Dorothy

Dorothy, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Theme of this shoot was Hollywood Glamour ala George Hurrell. Played fast'n'loose with that though. George would have used about 4 or 5 fresnel-lensed hotlights. I used my Pentax portable strobes. The secret sauce though is a ringlight installed inside an 18" softbox, attached to a monopod and hand-held a few inches above Dorothy by my assistant (who is probably nursing sore arms today. Sorry, Marzi!). Other lights in this shot: AF540 in a 42" bounce umbrella camera-left, and a snooted AF540 hairlight well back camera right.

Huge thank-you's to Dorothy, Vivian, Ladylyn and Marzi. You guys rock! And a giant thanks to Derek for letting us crawl all over his Cafe. Go down and catch some jazz, and have a steak while you're there. Tell 'em I sent you. :-)

Model: Dorothy Weiss www.dorothyweiss.com/
Photographer: Bruce Walker www.modelmayhem.com/1440574
MUA: Vivian Orgill www.modelmayhem.com/135165
Hair stylist: Ladylyn Gool www.modelmayhem.com/2096721
Photo Assistant: Marzi Leszczyk www.coroflot.com/marzidesign
Location: The Gallery Studio Cafe www.thegallerystudiocafe.ca/

Dust and Dance

This is quite brilliant. Dancer is dusted with flour, makes athletic leaps while back-lit with strobes. Any direct light paths from strobes to camera are blocked with black cloth. Finished shots from this project are on Flickr ...

Lee

Lee, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Many would say this couldn't be done: vintage Pentax K100D Super (entry-level DSLR), ISO 800, Pentax DA* 55 wide open at f/1.4. Accident totally waiting to happen.

"It'll be uselessly noisy!" ... "It'll all be way too soft!" ... "6 megapixels isn't enough!"

You be the judge.

At a posing and direction workshop held by my friend Neeto da Silva. I was kind of a guest participant, and I got this in the chill-out area while Lee and I were waiting our turns on-set.


Model: Lee Riley - ModelMayhem 1847806
MUA: Christine Chan
Photo/Retouch: Bruce Walker - ModelMayhem 1440574

Flash Success

I've read a fair bit of negative chit-chat on lists and forums regarding Pentax flashes, so here's just a bit of positive news: once a Pentax AF540-FGZ flash is repaired, it works well and hard.

A few months ago I blew up one of my two 540's, for the 2nd time. This time time I learned the hard way that if you have it powered on while inserting it into a metal cold shoe and you manage to short the contacts, it will try to fire multiple times rapidly and expires in the attempt. I left it out of my kit for quite a while until one day I realized I'd need it for an outdoor shoot I was to be part of.

I drove it over to Pentax Canada, they fixed it, charged me 200 bills (ouch!) and I drove it home a week later.

It didn't work! Same symptoms: faint ticking sound inside, the red charged light never comes on. So I contacted Pentax, the service manager apologized and asked me to try a few tests, failing which to bring it in. So I did, drove it over again (now my car knows the way), and the tech proceeded to demonstrate it working perfectly on his K-5 body. Aaaargh!

But I left it with them for observation, they ran all the tests they could think of and called me to pick it up a few days later. This time I brought fresh batteries with me and tested it in the lobby before accepting it. Drove it home, fired it up ... and it worked fine. And 100% fine ever since.

Last Thursday I did a creative fashion shoot using an Elinchrom softbox feathered to light the model's fronts and my two 540's lighting up the background (rough, unpainted concrete) with two coloured gels from a good distance back left & right of the models. I fired those suckers over 500 times, at full power, including a fresh battery change, over about 4 hours. When we finally wrapped and I got them down off their stands, the flashes were very warm and the batteries were hot to the touch.

So, summary: AF540's may be electrically a bit fragile, and kinda pricey, but they are friggen' workhorses, and will stand up to heavy use. They lit up a concrete wall 12 feet high over an area at least 12 feet across, bright enough to be seen nicely at f/8, ISO 100.

