Ghetto lighting.
Posted in film, it all comes down to experience, landscape, learning on July 9, 2008 by thewolfbrigade
Most photographers who are even remotely serious about improving their technique will have heard of Strobist, and may even have it in their RSS feed. Me? I have no idea about off camera lighting and although I have heard of Strobist, it’s always seemed slightly prohibitive in terms of cost.
The word SB600 seems to get thrown around a lot in connection with Strobist; I recently saw the price of an SB200 and figured that there was no way I’d ever be able to justify to myself spending that much on just a flash. (I’d rather buy another camera 
)
So when a flickr contact recently posted some impressive home brew light painting, it got me thinking about my options. Sure I don’t have wireless flashes and numerous tripods with softboxes and tripods to mount them on, but I did have an ancient Mecablitz BCT4 with a manual firing option. I also had a torch similar to the one used on a recent outing, that had proven that fancy equipment wasn’t needed to get a great shot.
Ideas started floating around in my head.
Generally I go out with mates who shoot digital while I shoot film, so I know pretty soon whether my suggestions will work or not. At least during a full moon….
Shooting at night is reasonably challenging, as to achieve a half decent star trail ideally there should be no moon, with a minimum exposure time starting at 15 minutes. Room for error? Not a lot. Even checking on my mates preview screens doesn’t help as after waiting around for half an hour or more for a single exposure, I rarely have the patience to reshoot.
Regardless, we headed out last night. In true wolf_brigade style I hadn’t set anything up, figuring I’d sort it all out on location, despite this approach causing headaches in the past. With only a quarter moon there wasn’t a lot of light. Great for star trails but no so good for trying to setup something new that required light to construct!
I’d brought along a couple of things:
1 packet of orange/red cellophane
1 packet of blue cellophane
1 pair of scissors
1 torch (12 volt battery style with square plastic body) that was found on a previous noctography expedition
1 torch similar in strength to a mag light, and similar in style to the type issued to the SAS; a remnant of my days as a security guard
1 Bronica SQi as a backup camera
1 roll of expired film in box for above camera
1 Pentax 645n with 6 shots left on 100ISO expired Konica Centuria Super
I gold and silver reflector
I roll of Leukoplast (a medical grade tape in lieu of the masking tape I couldn’t find)
1 (rarely used) digital camera to test lighting conditions
1 Slik tripod - my main one
1 dodgy 1 meter high tripod bought for $10 at an antique store so that I had a sturdy portable tripod for pinhole use
1 Gossen Lunasix exposure meter
1 cable release
1 digital countdown timer
First let’s eliminate the “useless items” for night exposure:
Bronica - sure it was nice to have a backup camera, but a set of batteries for the Pentax would have been a smarter move.
Exposure meter - I know from experience the exposure times now, but this is kind of like a security blanket.
The actual roll of spare film.
That’s it! The rest was put together MacGuyver style to allow my mate to take the above shot. Want to know how? Read on…
First I setup the torch I’d found shining up the tree’s trunk. Looked ok, but the lighting was very direct and didn’t illuminate much. I then tried hooking it on a branch, but it kept slipping down facing the ground. Enter the reflector. The gold side provided the best light as the slightly warm cast would help separate the illuminated tree from the deep blue night sky. However, the light wasn’t very strong as you can see here:
Then I remembered about the other flashlight. But with the heat it emitted, it was likely the cellophane sheet would literally melt after a few minutes. How to solve this? Enter the film box from the spare roll of film. Fashioning a home brew style snoot, I slipped it over the torch leaving enough of a gap so as to allow a buffer for the heat. I then taped a small sheet of orange cellophane over the top, cut with the scissors and secured with the leukoplast. I then taped that to the antique store tripod leg. Like so:
I then used a fork in the tree branches to mount my tripod light so that it was facing up. The complete setup looked like this:
Using the digital camera to document my progress, I felt pretty happy. I then setup the Pentax on the Slik tripod with the cable release and took a 15 minute (or thereabouts) exposure:
But Ben’s looked better, so I put it as the opening photo
Almost all the equipment used right? Well all except for the blue cellophane. We played with that later on, though my shots didn’t turn out too well because I was trying some weird techniques and completely forgot about setting the right focus…So in the meantime I highly recommend you check out another of Ben’s shots in which he used my ghetto style lighting I had set up under the bridge for one of my shots as well as passing car headlights to his advantage.
