Smashing Pumpkins With High-Speed Sync * Gang Light – Part 2
The line drive at 1/400 = blurry seeds flying everywhere.
GANG LIGHT – Part 2: Just how fast a shutter speed do you need to freeze the seeds flying from a pumpkin that your teenage son is trying to drive over the left field fence? Also, how do you create beautiful light on a dreary, flat light afternoon in a way that let’s you shoot at a really fast shutter speed?
Fortunately, I had a dozen Canon 580EX II Speedlites and an arsenal of RadioPoppers (all on loan from their manufacturers) so that I could try to answer these important questions. As you’ll see below, the answer to the shutter speed question is “really, really fast.” The lighting question takes a bit longer to answer.
The base hit at 1/3200 = still a bit of blur if you look really close.
Freezing Supersonic Seeds
Back in the days when I got my first SLR (hint: Nixon had just resigned), the top shutter speed on most cameras was 1/500″. In comparison, some 30+ years later, the shutter speeds on prosumer DSLRs seem supersonic. You’d think that anything north of 1/2000″ would be fast enough to freeze pumpkin shrapnel. Turns out that pumpkin seeds are supersonic too.
I shot at a variety of speeds — all in full-stop increments from 1/400″ [1/800", 1/1600"...] When I hit 1/3200″, based on a super-chimp of the camera’s LCD, I was sure we had stopped space and time. Back in the studio, with the benefit of Lightroom and a large monitor, I discovered otherwise. Turns out that the magic didn’t happen until 1/6400″.
The home run at 1/6400" = seeds frozen in space.
Left: 1/3200" Right 1/6400" - an important difference in sharpness
My hero shot for the afternoon. Details shown above.
Lighting The Bash With High-Speed Sync
High-speed sync, as I’ve explained elsewhere, changes the way that a Speedlite fires. Rather than one big burst, the camera tells the strobe(s) to fire a continuous series of pulses. The idea behind this technology is that the strobe turns into a continuous light source for the brief duration of the exposure. To get this instantaneous recycle, the power of the flash is greatly reduced. With high-speed sync, you can use virtually any shutter speed on your camera. [Confused? Then click on the link above and read that article before continuing.]
The downfall of high-speed sync is that it significantly reduces the power coming from the strobe. This means a couple of things: 1. you have to move the lights really close to the subject and 2. you need multiple lights.
As I wrote in the piece on Ben Willmore (here), my friends at Canon USA and RadioPopper loaned me an arsenal of Speedlites and Poppers (radio triggers). The lessons I learned with this shoot continue to erode my thoughts about the lunacy of having so many small strobes at hand. In fact, given that the second-generation of Poppers has been launched (details here) and the pesky fiber optic is a thing of the past, setting up so many lights will not be a big deal in the near future.
The Gang Light Rail - 12 Canon 580 EX IIs triggered by RadioPopper P1s
For the pumpkin smash-a-thon, I bolted a dozen Canon Speedlites onto a 7′ piece of red oak. The Gang Light Rail was held aloft by a couple of C-stands. I stood under the rail with the master Speedlite atop my camera. Given that I was close enough to get splattered with pumpkin guts every time, I don’t believe that the strobes could have been fired by traditional eTTL using the infrared receivers on the remote units. They’d have to be able to see my master unit. The geometry just wasn’t there so that all twelve units could see my master.
The pumpkin smash only deepened my affection for RadioPoppers. I was able to move in and out, left and right, without any concern for the position of my master unit in relation to the remote lights. Given that in some shots I was literally a couple of inches from my son’s swing radius, it was very nice not to have to worry about maintaining the line-of-sight between the remotes and the master.
I also have to say that I love the quality of light coming off my Gang Light Rail. The soft quality is created because the width of the lights along the rail wraps the light around my subject. Each strobe unit is a key and fill light at the same time.
