The Reward for Waiting for the Right Light

Also in this edition:

• Walt Disney was a Genius
• RX1R III ebook now available in all formats!
• 2023 annual for CameraCraft magazine now available!

So here we were on our honeymoon in Alaska 20 years ago.  I was traveling with my Minolta Maxxum 7D, a six-megapixel DSLR.  I stopped at the side of the road to take a picture of Mt. Denali.

"You know", I said to my new wife, "If we wait about 90 minutes, the sunset light on the mountain will make for a much better shot!"  

And so we waited.  

As it turns out, the shot came out maybe 5% better.  (You never know about these things.)  And perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of that story is that we're still married.

Still, it's a valuable lesson I teach in my seminars - waiting for the right light (or coming back when the light is better) can mean the difference between a snapshot and a shot you can sell.  If good light is the essence to good photograhy, then surely it must be worth seeking and worth waiting for.  (This is even more true for stock photographers, whose images must be better than the next guy's - otherwise you don't eat.)

I have many examples of this - where waiting made more than a 5% difference.  (As always, click on any image to view larger and sharper.)

The Sydney Opera House, at 3 PM and 7 PM.

The Petronas Towers, at 1 PM and 7 PM.

Much of the time the problem with photographing structures during daytime is that the dynamic range of the scene greatly exceeds what your camera can capture.  By waiting until the blue hour, the brightness of the sky comes down, and in many cases the structure lights itself up, brining the highs AND lows into the dynamic range of what your camera can capture.

Like with this hotel in Hawaii.  A normal camera couldn't capture the whole scene during daylight; but at twilight the highs come down and the darks light themselves up, bringing the dynamic range of the scene into balance.

Here's a case where waiting yielded disappointing light.  The example and how I fixed it can be found in this blog post from 2017.

Okay, you get the idea by now.  It's usually worth the wait.

RX1R III ebook now available in all formats!

The ebook on the Sony RX1R III book is finally available in all formats (.pdf, e-reader, and printed versions in either color or B&W.)  I also wrote a quick review of the camera for the upcoming issue of Cameracraft magazine.  You can order the book at https://FriedmanArchives.com/rx1riii

2023 annual for CameraCraft magazine now available!

Although CameraCraft Magazine is now an online-only publication (thanks t rising international postal rates), we are working on making printed versions available locally as print-on-demand issues in the US and the UK.  And we are very slowly making back issues available via the same mechanism, with not one but TWO annual compendiums now available for 2024 and 2023 editions.

2023 Annual US: https://mixam.com/print-on-demand/68689f337ed44a6baa23d65d 

2023 Annual UK: https://mixam.co.uk/print-on-demand/68659a16f15a7219262edb00 

2024 Annual US: https://mixam.com/print-on-demand/68306ea94a123a1128467d69

2024 Annual UK: https://mixam.co.uk/print-on-demand/6810cb2c99bd0a1048168b6c 

There's also an interactive preview at the bottom of each of these order pages so you can get a feel for the content in the Annual before you buy!

Walt Disney was a Genius

Walt Disney was known as being a legendary manager, on par with Dave Packard (of Hewlett Packard Fame) and Steve Jobs - all three of these folks were geniuses at identifying talent and then motivating them to push boundries.  That pretty much describes everything the Disney organization did in the '50's and 60's, when Walt branched off from animation to live action films and theme parks.  

Recently I came across two amazing youtube videos dealing with cutting-edge Disney live-action filmmaking innovations from that period.  

First, they had invented a technique for replacing backgrounds first used in the movie Mary Poppins that was superior to the Chroma Key ("green screens") techniques invented in the 1930's.  Instead of using a color that was easy to isolate in post production, they had invented a beam splitter which was able to isolate the very narrow light spectrum given off by Sodium Vapor light, and automatically create a mask at the same time on a 2nd strip of film.  It was genius, and just like the 3-stripe technicolor process of the 1930's, it was superior to the modern methods now used. 

Legend has it that the engineers at Disney were only able to make ONE such beam splitter (they tried to make others but they all had imperfections), and this one splitter, coupled with the special camera, was used in every movie from Mary Poppins to The Black Hole (awful movie).  Then, the technique was retired.  

Recently I stumbled onto a youtube video which replicated the beam splitter used in the sodium vapor technique.  It's a very instructive video explaining it all and demonstrating sodium vapor's superiority over green screens.  Check this out!  

Footnote: Just recently, I learned that the sodium vapor prism hasn't been lost after all!  https://www.facebook.com/share/v/16rvNpVXPK/  

Second, this video shows some of the pre-mat-era special effects they used for Darby O'Gill and the Little People (a movie which proved to be Sean Connery's big acting break).   I always thought they just used a split screen to mix large and small characters in the same shot.  Nope.  Here's how they did it:

Getting depth-of-field that deep is really difficult - the smaller the f/stop, the more diffraction sets in (which makes the subject a little less sharp).  So those matt shots are insane.  And the amount of light required must have been considerably greater than the light traditionally used in making movies!  

In a few days I'll be returning to Uganda to bring you Part II of the story of Saving Lives in Uganda.  Stay tuned!

Until next time,

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman