Kevin Bjorke
Kevin Bjorke
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A few days back I ran across a site linking to Botzilla: David Hobby’s Strobist. Quite a popular site and full of hints and methods for strobe use by David and a few cohorts.

As a shooter for the Baltimore Sun David gets lots of opportunities to work through classic location portraiture issues. In this way his job is a bit like that of Neil Turner, and some of the site reminds me of Neil’s dg28.

It ‘s one of those little paradoxes that the standard way to light still photography is to not light it at all (in fact many photographers get indignant about “respecting the original light” and so forth). This is quite opposite of motion-picture photography, where much might look “natural” but everything is deliberately lit and often the lighting is far, far, from anything that nature would have actually provided.

A byproduct of this disconnect is that a lot of the little stunts that Strobist and the like have devised (like a cardboard-and-gaffer-tape snoot, as in the snap here) are pretty similar to the things that gaffers and lighting cameramen in the movie world deal with daily.

For movies, every location shot has to be location-lit. And there’s usually a crew to do the work. I find it fascinating to read Strobist and a few other sites and see so many of the classic gaffer’s tricks and crafts re-worked so that one person can do them, quickly, and how thanks to the use of small strobes instead of 2000W Molepars, you don’t need to worry about having the fire department on standby.

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