Tag Archive for: HS

The problem with a global shutter that a lot of people will miss

Yes, Sony revolutionised the photography market

Without any doubt one of the biggest steps forward has been released by Sony, and it’s called the A9III
But why is it this huge step forward?

One might think that when we talk about huge steps we talk about MegaPixels, ISO etc. But this is all just adding to something we already have. When I talk about a huge step forward I of course mean the new Global Shutter.

Global shutter?

So why is this global shutter thing such a big deal?
When you work with strobes you probably know that the term X-sync.
The X-sync is the maximum shutter speed you can can use without seeing an annoying black bar due to the second shutter curtain.
For most cameras with studio strobes if you stay at or below 1/125 you will have no problems at all, and in the studio this is actually no limit. Most studios are dark so the slower 1/125 shutterspeed is no problem.

However when we go outside things change.
When we work with strobes we now have to compete with the ambient light.
Take into account the limit of 1/125 and you quickly understand why a lot of those shots with loads of strobe power have a DOF from here to eternity 😀
In other words, outside we often have to shoot at f22 to get the balance we need due to that 1/125 limit.

Solutions

Luckily there are solutions.

  1. Make sure you don’t place your subject close to the top. This way you can shoot at 1/160 and sometimes a bit higher without noticing the black bar. It’s still there for the strobe but the ambient light will not show it and the subject is somewhere in the middle so it will still get the strobe. A quick fix but far from perfect due to the huge limitation for composition (but it’s a nice one if you have to and can for example crop later in Photoshop).
  2. A bit more serious are solutions like HSS, HS
    With HSS your strobe fires a lot of flashes during the exposure making sure the sensor is always lit by the strobe. This eats both power from the strobe but also from your batteries, it’s also a system that’s not 100% stable in output and can overheat a strobe pretty fast.
    HS is a system that uses the cut off and raise of the strobe, not to make it too difficult it uses a very slow strobe to get faster shutter speeds, same issue here is that it eats power.
  3. It doesn’t help with the shutterspeed but you can use ND filters to get a shallow DOF, although this can work great there are some disadvantages, first of all a good ND filter for use with strobes will be a pretty strong one, or a variable (I have the KF concept in my kit and really like that one) And with the stronger ND filters you will get into some problems with focussing speed. Also some ND filters will give you a light drop off in the corners.
  4. Leaf shutter lenses
    Leaf shutter lenses are awesome but expensive.
    The shutter is inside the lens and this means it breaks the limit of 1/125 with ease, there is still a limit (for example 1/1500) which in most cases however is more than enough, especially because most of these lenses are found in the Medium Format cameras.
  5. Cheap cameras
    Believe it or not but years ago I shot with a very affordable small Fuji camera which was able to shoot up to 1/1000 with strobes. This was a far cry from a professional camera, but I decided to include it to make the list complete.

So what’s the big deal with a global shutter?

In short….
There is no real limit anymore.
You would be able to shoot strobes up to 1/16000 or even 1/80000 when using Sony compatible strobes.
Sounds awesome right?
And it is, but there is one limit I have to tell you about that will prevent some nasty surprises.

The speed is important

The idea of shooting at 1/16000 will excite a lot of photographer but it could also be a huge disappointment, but that last part can be solved with a bit of technical information.

When we use our camera we all know that the shutterspeed will determine the “freezing power” of your camera.
The faster the shutterspeed the more action is frozen.
When we use strobes we often just look at the output. And in the past this is 100% understandable, most strobes are fast enough to freeze motion in the studio so we often don’t link shutter speeds to flash durations.

When we look at the specs of our strobes we do however see a value that links the two.
The t0.1 and t0.5 values. You might notice that those values are often mentioned in a range from very fast to slower,
Maybe you also found out that the way the motion is captured does vary depending on the power output of your strobes, especially with cheaper strobes it’s very possible that there are only a few power settings that will freeze the motion, where with the others there always is a slight blur.

When I look at the strobes I’ve worked with over the years there were strobes that topped out at 1/1000 and 1/60000.
As you can see this is a huge difference.
So what is the link with a global shutter?

Let’s shoot a mountain biker at 1/16000 with our strobe on full power.
Now let’s shoot the same mountain biker at 1/16000 with our strobe at 75% power.
I can almost predict that the 75% setting will be brighter.

So what’s going on?

You can shoot with the shutterspeed at 1/16000 and there will be no black bar in the frame, however the strobe has to be just as fast as the shutterspeed otherwise the shutterspeed will be cutting off the power of the strobe while it stills flashes.

This is very difficult to visualize because our eyes can’t see how fast a strobe fires, so we need a special tool for this.
To measure the flashduration of my strobes I’m using the Sekonic 858 lightmeter.
When I measure my Geekoto strobes I can clearly see that they are incredibly fast in the lower settings, as soon as I pass half power they are still fast enough to freeze any motion (1/5000+) but when I reach full power the flashduration gets a serious hit. Now this has nothing to do with the Geekoto strobes, but it’s all strobes and brands, it’s simply how it works.

So how does this fit in the global shutter story.
When you read the reviews and specs on the A9III you might expect that your strobe will behave the same as in the studio and this can lead to not getting the maximum performance out of your brand new camera.