Here's one of my proof of concept lighting shots:

It's the "Accidental Tulips" setup with a feathered softbox, then the black foamcore background was lit from right and left by gelled, snooted (or gridded) and gobo'ed AF540-FGZ flashes. The criss-crossing shadows create the cool coloured patterns.

Accidental Tulips

Happy accident, really.


I have a Pentax AF160 macro ring flash that, honestly, doesn't see much use. Flower macros, obviously, but I've not been doing those lately. I tried using it for portraiture, but the geometry is wrong for that (its diameter is too small).

I recently picked up an el-cheapo wireless flash trigger kit from Cowboy Studios for 32 bucks: one trigger and two receivers. Works fabulously with my two Pentax AF540 flashes. I'm a happy camper ... except: the AF540 no longer fits in my 18" softbox with the receiver attached -- the combo is too tall. In addition, I'm trying to set up more complex lighting needing more flashes. Damn! Where can I get another flash from? Without, you know, spending money. And how can I regain use of my softbox?

So yesterday I was idly staring at the softbox perched on its stand, empty, and I somehow thought of my ringflash sitting in the drawer, useless.

Bing!

I threaded the ringflash head around the metal brackets in the softbox, dangling the control box on its cable below, attached one of the wireless receivers to the controller, pointed the softbox at some handy cut flowers and ... TADA! Brand new enablement.

Above is one of the first shots I got with it.

The undefeatable 3 minute idle power-off in the ring flash is a pain in the ass, but that's life. At least the flash retains its configuration when you power-cycle it to wake it up as they are all set by switches.

Tulip Study

Pentax K20D, DA* 16-50/2.8 @ 50mm f/8, 160th sec, ISO 200.
AF-160FC macro ring flash, Westcott Mini Apollo 18" softbox, Cowboy Studios NPT-04 wireless trigger and receiver.
Post-processing in Lr 3.6 and Ps CS5.

Postmodern Pinups exhibit in Toronto's Junction

I'm installing a small exhibit of my photography for the entire month of May in Toronto's historic Junction area. Here are the details:


Postmodern Pinups
Photography by Bruce Walker
at the Junction Chiropractic & Wellness Centre
3093 Dundas St West (just west of Quebec Ave.)
May 2 - June 4, 2012


Opening Reception Wednesday May 9
6:30PM - 10:00PM
Special Guests - Refreshments

I'm expecting many of my talented co-creators to come, and the makeup artist and one model are planning to come in 1950's dress.

If you're in or near Toronto on May 9th, I'd love for you to drop by to the opening reception and say Hi!

Panl in the news

"The Artist"

Panl Updates Cloud Monitoring Service

We put the final flourishes on an update to the Panl service, and the details of it went out on the news wires yesterday. Read all about our great changes here ... 

Picture Credits

Model/HS: Denise Stellar

MUA/Wardrobe: Chantelle Krupka

Artistic Director/Retoucher/Photographer: Bruce Walker

You code it, we'll monitor it

I can't reveal all yet, but the staff at Panl are busy adding new features to an already great service.

More to come ...

Model/HS: Denise Steller

MUA/Wardrobe: Chantelle Krupka

AD/Photo/Retouch: Bruce Walker - ModelMayhem 1440574

Wireless tethering simplified (and cheap)

Elle

Why Tether?

In tricky lighting situations, or when you're experimenting with new lighting designs, it's great to be able to see previews of what you're shooting to get feedback on whether you've got good light coverage, see that the shadows are deep enough (or maybe too deep), and so on. But inspecting that teensy image on the camera's rear LCD screen is not very useful. The contrast is poor and it's just too darned small to see much detail. You can zoom in, but navigating is awkward and you lose the overall viewpoint.

What you'd like is to be able to take a shot and immediately view the results on a reasonable size screen, like a large desktop monitor, or a notebook display. That is, you'd like to tether.

