Here we go high-speed sync. How to set it up and how to make it work. Beautiful
girl, high-speed sync, how can you go wrong?
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Hi. This is Jay P Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens, we're downtown Los
Angeles. We're going to do a little shot of beautiful Angela Whitworth here looking
back into downtown. We're going to high- speed sync our Baja B4s. The reason we're
going to do that is that we want to crush the background a little bit. We want to
have control of our shutter speed. So we'll be able to shoot at a thousandth
of a second. That means we can open up the aperture, make it pretty wide open, gives
us a nice highlight with our strobes on her face. So we'll see the big buildings
in the background and test this high-speed sync on the Baja B4.
Why high-speed sync? To understand high-speed sync we need to understand how
shutters work. Shutters are two curtains that open and close. The first curtain and
then the second curtain. At speeds slower than 125th of a second, sometimes 160th
depending on your camera the first curtain opens and stays open until the
shutter closes. Then the second curtain closes. That's for
slower speeds than 125th or 160th. At shutter
speeds faster than 125th of a second, the first curtain of the shutter opens
and before it can completely open the second shutter starts to follow behind and
close. This means that there's no time that the sensor's open for light all at
once. A small opening is traveling across the sensor exposing it as it goes. If
your strobe goes off during this time, it shows a black bar on the bottom of the
frame. The way high-speed sync solves this problem is it starts firing the strobe in
pulses as the first curtain opens and it continues to pulse until after the second
curtain closes. This pulsing is happening so fast that the sensor perceives this as
continuous light. So what's the upside
to high-speed sync? Why do we use it? First off this keeps your
strobe synced with your camera at faster shutter speeds. This allows you to shoot
with a wide open aperture in bright light situations giving you a nice, shallow
depth of field. Because you can keep speeding your shutter up to make the
background go darker and darker. You can also light your subject with strobe
light and then use the shutter to darken your background. So the person stands out
a little bit. Remember shutter controls
ambient light and we match the aperture to the power of
the strobes. So if we choose "F5" now we can move our shutter speed faster and
faster to make the background dark enough to either let the person stand out or to
make it dark enough so that it matches the strobe light on the person's face.
High-speed sync give you complete control of your strobes at all shutter speeds.
So what's the downside of high-speed sync? First of all it takes more power. I lost
about a half a stop on the Bajas when we went to high-speed sync compared to full
power without high-speed sync. So you lose a little bit of power. Some strobes
may lose more than that. I don't know. But know that you're going to lose power when
you go to high-speed sync. And with more power you're going to use your battery up
a little quicker. But you know what? In comparison to what you gain with
high-speed sync, it's a pretty nice trade off. So let's
get our Baja B4 set-up for a high-speed sync. The first thing we're going to do
is turn it on. That's a good place to start, turn it on. Then we're going to hit
the RPT button until it goes to H1. It's going to show us now we're in high-speed
sync. We now have the ability to dial this up or down. We can go up to H7 which is
the most power the Baja will give us in high-speed sync. And we can dial it down
to H1 which is the lowest power that it will give us in high speed sync. We're
going to keep it on H7. That will give us the ability to shoot at thousands of a
second which will allow us to crush the background just a little bit and shoot it
a little more wide open with our aperture.
Last of all, you need to push the plus that's on the remote that sits on your
camera so that the high-speed sync will connect with the Baja B4. Let's take a
look at our shoot downtown. In Los Angeles, you can get a permit to shoot on
the streets. You can't be on private property and you can't block the sidewalks
but you can shoot on most all of the sidewalks. It's pretty reasonable.
Our camera setting's are 320 ISO, 1500th of a second and F4.5.
We're going to make our background blue by simply putting our white balance on
tungsten and then putting a full orange on the strobe. So let's get this all together
and kind of see what's going to happen here. We're going to shoot a lot of
different shots. We got a couple of mirrors we're going to put in place just
to see how she looks next to the mirrors. We'll do some without the color crossover
and some, most with. I like the look of the color crossover. It looks really nice
down here. Let's look at our lighting breakdown. Our key light is a medium,
silver line softbox. I's going to give us a really nice highlight on her skin.
I'm going to allow the shadow exposure to be bright enough so that it shows blue
into the shadows on her face. That's it. One Baja B4, dome light medium softbox
and a full CTO. Here are some
of the images unretouched. You know it's so nice to be out and not have to worry
about power. The battery powered strobes these days are just fabulous.
I then put on a 15 to 30 millimeter Tamron lens and shot some more images.
I love this wide-angle look. Last of all
I added a second Baja B4 as a rim light on the camera right side.
And then we took a mirror that we had flipped it upside down, put it up
underneath her chin and reflected just a little bit of white light back into her
face. Here's a quick lighting buildup. Key light, a rim light just the white backside
of the mirror became a reflector card that bounced a little light underneath
her chin. Here's some more images with that three light setup.
I then took one of the images into Nik Software and I put a bi-color filter on
it. So I put a little bit of green in the corner. And that kind of gradates a little
more blue up in the upper corner just thought that was interesting.
I hope you learned something about high-speed sync today, how we can control
the background with the shutter whether that's long or short.
So check it out. Use that high-speed sync.
Post-note: The reason I like high-speed sync on a mono-block compared to those
little tiny flashes is that you got enough power to do something with.
I hate those little flashes.
Keep those cameras rolling. Keep on clicking and don't forget to buy one of
our t-shirts. That we don't have...yet.
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Hi, this is Jay P Morgan. I'm a short man on a box with a tall woman. Stay tuned
it's going to be exciting. Is that good? Kate? Are you loving it?