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Danny Steyn is known around the world as being a leading model and glamour photographer. For the best in Model Portfolio Photography call Danny Steyn Photography in Fort Lauderdale FL. Call 954 351 8884. We shoot all types of model photography, including model portfolios, headshots and portraits, zed and compcards, we shoot casual and lifestyle models, bikini and swimsuit models, lingerie models, glamour models, topless and nude models. Call us today
We had the distinct pleasure of photographing the amazingly gorgeous South African model Michelle Chrystal as the 2014 December Playmate for Playboy South Africa. Here are some of the smoking hot images from her shoot on location in South Africa! Be sure to check out her full pictorial in Playboy South Africa!
You can read my previous hypersync testing results here:- Hypersync Test 1, Hypersync Test 2, Hypersync Test 3, Hypersync Test 4 (Diana), Hypersync Test 5, Hypersync Test 6 (Emilee)
This test with Alexandria was a complete departure from my previous tests which had been conducted to establish that I that I could comfortably shoot at 1/2,000th of a second at 100 ISO and F2.8 in bright outdoor light with my Nikon D3, Alien Bees and Pocket Wizard transceivers. And I had established that I could shoot all the way up to 1/8,000th of a second with minimal cropping to the frame.
With that knowledge I wanted to try something completely different. I have played with freezing liquids in a studio setting using the fast flash duration of speedlights to freeze the liquid, but I wanted to see if I could use fast shutterspeed to freeze the liquid outdoors in bright sun, but overpowering the sun with studio strobes.
Freezing Liquids Outdoors Concept
You may ask, why do I want to freeze water outdoors in a bright setting?
Well, when you freeze liquids in a studio setting you are typically shooting against a dark background (typically black) and backlighting the liquid with the speedlights. There is generally no color in the liquid. For instance, frozen water looks like a lovely mass of molten acrylic, shiny, sparkly and totally clear with the back studio backdrop showing through the liquid. And of course when shooting opaque liquids like milk you end up with a frozen white liquid with droplets.
And the uniformity of color and background makes Photoshop work so simple that creation of composite “liquid dresses” whether they be water or milk, are relatively easy to shoot and composite in various ways.
But if you shoot outdoors in a bright colorful location, the clear water will refract all the colors of the background into the frozen mass, essentially creating a molten multicolored acrylic canvas, as you can see. And with the detail and color contained in the water, you really need to capture the full image in the camera, as it will be a total pain to build up a composite image in Photoshop.
Practice makes perfect
I have tried freezing water outside in bright sun with hypersync several times in the past all with less than perfect results. My main issue is that I always shoot glamour at around F2.8 to F4.0 with long lenses in order to have the sharp model pop off the blurred background. But when you throw water in front of or behind the model, now you need depth of field otherwise the water splashes will be out of focus, essentially destroying the intended effect (as seen in the image below with two water streams separated in by approximately 4 feet).
So now this means you need to have a smaller aperture to create a larger depth of field to have both the model and the water in focus. Or you can shoot with a short lens, and have the entire scene in focus, something that I almost never do in glamour.
So during this shoot I was totally out of my comfort zone.
Also, shooting at smaller apertures with hypersync adds another wrinkle. When you shoot with hypersync you are not getting the full flash illumination that you would normally get at the standard camera flash sync speeds. You are getting the tail of the flash, very often a small fraction of the rated flash power of the head. And when shooting with hypersync, not only is the aperture affecting the flash illumination, but the shutterspeed now also has a linear relationship with the flash illumination. The faster the shutterspeed the less flash illumination provided.
Hypersync Settings – Nikon D3, 4 x Alien Bees 640WS at full power, Pocket Wizards
So, in trying to freeze water outside with flash, not only do I have to go to a smaller aperture, but I also have to shoot at a shutterspeed of somewhere around 1/4,000th to 1/8,000th of a second, both variables killing the already reduced flash power available. This only leaves ISO, so once again I am forced out of my comfort zone and I am forced with the flash power I have available to shoot at way higher ISO’s than I ever do in my glamour work. For this test I ended up shooting at around 1,000 to 1,600 ISO, and of course deal with the associated noise/grain.
