Outdoor Portraits with Fast Flash Sync Speed

Portrait of photographer Mark Ostow

In This Issue:

• Overpowering the Sun with the RX10 V
• New Zealand Trip Update
• Singing Pumpkins - A Great Idea for Halloween Decorations

Ash Carter

Overpowering the Sun with the RX10 V

One of the things I love about being Associate Editor of Cameracraft magazine is I get a chance to meet and spend time with a lot of interesting photographers.  Over the past 14 years I've interviewed National Geographic photographers, war correspondents, and award-winning dance photography artists.  I've done stories about remberance photography which evoked emotional reactions among readers.  I've profiled photographers who chase storms, photographers who chase wildfires, and photographers who chase polar bears, among many others.

Robert Reich

For the upcoming issue I'm profiling a most out-of-the-box photographer, Mark Ostow.  He is an editorial portraitist who has photographed politicians, diplomats, artists, and public figures. He has worked for major publications like NY Magazine, The Atlantic, and Politico, documenting figures from the Obama administration to everyday people encountered on city sidewalks. He teaches photography, owns cafés, makes documentary films, and creates personal projects that blur the line between street photography and portraiture.

3 Presidents

Mike Pence

   

 

Street Portraits

For the upcoming issue, I wanted to shoot some portraits of him, and we kept brainstorming on how to make them more and more unusual.  I started with a standard environmental portrait (as always, click on any image to view larger and sharper):

Great.  Now how can I make it better?  Add wireless flash.  And Mark wanted the lighting to be in the shot.  So we took a few different poses:

A lot of people feel that when converted to
Black-and-White, it automatically looks more "artistic".

Then we went to do outdoor portraits.  "This RX10 V is a great street camera", I told him.  "It has a leaf shutter, giving it a flash sync speed of 1/2000th of a second!"  This impressed him.  So the goal was to shoot at 1/2000th of a second and f/8 to darken the ambient light considerably, and then use a handheld flash as portrait illumination.  (Spoiler alert: I've used this technique many times in the past, but never at 1/2000th of a second.)

That was the goal, anyway.  But at 1/2000th of a second, the flash hardly registered at all.  I had to dial the shutter speed down to 1/1000th of a second (still pretty impressive!) in order to get the shot at the top of the blog post.

What's going on?  I did some tests when I got home, and I'll share what I learned in a sister blog post dealing just with topics related to the RX10 V.  You can read the rest here - scroll down to the last topic.

 

New Zealand and Tibet Updates

We are slowly piecing together an itinerary for a photo tour of New Zealand South Island, scheduled for April 10-17, 2027.  The primary goal will be to position ourselves in spectacular landscape spots each sunrise and sunset, with some moving around in between.  The trip will primarily be to get good images, rather than to be tourists.  

More info soon.  We will need at least 12 people to sign up or the trip doesn't happen.  Right now we're looking at a cost of around $5K USD per person, not including airfare.  Please send me an email soon at Gary at Friedman Archives dot com to express interest and to hold your place!

The Tibet trip still needs more interest.  Have a look at https://travel.stevechong.com/tibet/ and let me know if you're interested!

Singing Pumpkins - A Great Idea for Halloween Decorations

Have a projector and a laptop and 3 pumpkins?  Try out this cool animated singing pumpkins display I created to entice trick-or-treaters to our house.  This is a direct rip-off of the famous "Singing Busts" from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

Here's another, less cinematic version but it gives you a better idea of how it looks to the human eye without blowing out the highlights.  

If you want to do this for your halloween decoration, you can purchase the animation here (along with MANY other choices - "This is Halloween" from the movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is an obvious one that more people will recognize.)  In order to purchase the animations you have to send them an .mp3 of the music so they're not breaking copyright laws by selling someone else's music.  https://www.thesingingpumpkin.com  (They have animations for Christmas decorations too!)

Until next time,

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman

We took portraits of each other.  Streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts.