Hi this is Joe McNally for Adorama TV,
and in this segment gonna talk to you about flash duration how the speed of
light
can make your pictures sharp. Adorama TV presents
photo on the go with Joe McNally where you'll go behind the scenes to see how great
photos are made
so I'm about 60-65 stories up
in the central business district of Beijing and they've let me up there too
do a construction picture you know cuz there you know
rebuilding really the city a Beijing lots skyscrapers and what not anyway
I go up there and I'm working for a client based in Beijing and they want
to get some sort of snazzy dusk picture
and they're doing some welding some you know
and some cutting, theres sparks everywhere up there so
I suggest a position to do this in and
I realize that I'm going to have to blend the city
what's the driver here the ambient light level right
so have to accommodate the darkening City and
I also want that to happen because what is that resulted
a longer shutter speed which then the sparks
create tracer lines and you have the possibly for a very graphic picture
but what's the danger zone your picture will be unsharp a shot this available
light
i'd have an unsharp mess on my hands
so what I did was I placed a flash
on a Justin clamp. Handy
keep them in my bag, clip them to my bag and so I put one simple flash
on a railing you know or whatever I could find on a construction site
it is of to camera right
so here's the deal, alright
here's the ledge let's do a kind of a bird's eye view here
this is the ledge here's my welder okay
he's got his helmet on he's here with the
spray is coming out here the sparks here's another column that is working on
here and he's got
the weld operation going there here's
you know the city of Beijing and the traffic and everything sixty five
stories below
there's a railing here and we're standing on a girder
I am outside the railing with him
I don't have a safety harness so
I go jump outside the railing
well maybe not jump and I get my camera
wide lens, shot this at 12 millimeters
and I brace myself here's what I did: I
hang on to the railing with my left arm
okay I brace the camera my right and I lean out this way over traffic
my fixture reaches over and grabs
my belt and that's our safety harness
right there. unfortunately I'm about 200 pounds in my fixture was maybe
130 pounds of I was going he was going anyway
the flash on the Justin clamp is right over here
I'm hitting this guy's shoulder with a
hard blast of light know like light shaper nothing like that
everything is just very direct I send the signal
from my commander flash from my position
out here hanging onto the railing trigger that
flashes him he retains an essential sharpness
I get the sparks flying into the street and the glow of the city
it's a two second exposure hand-held. I wouldn't have a prayer of shooting that sharp
if i didn't use flash
so the mechanics are fairly simple one flash
freezing my subject or sharpening my subject and then the rest of it just
becomes unavailable light exposure
the key or the challenge for me is to hold my camera steady
during that time and let the flash do its work of sharpening the image for me
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another key to the
picture the weld itself it's like the power of a thousand suns
and so what was happening as he was welding this
here was getting white hot light on it
so what do I have to do had a corral that exposure
so I found another piece a girder like a chunk of steel
and we drug it over here and we laid it down
over his weld so in other words he's welding
and the steel is on top of it and it forces the exposure
to stay underneath that and not climb up this
it also had the benefit of forcing the sparks
to go out into the street and
that was it one light and the power
of the speed of light, flash duration. This is Joe McNally for Adorama TV
flash gives you a chance to stay sharp
even when you're hanging off a building with one hand and a two-second
hand-held exposure
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