Cameras meant for studio use, like medium format bodies with digital backs, are easy to tether as they have ethernet or FireWire interfaces for the purpose. You can shoot and your full-rez image is transferred right into Lightroom for viewing. That's fine for full-time pros with high-end budgets, but what about us part-timers? And while many semi-pro cameras (many Canon and Nikon bodies) can be wire-tethered using an inexpensive USB cable, my Pentax body (K20D) cannot.

So, am I stuck? No!

Wireless Tethering

My answer to the lack of wired tethering ability is to use an Eye-Fi wireless SDHC card and my PowerBook running Mac OS X. In order to make my solution portable, I could have bought an iPad and software (ShutterSnitch), but my old Apple PowerBook that was just lying around has a great screen, so I decided to use that as my preview device.

When I press the shutter, the RAW image stays on the SDHC card but a copy of the low-resolution JPEG is transferred via WiFi to the PowerBook where an Automator script sees it and sends it to the Preview app for immediate display.

End-to-end, my solution has these parts then:

• Camera that uses an SDHC card (or CF and an adapter)
• Eye-Fi Pro X2 WiFi card
• PowerBook with WiFi
• Automator script to send JPEGs to Preview

Here's how you configure the bits and pieces.

Camera. Configure your camera to generate RAW and JPEG images. Configure JPEG images to be the lowest possible quality and pixel dimensions. On my K20D this means one-star for Quality and 2M for Recorded Pixels. This will speed-up the preview process and easily gives you a large enough image to see how you shot looks. I also configure my K20D to generate RAW images only by default and RAW+ (ie both RAW and JPEG) when I press the RAW button on the body. That way I'll only get previews when I specifically call for one.

Ad-hoc network. You need to be able to push preview images to the notebook as they are created, so this and the WiFi card need to be networked together. If you are working in your home or other controlled environment you can use the standard method of connecting to the local available network. But if you expect to be working in some random place, like a rented studio or outdoors, then you must connect via an "ad-hoc" network. This requires you to create an ad-hoc network on your notebook first, then configure the Eye-Fi card to see it. For a Windows or Mac OS X notebook, follow these directions.

Eye-Fi card. Having configured the notebook you should plug the Eye-Fi Pro card into the notebook and configure it to connect to your notebook's custom ad-hoc network. Follow these instructions on the Eye-Fi support site.

Eye-Fi Software. When the preview JPEGs arrive on the PowerBook I want to see them popup on the screen immediately for viewing. To accomplish this I arranged to have an Automator script, a "Folder-Action", connected to the image-drop folder. The Automator script wakes up when an image arrives and sends it to Preview.app. You configure the image-drop folder in Eye-Fi Card Settings. Open Eye-Fi Center, click on the little gear icon to the right of the Eye-Fi card under DEVICES. Then in the Photos tab, click Enable, and choose a folder under "Manage - Upload photos to:". Under Subfolder options select "Do not create date-based subfolders." Also disable uploading of RAW files in the RAW tab.

The drop-folder I use is /Users/{my-home}/Pictures/Eye-Fi but you can put them anywhere you have write permissions to.

Folder-Action. The exact way you create a Folder-Action and attach it to a folder varies depending on what version of Mac OS X you are running. My PowerBook is running 10.5.8 so I'll describe that ...

1. Launch Automator.app
2. Choose a Custom workflow
3. under Library - Files & Folders double-click on Open Finder Items
4. select Open with: Preview.app
5. under File menu choose Save As Plug-in
6. in the drop-down menu choose Plug-in For: Folder Actions
7. select Attach to Folder: Other ... and select the image-drop folder you configured above.
8. enter a name in the Save Plug-In As: field
9. tick the Enable Folder Actions checkbox and click Save

Steve Harley has written up how to do this for newer Automators (10.7 Lion) and also in Applescript. (Thanks Steve!)

If you are running Linux, take a look at incrond to watch for the images landing in the drop-box folder.

If you are running Windows you're on your own at this point -- sorry! -- but I would guess that something similar to Automator.app is available in the OS or as a freeware or shareware application.

