. Which means my arm strength and how hard I
throw it changes the velocity and how fast it’s traveling. So it becomes a little bit
of an inexact science. But that’s the way this stuff is. But we got some pretty cool
shots anyway. So let’s take a look at our final image today. So in the end it’s controlled
trial and error. But I learned several things that you really need to apply. One is, get
the trigger as close to your sound you can. Two, work in a dark room. Three, use a bulb
release so that your camera doesn’t get jiggled. And then just experiment, experiment,
experiment. So get out there and break some glass. And, uh, keep those cameras rollin’, keep on clickin’.
Go to theslantedlens.com/giveaway to enter our holiday giveaway.