Roberts Raw!

› archive for ‘Lighting’

Spring Cleaning – How to Clean your Closet

Its time for spring cleaning; out with the old, in with the new.  Or just out with the old.

If you have old cameras, flashes, lenses etc.  We are happy to help you unload some of the old goodies that haven’t seen the light of day for awhile.  If you have questions regarding trading in products for something new or would like us to buy some of your antiquated equipment, drop us a line here. A little birdy told me that earlry May will bring our always popular “Cash For Cameras” event during the Spring Expo.  If you don’t want it, there’s a great chance that our buyers do.

read more



Rogue Grids Tighten Your Flash Up

Coming soon to our shelves will be a neat new product from Rogue, called appropriately enough the Rogue Grid. The Rogue Grid is a stackable grid system for your hotshoe flash. There’s a bevel/holder, into which you can slot either of two grids, or both. You can see the grids are slotted, so they keep proper alignment, which means in a very tiny package, you have the option of three different grid tightnesses (45, 25, and 16 degrees).

The grid holder is all of 1.2″ deep, and the whole package with the adjustable tension strap for mounting it to your flash weighs just 3.5oz, which makes this one of those no-brainer tip-ins for your field kit. And, just in case you’re wondering why you’d want a grid, the picture below does a pretty good job of showing just how the progressively tighter grids affect your light output.

Pricing will be coming soon, as will their presence on our website. Keep your eyes peeled.



Lighting Carmel

We’re making Carmel a little brighter these days.  Several thousand watt seconds brighter.

The Carmel location now has a completely functional lighting department.  I am still waiting on some product deliveries, but the display is up and running.   Whatever your lighting needs, from small flash to the big 2400 w/s generators, we can service your requests.  Please stop by to check us out and let me know what you might like to have on hand and regularly available.  Hit the jump for more info!

read more



Nikon Pocketwizard Flex TT5 and Mini TT1

Hello Everyone!  Happy New Year to you all.

To follow up Marc Lebryk’s excellent post on the Beta Pocketwizard units for Nikon, i wanted to tell you a little about my own use of the units and how they performed under my testing.  For my day to day purpose of standard flash use, the SU-800 and CLS handles almost all my needs.  My testing of these units was all about freezing motion with extremely fast shutter speeds.  One of the greatest features of the Flex/Mini units is what Pocketwizard terms Hypersyncing.  This feature, much like the Nikon AutoFP capability, allows a shooter to use faster than normal sync speeds (shutter speeds) with high powered flash output.

read more



Area Photographer Reviews PocketWizard TT1, TT5 for Nikon

Area photographer, Roller Derby / WFTDA aficionado, and Roberts customer, Mark Lebryk has blogged his hands-on experience with the PocketWizard TT1 and TT5 sync units for Nikon flashes. Mosey on over there to check out his impressions.

Please note that we’ve been waiting about 2 years for these bad-boys, and that we won’t have ‘em until we have ‘em, and that pre-ordering them on our website gets your name put in line – it doesn’t guarantee you a product. Once we have them in stock in quantities to satisfy out back-orders, we’ll put them up for sale online.

In the mean-time, check out Mark’s write-up and think about what you wanna use these TT1 and TT5 units for.



Lighting On Location – Controlling Mixed Lighting

The so-called “Golden Hours” of light are an opportune time to shoot portraits, but all too often we are limited to shooting around others schedules or need to make use of a full day to complete the job or jobs.  There are times i will spend entire Saturdays shooting senior portraits.  From 9AM to 7PM, 5 seniors, 5 sessions.  5 times the business.  Lets forget for a moment it’s near impossible to rouse the average high school senior out of bed at 7am on a Saturday.  If i limited myself to the golden hours, i would have 1.5 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the evening.  I’m not really capitalizing on my schedule.   We shoot when we need to, not always when we want to.  Tips and tricks after…

read more



Lighting Control – Mixing Flash with Ambient

First things first, we will be discussing some mildly advanced techniques and controls of flashes.  Because there are many manufacturers of lighting equipment it is impossible to accurately describe a specific process for each brand or product.  Thus, i will be using as generic terms as i can and will expect you to have read or at least have good intentions of reading the product instruction guide.  Yes, i know the guides are boring and may as well be written in Sanskrit, but that’s no excuse.  The information in the instruction manuals is important and well worth your time.  If you want to get the most out of your lighting equipment, you must know how to control it.  Incidentally, this goes for cameras, too.

Generally speaking there are a lot of rules in photography that can be bent or broken.  Contrary to popular belief there is no perfect f-stop or shutter speed or focal length to make a perfect picture.  However, photography is based on math and physics, so there are some fixed values and ideas to wrap your minds around.  The following information is basic instruction to control your photographic lighting.

read more



Power of Light – Small Flash Pt. 2

To continue our small flash theme from last week, lets talk in detail about some regular uses of speedlights.  In an effort to keep this simple, i will limit this post to two styles of photography: macro (close-up, high magnification) and portrait photography.

Macro photography offers a view of the world in a way that most people don’t have a chance to see it.  The trouble is you are often shooting into dark places and a little extra light can make a really big impact on your photograph.  In the image above, i used a single SB900 Nikon Speedlight triggered wirelessly with the built-in Nikon CLS control, a Nikon D90 and the AF-S 105mm f/2.8 VR Micro.  CLS is the “Creative Lighting System” and it offers some of the very best abilities in the flash photography market.  Nikon has always been pretty serious about speedlights and the role they carry out in photography.

read more



The Power of Light – Make Use of Small Flashes

If you haven’t embraced the abilities of small flashes yet, then you might be missing out on some of the most enabling aspects of today’s photographic world.  I “chucked” (no correlation to the venerable Mr. Pace) my studio strobes several years ago in favor of a portable, light-weight lighting solution.  Anything from macro photography such as jewelry, flowers or bugs to location shooting like weddings or family portraits to shooting in the studio, small flashes have found a niche.

Today’s flashes are more powerful and faster recycling than ever before, and can be accessorized with secondary power packs like the new Quantum Blade to further increase performance.  RF transmitter/receiver systems like Pocketwizard’s Plus II’s have supplied reliable triggering devices for years, and most recently the TT1 Mini and TT5 Flex from Pocketwizard have TTL (auto flash) capabilities which further increase the level of quick, precise control.  Light modifiers (e.g. umbrellas, soft boxes, snoots, grids, beauty dishes) are now built specifically for small flash usage.  The bottom line: its never been easier to shoot high quality flash photography.

Im certainly not saying there is no reason to own studio equipment, and some of the newer strobes are almost as small as Nikon’s and Canon’s Speedlights.  For example Elinchrom’s Quadra RX are powerhouse units and weigh in at a measly .25Kg or about a half a pound.  More to come on the Quadra system.  Studio strobes will generally put out much more power than small flashes which will allow you greater control of ambient light.   However, a strobe will not travel as easily, always have its own portable power system or be able to sync at faster shutter speeds than today’s small flashes.

In the next post i will talk in depth about how to control small flashes in different situations.

Stay tuned…




The Online Lighting Diagram Creator Solves Problem Of Diagramming Lights Online

If you’ve spent any time in either the studio or the field fussing with lighting, you know how problematic finding good lighting set-ups can be. And how much harder remembering good solutions or explaining set-ups to assistants or even models can be. But, these days, thanks to a free online service, you can quickly and easily diagram out your lighting solutions. And soon, you’ll be able to create an account to save and share your set-ups, attach images of the results, add notes, and more.

As mentioned, it’s free for most circumstances. Per their site:

The Online Lighting Diagram Creator is free of charge for non-commercial projects and for professional photographer websites, photography blogs, photography forums as long as the OLDC services and products are accessible by all visitors at no charge. All free of charge use must include the footer with the credits.

For books and DVD illustration, a donation of at least USD 10 is required.

If you are giving [sic] paid for tuitions, then a donation of USD 50 should cover for a year.

So, if you need to diagram out some lighting set-ups, this is a handy and easy tool. It took me maybe a minute to make the diagram above (which I used once while, I kid you not, shooting zombie pin-ups). And, did we mention free?




Switch To Mobile Site