You can also change the weather with high-speed sync. Did you notice the difference between the rail shot and my pumpkin shots? The rail shot was made with my camera choosing the shutter speed based on the ambient light. For the pumpkin shots, my manually-set shutter speed was 5-stops below ambient. The light grey sky turned into a storm-filled sky.
I Can’t Think Of Another Way To Light This Shot
Given the camera gear that I have on hand (Canon 5D) I have to live within the limitations of the focal plane shutter. [Again, read my earlier article on high-speed sync to understand why the type of shutter makes a difference with sync speed.]
Many comments on the Willmore piece, both here and on Strobist, suggested that I was a fool to use a dozen Speedlites instead of a big (expensive) studio pack to turn noon to night. I’m called a fool all the time. If I’m going to earn the title, I’d at least like to get it for the right reasons.
So, I’d like to preempt those same comments here and say again “I’m a Canon shooter. I have a focal-plane shutter.” Sure, I could bring in a big (expensive), bi-tube studio pack and fire it off at a low-power setting – which would give me an ultra-fast burst of light. But… there’s that focal-plane sync speed barrier. With my 5D, my sync speed is 1/160″ (the manual may say different, but I’ve fired this camera over 100K times, and my sync speed is 1/160″). So anytime I shoot with a studio pack, the fastest I can shoot is 1/160″ – if I want to illuminate the whole frame with flash. [David Ziser has a very interesting piece about shooting at faster speeds - but the pumpkin shots don't have the composition that David's technique requires.]
Let’s do the photo-math. The hero shot above was made at 1/6400″ at f/5.6. There are five and a third stops of shutter speed between 1/6400″ and my sync speed of 1/160″. So, to light with a big (expensive) bi-tube, studio strobe, I’d have to shoot at 1/160″ because that’s the sync speed for my 5D. To keep the ambient light (the sunlit background) exposure the same, I’d have to stop down five and a third stops from f/5.6 to f/40-something. Funny. I don’t have a lens that goes past f/32. Further, the edges of the frame and the background are better in soft-focus. So, how to shoot at a relatively wide aperture if my fastest shutter speed is 1/160″?
I guess I could throw on my Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter and dial in a ton of neutral density to make the studio pack work at a wide aperture at 1/160″. Maybe. Have you ever looked through a Vari-ND dialed down 6 or so stops? It’s almost impossible to see through. It’s not something that I’d want on the end of my lens when I’m dancing a couple of inches outside the arc of a pumpkin-spattering bat.
Like I said above, the lunacy of having so many Speedlites on a shoot is melting away.
More Gang Light Adventures
Part 1: I Shot Ben Willmore, 12 Speedlite Ring Light
More to come…
Great article Syl! I can’t wait to try this. Oh yeah, anyone wanna loan me a few G’s to go buy 12 580’s and 12 Radio Poppers? Send it to: KLPhoto 1310 Clinton Street #217 Nashville, TN 37211. Hehehee
Your High-Speed Synch articles are really great! Look forward to reading them. Great shots too.
I definitely agree with you about the Radiopoppers. I can’t imagine shooting without them anymore. Really looking forward to the new ones.
Thanks again for the interesting, informative and inspiring articles.
Tom
Another great demo of how these puppies “Pop”! I was in Joe’s class last week and enjoyed the demo you gave us all there at Lepp. The Radio Poppers really seem to be the bleeding edge technology for radio driven TTL and between your demo last week and your post today … I’m sold.
-J.
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Thanks for sharing this. I hope to see Radio Poppers locally available here in my country. Happy Holidays to all.
Great article. Did you go right for the 12 speedlights, or did you gradually build up to that as you found more were needed?
Rob – I went straight for 12. If I’d had 16, I would have used 16. I haven’t shot enough with the Gang Light Rail to know how many is too many. I had to go to 1/6400′ to freeze the seeds. That got me f/5.6. Don’t know the power setting on the flashes as I was in ETTL. If they were firing at full power… I would have needed 24 lights to shoot at f/8 and 48 lights to shoot at f/11. Now that’s crazy, even for me. Ciao!
Thanks for sharing. Was there a particular reason you went with a gang rail / linear set up as opposed to grouping the 580’s in a square or bunched pattern? Could you accomplish the same goal with continuous lighting?
Syl,
Isn’t the 1/6400 getting close to the fireing time of a regular flash burst, which I heard is around 1/8000 th of a second? I wonder what happens when you get to that speed?
I have been photographing dance performances with two off camera flashes. I do not have ETTL capability at this point (I use elinchrom radio triggers) so the best I can do for speed is 1/200. I will definitely look into radio poppers. Thank you for sharing your experiement!
I have a blog about the dance photoshoot at this link:
http://ronaszegi.blogspot.com
Arpad
Ah… just what I was thinking. Didn’t stumble across this, when I wrote my comment on your portrait with “Where is Ben”…
perhaps your subject will be blinded? But, what do you think of those 10Million Candlelight Flashlights? They go for about 50$ a pop. And they’re insanely bright…. you could get 10 for $500?
Dave – Great questions. The rail configuration gave a broad zone of light. Two advantages. First, the quality of light (in my opinion) is beautiful as it wraps the batter (each light is a key light and a fill light at the same time). The rail turns the strobes into a very long, narrow strip light. If they were ganged up close together, it would have looked more like a spot light with harder shadows (not bad, just different). The second advantage of the rail is that I did not have to worry about my batter stepping out of the zone of light. That’s very helpful because I WAS worried about getting hit with the bat. You could accomplish a similar look with continuous lighting: if I had some (I don’t) and if I could flag/snoot/control the hot lights so that the fall-off did not light the surrounding area as well as the batter. In my experience, it takes a large hot light to equal the output of a large quantity of flash. The big difference, from the subject’s point-of-view, is that he’d be nearly blinded and have to squint. Ciao!
Arpad – Good the hear from you again. There really is no such thing as a “regular flash burst”. Flash speed depends upon the overall power of the strobe and the individual power setting that the strobe is set to for the shot. At a high power setting, the flash must fire longer than it has to at a low power setting. My Quantum flash (400 ws) set to full, fires at 1/300″. When set to 1/64 power, it fires in the vicinity of 1/8000″. Your Ranger (a 1100 ws source) when set to the equivalent of 400 ws, is in the range (and I’m guessing here) of 1/1000″. So for the same amount of light, your Ranger is must faster than my Quantum. For the fastest speed with studio packs, it’s best to use a very high-powered system and turn it to a low power setting. As you may know, you can get bi-tube heads for your Ranger that fire really rapidly (it’s essentially two tubes always firing together at half power – hence a shorter burst of light from each is needed). The huge advantage of TTL, if you have enough lights for the power loss of high-speed sync, is that you can shoot at super fast speeds. Another way to eliminate the sync issue with focal-plane shutters is to use a medium-format camera and a leaf shutter. My friend, David Cooper in Vancouver, does beautiful dance photography. Check out David’s work here. Ciao!
Thought about that… – I’d never point a super strong, continuous source, like a raygun flashlight, at a person. The advantage of high-speed sync is that it creates a super-short burst of light. Ben Willmore commented here on PixSylated that he didn’t even see spots after the shot.
Syl,
Thanks for the detailed explanation and response to my question! This is what I was thinking (which apparently is faulty because when I tested it it failed): if based on the power setting the length of the burst changes, then if we know the length of the flash burst (say 1/1000′ ) and have a shutter speed at least this fast than as the shutters travel across the sensor the light should reach the sensor because light is present for at least as long as the shutter is open. As I mentioned something is faulty with my thinking because when I tried it (I tried it with canon 580EXII and nikon sb80 flashes) regardless of the setting on the flash the cut in the image was the same even when I used 1/8000′.
Maybe you can “shed” some light on the problem with my thinking. Thanks!
Arpad
Thanks Syl – brilliant! I suspect that if the Radiopopper people offered a trade in option on Pocketwizards that more than a few PW users would jump ship. Powerful stuff.