Test it out

Now the whole thing should work, so test it by installing the Eye-Fi card in your camera and take a shot. Make sure that you have JPEG creation enabled (RAW+). A few seconds after you press the shutter you should see the Eye-Fi Helper app's icon flash a small preview image and then you'll see the large sized preview popup in Preview.app.


References

1. Jimmy Shoots Blog, "How To Wirelessly Tether Your Camera To Your iPad Using Eyefi and ShutterSnitch"
2. Eye-Fi Pro X2
3. Ad Hoc Network Setup Instructions
4. Connect card to an Ad Hoc network
5. folder action & Eye-Fi tethering workflow

Picture Credits

Model: Elle Bunny - ModelMayhem 2200634
Hairstylist/MUA: Tea Scott - ModelMayhem 1048908
Photographer, Retoucher: Bruce Walker - ModelMayhem 1440574
Location: Acor Studio - ModelMayhem 1987608

Keeping an eye on RADIUS using PyPanl

I wrote up a tutorial on using my company's monitoring service to keep track of your company's internal services. If this sounds like something you wrestle with, read on ...

The problem we're going to solve today is a common but important one: how can we keep a watch on a critical authorization server and be notified quickly if it stops answering queries?

I'm going to show you how to create a Panl "Custom Monitor" and use a server-side timed script to send updates to it. If the updates report "down" or the updates themselves fail then the Panl monitor will send an appropriate alert to the admin's mobile device or email.

Read the full article here ... 

Eye-Candy Friday: "Elle"

It's been a while since my last restful image, so here's one ...

I took this shot recently at a collaborative photo shoot with two models, a makeup/hair artist and three other photogs.

The foggy/hazy glow effect is not Photoshopped! That comes courtesy of a flukey lighting setup error. Cooling vents on the two large softboxes illuminating the model from both sides were open and allowing direct light from the 400 watt-second strobes to hit the inside surface of the lens-hood on my camera. Pixel-peeping reveals a distinct fabric-like pattern, and I figure that the light was reflecting off the (normally) light-absorbing black felt lining.

Before I closed the vents to fix the problem I took a few shots like that and really loved the ethereal, mystical softness it imparted to Elle.

Model: Elle Bunny - ModelMayhem 2200634

Hair/MUA: Tea Scott - ModelMayhem 1048908
Photo/Retouch: Bruce Walker - ModelMayhem 1440574

Location: Acor Studio - ModelMayhem 1987608

You can see a few more shots from this session here ...

And speaking of new stuff ...

My company Panl has launched its services. Here's the blurb:

The Panl monitoring service is now launched and available to everyone! 

Panl offers free website monitoring, and the ability to create custom monitors to track almost any IT metric. Our unique "overdue alert" capability lets you know about events that are supposed to happen but don't. You can track monitor status on the web or with our iPhone app, and receive alerts via email, SMS, or iPhone notifications. 

You can sign up for our commercial plans for as little as $10/month, or get additional free monitoring services by referring your friends and colleagues. 

Please visit http://panl.com to get started, or for more information. And please pass this email along to any of your IT contacts that might be interested.

The ALFEW arts cooperative has a brand-new Google+ Page now. Go ahead, check it out!

The Piano. .||.|.||.|.|.||. from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.

Jungle Beauty

Jungle Beauty, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Sadly, there aren't going to be any more of these gorgeous daylilies here this year. This shot is appropriate though as it's a very rainy day today in this, one of the final days of summer.

I hope your summer was as enjoyable as mine was.

Sandra

Sandra, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Strobist: shot outdoors in open shade. I added front fill with a bare AF-540FGZ lying on a table camera-right, remote triggered optically from the K20D.

Reflecting

Reflecting, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Another hat pic

Untitled, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Same girl, same hat, different focus.

Singularity

Singularity, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Le Chapeau Noir

Le Chapeau Noir, a photo by Bruce M Walker on Flickr.

Here's Iryna again, in the "studio" with a borrowed hat on. The studio, of course, is a room at home with all the furniture pushed to one end. :-)