My current humbling experience all started a few days ago with a wonderful meal and talk with a photographer friend of mine. It was not him, but just watching some of the videos he has produced recently really reminded me what a two-bit punk hack I am. It was not the technique, but how he captured the power of the story.

Then today, I shot a very “ok” family portrait session. That is “ok”, as in, I do not want to say more of what I really think. The harsh sunlight made things tough, not only for lighting, but for the quickly wilting subjects. Excuses aside, though, I really want to know what happened. How do I improve? What can I learn here?

One of the key problems was a lack of familiarity with my lighting equipment. Well, more accurately, I was so focused on trying to balance the flash with the blaring ambient, I totally lost connection with the subject. I did not direct them. I did not let them know what they should do. And, to top it all off, I was not really even paying attention to them when I put the camera up to my face (or before then either).

Ok. How to fix it, though? What are some keys to making it different, and I mean small practical things?

Limit location/scene. In an attempt to give the mother a wide choice of background, poses, and set-ups (for lack of a better word), which she expressly stated she wanted, I ended up magnifying my difficulty at getting the lighting right. What I should have done is pick one or two spots, the ones I knew would end up best in the end, and spend more time there. Then, after the lighting was set right, I would be free to interact and catch that nice moment.

Be the director. To help them be at ease and to have confidence in me, I must direct. If I notice somebody is not smiling, find a way to get that out of them (well, if you need a smile, which this photo was certainly expected to have). If they are all just standing straight, hands to their sides, in the classic boring pose (because the photographer did not know what better to do), I need to help position them, pose them, suggest movement, or whatever.

Well, there may be more things, but every other “should-a” I can think of really falls into one of those two. Honestly, I really think I am going to call them up, let them know I have some “ok” shots, but nothing really nice, and I would be more than willing to set up another shoot in the next couple days.

And for the cold-hearted motivation, as if I were not already motivated enough to want to make this right, I found out during the shoot they will be printing this photo with some printer in the US to show as an example to other families here in town of that printer’s services. In other words, if I can really excel in this shoot, my work would be displayed before a wide(r) audience, and I would be first in line to provide photographic services for their family and group photos. I am not terribly concerned about that (because I live and work in a different country anyway), but it would be throwing away an excellent opportunity.

So, to add on the title of this post a little bit, it is good to be humbled, especially publicly. That reveals the weak areas of our photography and, if publicly so, gives us great motivation to improve.

The first day, about a week ago, things went ok…not great, but lessons learned. I also wanted to field test a pair of Cactus triggers. “What are those,” you might ask? With those, I can remote trigger my flash via radio (i.e. no cords). Those ended up incredibly frustrating, to be honest. They did not fire very consistently. When you read through discussions about these on Flickr, some folks love them and some hate them. They are consistent for some folks and inconsistent for others. For me, when they are needed, the break. When I am goofing around, they work flawlessly.

Wait, this was about the flash. I will get back to the story.
So, the second day comes along. Seeing as my radio triggers were not reliable, I decided to go optical. Meaning, I could use the pop-up flash from my camera to trigger a little optical sensor attached to the flash. I had heard it might not do well on a sunny day (and sunny it was), but it worked just fine, until…

Pointing down into a fountain (our backdrop), someone said, “Cooper, is that your…” There was no need to complete the sentence, everything went into slow motion and their words would have been incomprehensible, anyway. I calmly walked closer to the long, dark shape at the bottom of the water, then took a glace to where my tripod-flash-umbrella set up had been: nothing. It did not hit me till I saw the white (now folded up) umbrella sticking out from the tripod.

I tried to stay cool so my friends, for whom I was taking the photos, would not feel too bad. I layed down on my stomach and fished it out of the fountain. The flash was…wet. It is an interesting feeling to see water pouring from your equipment. I took the batteries out. That is only sensible, but I figure it will not make much difference with such a low power source and the fact they were already sitting in the water with the flash on anyway.

So, needless to say, I did not get much of a field test out of the optical flash trigger, but I pulled out my handy dandy coffee filter, slipped it over my pop up flash to soften the light, and used that for fill light every now and then.

I honestly thought the flash would be fine in the end. I unscrewed every screw I could find and it ended up looking like C3-PO after coming out of Lando Calrissian’s recycling room (if you are not a Star Wars fan, you can probabaly still figure it out). The trickiest part was getting the head open. The bottom was easy, but I never really did get that head open (I probably should have looked it up online, like I did the spelling of ‘Calrissian’ a few seconds ago). I finally figured the plastic cover where the flash actually comes out would just pop off, and it did, both of them.

I hair dried the whole thing till I was more than satisfied and when I put it all back together (it was not too bad, easier than getting it apart) it worked just fine. As a fun side note, sometime after I put it back together, I was looking for some manual or something for my flash online. I found out the red glass looking thing on the front is a built-in optical slave receiver. In other words, my little optical trigger I mentioned was a silly purchase, because my second hand Nikon SB-26 speedlight already has one built in! Sweet. I feel dumb for not knowing that already (I thought it was just a distance calculating light…which is also in there), but you can bet I will be putting that to work.

So, yes, your flash should be fine if you decided to drop it underwater like I did. Take it apart, hair dry that thing (though without the hair part), and I would guess it will be fine. Oh, I forgot to mention that a bad connection with the Cactus trigger the previous week was loose and I dropped it twice, once concrete, once grass. So, I can confidently say this Nikon SB-26 flash is a tough character.