Arpad – With a focal plane shutter – like that found in film and digital SLRs – you have two curtains that travel across the film / sensor. The first curtain opens and a fraction of a second later the second curtain begins to close. The gap between the movement of the curtains is the shutter speed. A camera’s sync speed for flash is the fastest shutter speed at which the first curtain has opened completely before the second curtain begins to close. This is the sync speed limit because the film / sensor must be completely open at the instant that the flash fires – so that the whole frame is exposed. At faster shutter speeds, the curtains move so that there’s only a gap between them that travels across the film plane – meaning that one side is exposed a fraction of a second before the other side. So, when the flash fires at a fast shutter speed (regardless of the actual duration of the flash), only a portion of the image is exposed by the gap between the curtains. At that instant, the rest of the frame is covered by the first and/or second curtain.
High-speed sync works because the camera changes the way that the flash fires. Rather than a strong burst, the flash fires a very rapid series of stroboscopic pulses — essentially creating a continuous light source from the flash. In high-speed sync, the flash continues to emit light for the brief duration that the curtain gap is moving across the focal plane – so the whole frame is illuminated. Read my post “Flashing at High Noon‘ for more details on the mechanics of high-speed sync. Look for the link in the article to the diagram on Canon’s site. It should help you visualize the difference between normal and high-speed sync.
Syl,
I understood how ETTL works and also that the two curtains move across the sensor, but I think finally I realize what I did not see: the shutter speed is not how long it takes for this gap to move across the whole sensor but it is the time difference between the lower curtain and upper curtain passing in front of any given point on the sensor.
Thank you very much for this clarification and your detailed explanations! Also thanks for referring me to David Cooper’s site – inspiring work!
Arpad
[...] but I guess that’s what the magic behind the curtain is all about. Check out the full article here, I insist upon [...]
Syl,
(Speculation from one who does not own equipment to test)
A 1/8000 fp-sync flash frame has this sequence:
shutter button
begin HS flash
first curtain starts opening
(1/8000 delay)
second curtain starts closing
first curtain fully open
(1/8000 delay)
second curtain fully closed
end of flash
Overall time ? perhaps 1/250 ? 1/500 ? (wild guesses)
If we could get a studio strobe to begin before first curtain opens, and last until second curtain closes, it might provide a much cheaper alternative to your multi-speedlight setup.
Most studio stobes have longer flash durations than speedlights, so that is a step in the right direction. For once we would want a strobe with a fairly long duration.
Many studio stobes have longer durations when set to lower power (opposite of speedlights), so perhaps we can strech the duration as needed.
The PC connection on the camera will not trigger until first curtain fully open (too late).
We could put a speedlight on the camera, set it to high-speed-sync (to get the pre-opening trigger), and trigger the studio stobe via optical slave.
If the optical trigger reacts fast enough, and our particular strobe has a pulse long and even enough, we should be able to control exposure by aperture and shutter.
Total cost could be about two speedlights. Any many people have most of this stuff.
Would that work?
Dave
Dave – Thanks for your detailed comments. As I understand the mechanics of focal plane shutters, the gap between the timing of the curtains is the shutter speed, ie: 1/8000″ between the time the first curtain is fully open and the second curtain begins to close. My guess is that the transit time is way faster than 1/250″ or 1/500″. I’ll try to find a wizard at Canon that knows.
Mixing studio strobes with TTL-flash is problematic. The TTL system fires a pre-flash from the master to activate the remotes, then the remotes fire a pre-flash so that the camera can calculate the proper exposure. [Look for saucy details about all of this pre-flash business in McNally's upcoming book, The Hot Shoe Diaries.] The problem is that the optical slaves on the studio packs see the pre-flash and fire the strobes — too early. RadioPopper recently announced that their new X system has the ability to solve this pre-flash problem and enable the use of TTL-flash with studio packs. I’ve only seen the pre-production units and have not had a chance to use the real X system yet. The guys at RadioPopper are really bright. I’ve no doubt that this system will revolutionize the flash world.
I think your understanding of the duration of flash (speedlite or studio pack) is backwards. You said “Many studio strobes have longer durations when set to lower power (opposite of speedlights)”. It’s my understanding that all flashes essentially have the same mechanics. A rapid discharge capacitor sends a pulse of electricity through the flash tube and creates a high-voltage spark. The duration of the electrical pulse determines the amount (“power”) of the flash. The longer the duration, the more light comes out of the tube. When a flash is dialed to a lower power setting, the duration of the pulse becomes shorter. In either instance, high power or low power, the tube always reaches its maximum intensity in a handful of micro-seconds. Because all of this happens at the speed of light, we see it as an instantaneous event. To get ultra-fast strobes, pros generally use high-powered packs with bi-tube heads set to a low power setting. If you come upon a system that works differently, don’t hesitate to let me know. Ciao!
Syl,
Looks like other people are already using the studio flash HS Sync idea :
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1025&message=30706855
Dave G
Syl, please be honest about the cost of your rig.
A strobe with the ability to overpower the daylight even more than in your demo, costs FAR less than 12x 580’s, never mind the additional cost of 12x Px receivers- $$$$$$$$. You could buy a Bron or Profoto pack for less.
However, what you have gained is using shutterspeed instead of needing ultra short flash duration to freeze motion. That’s very tricky, and totally unique
I’d be interested in see a test of the power of 4x units bouncing into a silver brolly as daylight portrait fill. This to me, is a more cost realistic serario, and one I’d even consider buying. But would there be enough power to be useful???
Cheers.
The byproduct of that rig is also a cool spread of the light. Strange, narrow, strip-light effect.
Hey Syl,
Found your post on high speed sync to be especially helpful. Tho I really enjoyed this article; realistically I don’t think I’ll ever own 12 Speedlights. Question for you: How many Speedlights would you need to underexpose a very bright sky by 2 stops while still yielding +1 Ex. comp. on 1 of 2 people while shooting from very close thru an umbrella all in direct sunlight? I figure with these variables I’d give myself enough latitude to have some flexibility in a lot of other situations. Sorry the question almost sounds asinine; but I know that all those variables will affect your answer.
Have found your website to be very illuminating (sorry, couldn’t resist
Thanks in advance for your help.
Zpowderhound (as in snowskiing)
Sorry about the typo above I meant “1 OR 2 people” Also, I think I could add about 3 stops of neutral density and still compose, in order to also keep the cost of buying more Speedlights and Radio Poppers down.
Thanks again,
Z
I just found your site today and found this article very neat. I was suprised how many strobes it took to do this. I understand that it could be less if the power required for each strobe was very low. I was also suprised at how fast the shutter had to be to freeze the seeds. If you were just interested in shooting the seeds and you required just one flash what would the shutter speed need to be I wonder… Would a very short flash duration and a shutter speed which was much longer have frozen the seed if this was shot in the dark?
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Awesome stuff!
~dave
Love to see you make your own DVD on the science and art of poppers and Canon flash units.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing!
[...] and why’s of High Speed Sync. Joe McNally has done two great posts on the subject, as well as Syl smashing pumpkins at 1/8000 of second with the Rail of Light. Check out those posts for more tech [...]
[...] that, but nothing really that I could use for Canons….until this morning. M.D. Welch and Syl Arena have covered it quite nicely and show the results of what they’re discussing. (Thanks for [...]
Man, you need to invest in an OC-E3 cord to get around those line of sight issues.
Zack Arias would’ve figured out a way to do it with one light.
Is there a way to modify the Radiopopper PX receiver so that it can be mounted on top of the flash head? I have the new mount (for a Canon 580ex II) but it doesn’t work on a multiple strobe setup like on the FourSquare kit. As the mount uses the flash hot shoe it limits my options. Can the PX receiver be modified by adding the fiber optic cord?
This looks like a fun project. I would like to try this out if I ever get the time. Thanks for the idea.
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