The Shoot
I also had an idea to incorporate an assortment of balloons in the water to add excitement and add more specular highlights so we all spent an age inflating, tying off and weighting down 50 odd balloons, and trying to get them to cooperate. Unfortunately the translucency of the balloons meant that flash power the perfectly exposed the model completely blew out the highlights in the balloons, so that idea never really worked.
The gorgeous Playboy model Alexandria Kingsbury graciously collaborated with me on this project and I was ably assisted by two Art Institute students Brian and Lazaro. I tried all aperture, shutterspeed and ISO combinations, along with a host of lighting approaches, using scrims, modifiers, barn-doors and flags and finally nailed down something that worked. And of course there were hundreds upon hundreds of buckets of water tossed in front, behind and on top of our lovely model, all trying to nail that one defining shot that I had visualized in my mind. Of course, converting the visual idea into a finished product was way more difficult than I had imagined and as far as I am concerned the defining shot never materialized.
Once again Hypersync allowed me to do something that would not be possible using HSS or standard flash sync speed, and I am pretty encouraged with the results. However, Hypersync once again proved to be problematic by not being consistent throughout the shoot. This further reinforces me experience that the technology is great for personal work but is not reliable enough for me to use with my commercial clients.
We had the recent pleasure of having our stunning images of Nikki grace the pages of Playboy South Africa – April 2014 Edition! If you missed seeing those images here’s a small sample of some that we shot (some that made it and some that didn’t) for this pictorial plus some behind the scenes from the shoot! Enjoy!
Our lovely and talented make up artist, France working her magic on set!
Over the years we’ve had the pleasure to work with some awesomely ripped individuals in the fitness industry. Some of them have been just regular people looking to get some fitness photographs of all their hard work, to professional fitness trainers looking for promotional fitness photography for their business, to full on body building competitors coming to us right before or after their body building competitions. Of course the idea is to capture the athelet when they are at their peak physical shape, just days before the contest, when they are at their best! Our fitness photography has been featured inside and on the covers of various fitness and muscle magazines throughout the world and we are thrilled to have been able to work with these amazingly dedicated fitness individuals.
Take a look at some of our newest fitness photography images ….
Pocket Wizard’s hypersync function allows you to use flash at shutter speeds well over the standard maximum synch speed of your camera (in most cases the max flash synch speed is around 1/250th of a second).
Sure I know I am late to the game, but the ability to sync flash at shutter speeds well above the camera manufacturer’s flash synch speed is a huge advantage for photographers like myself. While researching the various approaches to making this work, I became very aware that most photographers yearn for more information, so in an attempt to help photographers like myself wander through the hypersync / high speed sync morass of conflicting opinion, I offer my own journey of discovery. Hopefully some of this helps.
I typically shoot outdoor glamour and this has been paying the bills for most of my life, but like most photographers I wanted to be able to shoot my models with flash outdoors at any time, including the mid day sun, but at wide apertures to create the shallow depth of field that blurs the background and makes the model pop out of the shot. But the midday sun necessitates shutter speeds way higher than the camera’s flash sync speed, even at low ISO values. So I was confined to using either early morning light with flash or typically shooting with reflectors once the sun got higher.
My typical early morning sunrise beach shots typically required shutter speeds in the range of 1/250th – 1/2,000th of a second at my preferred shooting apertures ranging between F2.8 and F4.0 at 100 ISO.
Several years ago I experimented with my Nikon D3x and the Nikon SB 800 and SB 900 flash heads doing the Nikon HSS high speed synch. And while I was able to get some decent exposures all the way up to 1/8,000th of a second, for the most part it was a very unsatisfactory approach for my work from many viewpoints.
Since the SU 800 and SB 900 infra-red signals were not reliable, I tried out the Radio Popper transceivers that convert the infra red signal to radio signal. The flash signals were transmitted way more reliably than with the SU 800 SB900 combo on its own, but the other issues above remained.
I eventually gave up on High Speed Sync for any commercial shooting but still played with it for my personal work as I love to experiment and try new things
So last year I started playing with the pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 for Nikon. I wanted to see if the HSS mode was any better. The Pocket Wizard radio signal was totally reliable, the flashes fired 100% of the time even over long distances in the midday sun but sadly the power issue of the speed lights was no different and the heads had to be placed way too close to the model to make them usable.
So I put the gear away in frustration and went back to what worked for me in the past. But after a few months I felt that I should give it another try, and this time I was going to focus on Hypersync and not High Speed Sync. For those of you who are not sure of the difference between High Speed Sync and Hypersync, I suggest reading up on this as the two approaches are very different.
Hypersync technology is achieved using the Pocket Wizard radio transmitters and receivers, PLUS software to create a pre-trigger event that allows most of the illumination from a particular flash head to synchronize with the higher than normal shutter speed on a particular camera. Please note that this very dependent on the equipment used. The brand and model of flash will have an effect, as will the brand and model of camera used. You must experiment with your equipment to see what works best for you.
You can read all about my very promising first foray into Hypersync using my Nikon D3x camera, Pocket Wizard TT1 transmitters, Pocket Wizard TT5 transceivers, and my Nikon SB 900’s and SB 800 speedlights.
While the Hypersync yielded way better performance and reliability with the Nikon SB 800 and SB 900 Speedlights than with HSS, the lack of power was still the main issue. So I started experimenting with our traveling mono lights, the Alien Bees B1600’s that provide 640WS at full power. Paul C Buff has built a superb reputation with these lights by providing arguably the best customer service in the industry as well as exceptional value, and these lights have been our go-to location lights for years.
Following the instructions on the Pocket Wizard site
Since I have the Pocket Wizard AC3 zone controller to control the power settings of the Alien Bees, I also wanted to try the AC3 out it in this test. From the Pocket Wizard Wiki I was able to determine that the AB 1600 flash allows shutter speeds up to 1,000th second with very even illumination. At shutter speeds above 1/1,000th the clipping or banding starts to become noticeable on the full frame, but can be eliminated by cropping the image if needed.
I conducted this test in the late afternoon shooting directly into the setting sun. As I already knew that 1/1,000th of a second was achievable, I kept the ISO constant at 100, the shutterspeed constant at 1/1,000th of second and adjusted the aperture to get the most pleasing background exposure
Everything I had read indicated that you needed to fire the flashes at full power as this gave the longest flash duration and this would provide the best illumination with the elevated shutter speeds. So the first test was conducted with the following settings
I was specifically looking to see if there would be any banding at the 1/1,000th shutterspeed and if so would it be more noticeable at smaller apertures. As you can see from the images below, there was no detectable banding at 1/1,000th second and while the aperture selection affected the overall exposure, the smaller aperture did not yield any banding at all.
As expected, reducing the aperture reduces both the ambient light and flash exposure.
I was so encouraged with the ability to immediately sync at 1/1,000th of a second without any banding (2 full stops faster than my Nikon D3x max flash sync speed of 1/250th ) that I decided to see for myself what the real limit would be with shutterspeed.
So this time I set my Nikon D3x camera and Alien Bees flash settings as follows
As you can see all the images are a bit overexposed at F2.8, full power and the flash to model distance I selected, but it did reveal the shutterspeed at which the banding becomes noticeable. There is absolutely no visible banding at the bottom of the image at 1/1,000th.
At 1/2,000th there is just a hint of imperceptible banding, but as we get to 1/4,000th and 1/8,000th it is very noticeable but in reality the banding only projects into the bottom edge of the landscape formatted images. A simple cropping of less than 10% of the image yields a very usable image will almost no detectable banding at 1/8,000th of an image. WOW.
Knowing which side of your frame will be banded and how far it will project into the image will allow me to compose the shot for cropping in such a way as to yield very acceptable shots a 1/8,000th of a second, a major breakthrough for my photography. This is very exciting.
Interesting to note. Now since we are dealing with a flash exposure that is inherently longer than the shutter speed, increasing shutter speed now not only reduces the ambient light exposure but also now reduces the flash exposure, something that must now be factored into the exposure calculations.
Based on the very encouraging results I obtained at full power, I wanted to see if they would be dramatically different at lower power settings, so I immediately lowered the power to ½ power using the AC3 Zone Controller, and tried the same test, varying the shutter speeds.
So this time I set my Nikon D3x camera and the Alien Bees flash settings as follows
As you can see all the banding results are almost identical to those achieved at the full power setting. There is absolutely no visible banding at the bottom of the image at 1/1,000th, but it does become noticeable as the shutter speed increases. However, once again, cropping 10% of the image yields a very usable image will almost no detectable banding at 1/8,000th of an image. WOW.
But even more important is that I now have options. The ability to reduce flash power and get great exposures at elevated shutterspeeds is HUGE. So instead of being forced to change the flash-to-model distance to get the right exposure, I now have the option of using the AC3 controller on top of the camera to reduce the flash power and this will further allow me to get more exposures from the battery.
To be honest I am more than thrilled with the results so far. More testing is needed! But remember that shooting directly into the sun will reveal all the sensor dust bunnies that you never knew you had!
Click here to see my next test utilizing Nikon D3X and Alien Bees with Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5
Pocket Wizard’s hypersync function allows you to use flash at shutter speeds well over the standard maximum synch speed of your camera (in most cameras the max flash synch speed is around 1/250th of a second).
So why would you want to use flash at speeds higher than 1/250th? There are many reasons, ranging from freezing action in sports photography to my case where I shoot models outdoors and I run into the typical issues all photographers face……
If you shoot the model in direct sunlight and you want to use a wide aperture to create a narrow depth of field that blurs the background and makes the model pop out of the shot, then you have to use higher shutter speeds, even at low ISO values. My typical early morning sunrise beach shots require shutter speeds in the range of 1/1,000th – 1/2,000th at my preferred shooting apertures ranging between F2.8 and F4.0 at 100 ISO. This means that you cannot use flash and you need to use reflectors to fill in the shadows.
And while approach this has worked incredibly well for me over the years there are several issues created with the reflector approach
So it would be really great to shoot at 1/2,000th of a second at f2.8 and use flash to fill in the shadows. This gets around both of the problems above as the model no longer has to deal with a bright light continuously in her face, and it also allows you to orientate the model in such a way that the wind is blowing her hair in an acceptable direction.
There are at least two methods that allow you to use flash at higher than normal synch speeds
In this test I am purely going to see what results I can achieve with my Nikon D3x and my Nikon SB800 and SB 900 strobes in hypersync mode. I have 6 of these but will only use 4 in this test. I wanted to do the test with the default PW settings (not adjusting any timing offsets in the software application) to see if it would work and then only make adjustments if the results were unacceptable.
I wanted to do the test at midday to deal with the harshest conditions but rain kept me inside and the test was conducted late in the afternoon. I shot at 100 ISO and F.8 with a 70-200mm lens.
I first checked ambient light with no flash to determine what I considered the ideal exposure to give me the underexposed saturated background that I wanted
While I actually liked the look of the background exposure at 1/800th, I settled on 1/1250th of a second to see if I could get the flash to synch at shutter speeds that I would typically deal with in my normal early morning beach shoot scenarios.
I positioned the flash units as follows. Note that I ganged two SB 900’s as my main lights as the distance to the “model” was too close to get even illumination over the full length of the model with just one bare flash head, so I added a second head lower down on the light stand to illuminate her “legs”.
The right hand side of her face was bathed in direct afternoon light. Below you will see a couple of examples. All images were shot in landscape format. None of the images below have been edited other than the text placed over the images. They are just as they came out of the camera, no adjustment of levels, color, contrast, saturation etc. They are also shown full height so we can see if any banding occurs (bottom of frame in landscape format on Nikon cameras)
I am happy to say that I was able to get very usable results with the 4 Nikon flash heads at speeds all the way up to 1/8000th of a second at F2.8 and at F4.0. The minute I tried stopping down the aperture to F5.6 or smaller, the flash units were not able to illuminate the model adequately, so this is where the studio lights would start to come into play. I achieved these results with the default PW settings, no adjustments were made to the flash offset timing.
It is important to note that when using hypersync, in these elevated shutter speeds, the flash duration is now inherently longer than the shutter speed, so now not only does the aperture control the flash exposure, but so too does the shutter speed. This is completely different to shooting with flash at shutter speeds under the sync speed where shutter speed has not effect on the flash exposure.
This means that if you want to shoot at really high shutter speeds around 1/4000th or faster, you will have to gang several speedlights together to compensate for the reduction in illumination.
In summary the PW TT1 and TT5 units allow you to use Hypersync with Nikon (and other brands of speedlights) at much higher than standard shutter speeds. This allows you to
And I encourage you to do your own testing. Do not rely on my information as all cameras and flash units behave differently in Hypersync.
Click here to see the next HYPERSYNC test