A tip for all of you Pocket Wizard using photographers

I was assisting a photographer friend of mine the other day and we ran into a hiccup with our shot.
We were trying to shoot a building from pretty far away, and fire lights inside it. I think the range must have been just out of reach of the pocket wizards we were using as they were not firing with any kind of consistency.

My first thought was to use a relay, about half way between the photographer and the lights.
It had been some time since I had actually used the relay feature so I had to look up how to do it. After a few minutes on Google, I had my answer. The only problem was, in order to have relay mode work on your pocket wizard, the relaying unit has to be on the hotshoe of a camera. We didn't have another camera available to use for this, so I thought we were done for.

While digging through my gear bag, I came across a little piece of equipment that I almost never use anymore but that ended up making a huge difference. It is an $11 hotshoe adapter that I bought from www.flashzebra.com.



Photo by Mike McLean

What makes this hotshoe special is that it has a pc jack on the side, which sends a signal to the contact on the shoe of any flash and fires it. I originally picked it up because I had several flashes that did not come with pc connectors and this was the cheapest way to get them to work with pocket wizard triggers. However, you can use it to cheat a relay mode with pocket wizards.

To do relay mode, you need a minimum of 3 pocket wizards. The first is used as a remote to fire the shutter wirelessly. The 2nd normally is on the camera's hotshoe, plugged into the camera's wireless shutter release port. When pw #1 is fired, pw #2 gets the signal and sets off the shutter.
While this is happening, the camera senses something on the hotshoe and sends the signal to fire whatever is up there in sync with the shutter. Here is where relay mode kicks in. The Pocket Wizard automatically goes to the next channel down (in our case, channel 2) and transmits the signal to fire #3, which is already set to channel 2.

As I didn't have another camera to use, I thought of this hotshoe adapter. It has a "hot" shoe and a pc connection. I simply put the pocket wizard on the hotshoe adapter,


Photo by Mike McLean
and then added the cable to it.


Photo by Mike McLean
A quick push of the "test" button on pw #1, set to channel 1, fired the lights that were hooked up to pw #3, which were set to channel 2. By doing this, essentially you can take the range of your pocket wizards from 1600ft to 3200ft. All that for $11.

Pretty nice!

Basketball Profile prt 2.

As our first attempt at shooting Dominique was rushed and cramped, we spoke with the Journalism professor and he spoke with the basketball coach for us. He agreed to let us use the locker room during the whole next J.V. game so that we would have more time. We shot a few group shots with a slightly different lighting setup, then got down to business and shot Dominique for about 10-15 minutes. I must say these shots were much better than the first set we did.

Here is one of my favorites from the shoot:


He was pretty relaxed for this one, and we got a lot of good images to chose from.
In addition, I got a couple of good action shots during the game. We went with completely separate sets of lights this time. Both were on separate pocket wizard channels (one of which was 100% mine) so the light recycle time was much better.

Here are two that I like:





Hope you like the images.

Hot Pursuit

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was doing a shoot with a police officer. The shoot didn't go as well as planned unfortunately. We got a late start and I had some equipment problems. Actually I can't blame it on equipment. It was more a brain malfunction. I forgot that for the camera to be able to snap quick photos in remote mode it needed to be pre-focused and not on "auto-focus" mode. It took me 10 minutes to figure that out so that was more time lost.
The next problem I ran into was that the lights on a police car are much brighter than those of an ambulance. This produced a lot of lens flare and every spec of dust on my lens became a big blob of light. So after fixing that we made one last pass and I got a few usable images before moving on to the next setup.

Here is a Horizontal crop of one of the better ones:



To get this shot the camera was mounted to the rear window on the left side of my vehicle. The shutter was fired via pocket wizard, which was set to relay mode and fired a strobe in the police vehicle as well.

Here is another shot we did. The setup was basically the same except the camera was on the hoot of the police car and not on my vehicle.



Special thanks to Jake and to the Allen P.D. for letting us do this shoot!
I'll post some behind-the-scenes photos of this shoot in a little while.

The Shot

This week I Assisted at a hospital and rehab center in Azel, Texas.
The shot I am going to show you today was of a Dr. giving a steroid shot to a patient in the Endoscopy center of the hospital.

We got to the location about 20 minutes before the dr. so we could scout. After looking through several rooms we were pointed towards one of the main "procedure" rooms. In this room was a lot of equipment and electronic equipment that would be used to perform various fases of whatever needed to be done to the patient.

The patient for this set up was to be the nurse who worked in that particular part of the hospital.
She put on a gown and rolled up the back of her scrubs so her back was exposed and we wheeled her into the room. Next we moved all of the equipment and electronics into place, following the direction of the dr. who would normally perform the procedures.

All pretty simple up until now. Now for the lighting. The goal was to create a dramatic portrait of this dr. giving the shot so we lit it from one side only, and left the other side completely dark.
The next issue we faced was a bare wall behind the dr. A light with a snoot and a grid set up right alongside the wall gave it a streaking effect and gave something interesting to look at instead of just a semi-black wall.

We tried a few shots like this and decided to make one last adjustment. We added a 3rd light with a snoot and blue gel, aimed at the instrument that was directly in the foreground.
For some reason blue always makes things look more scientific or medical. I've never understood why really but it is almost a given that if you are doing a medical shot you will use a blue gel...

Here is the resulting shot with all the lights in place:

Here are some shots of the lighting setup we used:

In this image you can see the light used to streak on the wall and the light used to hit the right side of the instrumentation in the foreground.

In this image you can see the main light, hitting the dr. from the left side and leaving the right side dark.

By leaving the right side of the image dark it created a very dramatic scene. However at the same time, the streaking light in the background and the blue light - both coming from the right side of the photo help to create balance in the image.

Hope you enjoyed the little "show and tell" session for today.