Crazy Brian and Stolen Studio Time

So, we have this friend. Brian. And for those of you who haven't met him, lets just say that he's special.

Being around Crazy Brian is kinda like when you read about the drunk hillbillies driving around drunk throwing lit Blackcats from a big bag of fireworks in the Camaro. You know what happens. And its not nice to the Camaro (heeey, take it easy on the leather maan).

At one point in his long and not so distinguished academic career, Crazy Brian was living in College Station and possibly going to A&M. Or not. After 8 or so years of "college," it all seems to run together. Regardless, he was working in a photo store running the processing machine. Lets just say that given Crazy Brian's attention to detail and incredibly responsible work ethic, I'm sure there were some very happy photo customers in Bryan/College Station.

I went to visit Brian one day and he took me to work. I'm not sure if he had a supervisor but I certainly assume she or he was not there at this time. While I was there, he made 8x10 blowups of drunken sorority girls that had been dropped off for processing, backed up the toilet, broke the toilet in half, and managed to accidentally cross-process someone's film (see post below). Mostly though, I remember that we grabbed a roll of film off the shelf, snuck into the photo studio in this little store, shot a roll of ridiculousness, and then immediately processed it to see the results. It was the first time I'd gotten to shoot with studio lighting and I certainly had an animated subject. I can't honestly tell you that any of the materials which captured the following image were obtained morally, ethically, or legally. That said, the store is gone (can't imagine how they could have been losing money), Crazy Brian doesn't work there or live there anymore, and I feel it is now time to unveil a masterpiece:

Crazy Brian captured in the Studio

Cross Processed from Back in the Day

This is an image I ran across recently as I was working through my 900 something images from my portfolio which I have scanned but need to retouch. I think its particularly fun.

This portrait was shot in natural light outdoors on negative film (Fuji Superia 400.. like you get for cheap from a discount store). However, when I processed it, I dropped it off and asked that it be treat it like slide film. Accordingly, they screwed it completely up. This technique is called cross processing.



This was shot sometime in 2004 of my friend Ari Briskman who was a graduate student in Radio, TV, Film at UT Austin and is now working in L.A.

Here's another fun cross-processed image of Jen and Heather just after I met them. Wo - Jen's hair was so short then!

I'm A Flasher

Well, last night Ryan and I did a number of strobe (flash) tests with some new gear that we've been trying out.

First, we experimented with 2x Canon 550EX (now replaced by the 580EX ) strobes and 1 Canon 420EX (now replaced by the 430EX ) strobe utilizing their integrated slaving ability. By using one of the 550's as a the master and the other two strobes as slaves, we were able to dial in a particular ratio of fill light as seen in this image:

This is a ratio of 1:4 (top light to rear left backlight). The rear right flash (the smaller 420EX) was set to -2 stops of underexposure.

Be aware that these files have not been corrected in any way other than setting white balance in Adobe Camera RAW (exposure @ 100, shadow @ 0, brightness @ 50, contrast @ 0, saturation @ 0, curve @ linear, detail @ 0). Originally shot in Adobe RGB (1988), these files were converted to sRGB by Adobe Image Processor when they were converted to JPEG. Unlike most of my galleries, these files can be viewed at original (6 megepixel) resolution.

View Gallery

Given our druthers, we found the entire experience to be extremely frustrating. Don't get me wrong, the flashes are amazing and seem to automatically create great images. However, compared to studio strobes... whoa... what's going on and who's in control here?

Essentially the Canon strobes are extremely intelligent and the master only seems to call out for the other flashes to fire when it deems appropriate.

Here's an interesting shot that I took on a whim:

We were playing with a new Chinese Wireless Transmitter that I purchased off Ebay for essentially nothing compared to the (much) more expensive Pocket Wizards. Ryan was running around the house trying to see how far this transmitter would fire from. The answer, a LONG way (they claim 300' but I'm not sure I believe that). Anyway, I went and found him as the studio strobe was still happily firing as I walked around the house. I found him in the garage and he had the flash pointed down so this is a bounce shot off of unpainted concrete in almost complete darkness. Ooooh! Moody!

So, what did we learn? The Alien Bee's studio strobes are amazing compared to battery powered on-camera strobes... they're wicked fast to recharge, insanely bright, and much more easily manually controllable. Well duh, I just explained the reason anybody would buy studio strobes. Regardless, the portable flashes are of great use as well (no wires) as I'll likely demonstrate tomorrow when I shoot the Austin Apartment Assoication's Casino Night in a dimly-light cowbow dance hall (no natural light for those folks...). What else did we learn? Just as everyone says, there's soooo many dimensions to good lighting. We learned that there's about a billion things we don't know.