The best way to make sure you get the maximum out of your system is to shoot a series of images on a white wall with the camera on a tripod. Don’t change anything on the camera itself but only change the output of the strobe. Do this for several shutter speeds and watch where the strobe starts to get dimmer and put a sticker on the strobe with those settings.

Why is this important?

When you use a lightmeter on location the meter has “no limits”, so it will give you the value of the full strobe, if the strobe has a flash duration of 1/800 or 1/16000 it doesn’t matter for the meter. Now that we know that the shutterspeed of the camera can cut off the strobe it’s also clear that when we are shooting above the “speed limit” of the strobe the value on the meter will not correspond with what you get in your photo.

Besides the trick with the white wall there is a solution for this, but it’s not cheap, but it will make it much easier.
When you use the Sekonic 858 there is a setting that doesn’t just meters the light but also the flashduration. This can be a very useful tool where you can not only find the setting with the fastest flashduration, but also to know how fast you can set your cameras shutterspeed.

A feature that was handy for reviews in the past has now become an essential tool to use your flash system to the max, and that’s a good thing, a really good thing. We can do amazing things with global shutters and flash, can’t wait to test it out myself.

 

To be clear, I have not shot with the A9III, this why there are no examples (I don’t fake examples), the technique however is universal.
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Video Freerunners with the Elinchrom HS system

Today the video we shot during the shoot with the Freerunners in Emmeloord testing out the new Elinchrom HS head.
As explained yesterday I was not going for the “standard” day to night look, I mainly wanted to see how far I could push the system to get a nice strobed look without those annoying black trails behind the jumpers which you would normally get when shooting ambient with strobes.

Elinchrom HS system first tests

You probably already read some things about it, but Elinchrom recently released their new Skyport and that introduces a whole new way of shooting images outside (and inside). In case you didn’t let’s quickly tell you “all about it”

 

Skyport
The skyport is the system for triggering Elinchrom strobes (and they also have an universal version of course), main advantage of the system is that you can also change the output of your strobes and turn on/off the modeling lights, use groups and channels etc. A pretty cool system in a remarkable small package. Well you can skip the small in the new incarnation of the skyport, you could say it’s matured now.
ELI19366

But as you can see it’s a good thing, because one of the first things you notice is the big LCD display, and that is awesome. You can now see which strobes are active, you can select the strobes and change settings, and of course you can still change the output of the strobes, switch between groups and much more.

 

In short the new system has the following new features.
1. Much stronger, so longer distances (something that was needed in my opinion)
2. ODS control, later more but very important for HS use
3. Focus assist beam (very handy in darker studios)
4. HS
5. USB for updates
6. Uses normal AA batteries (yeah)

 

But the biggest thing is of course: HS

 

What is this HS?
Well it’s actually quite easy to explain… it makes it possible to sync at higher shutter speeds.
Normally studio and location strobes (except small flash and some other brands) are limited to the so called X-sync which often means that you can shoot up to 1/125 or 1/160 without any problem but above that it’s hit and miss to let say 1/200 and after that you will start to see black bars (second shutter curtain).

 

Now when you’re used to this it’s not a real problem, but it does limit your creativity, you can’t fight the sun and shoot wide open, simply because the shutter speed would be way too high, you can of course use ND filters but then the camera has problems with focussing so perfect…. well far from.

 

The HS system from Elinchrom breaks this barrier and makes it possible (in certain configurations) to shoot all the way up to 1/8000 of a second. Which is pretty cool and something that was not possible yet on the Elinchrom system. They achieve this by very clever timing with the TL pre-flash and making sure everything is syncing as good as possible, and this way it “seems” like you have strobe power over the total range of shutter speed, and this is true but… there are some things you have to realize and that you probably don’t read in other reviews, so that’s why I wanted to give some attention to it.

 

What you need to know
In theory (and real life) the system works awesome, it doesn’t eat your battery (which a strobed system would do where the flash is repeated constantly, like speed lights) and the Quadra for example recycles very fast, just like you’re using it normally.

 

What happens is that the timing is so accurate that it seems the whole sensor is lit even with 1/8000 of second as shutter speed, but… this works only with SLOW strobes, for example the D-lite series (believe it or not) are perfect for this, but an ELC on the middle setting (clocking in at 1/5600 of a second) is not very good for this system (it actually cuts off at app 1/500 on a Canon 5Ds without fine tuning I have to add), but the BrX, D-Lite etc. all work surprisingly well, and this is very cool because this means you don’t need to buy new strobes. Then why did Elinchrom release new heads (the Quadra HS head for example), well that’s easy to explain, the HS head is a VERY slow head and this means it’s perfect to reach that 1/8000 of a second shutter speed without any problem. So in short, shorter duration strobe heads will not work that well, long duration heads will work perfectly.
The other thing you have to realize that (and it hurts to say this) you can forget about the light meter.
The reason for this is simple to explain but sometimes hard to understand (yeah it sounds funky I know).
To achieve the higher shutter speeds the camera cuts the strobe off earlier, with ODS you can tune this but, the effect is that the higher the shutter speed the LESS of the strobe duration is used.

 

If for example a strobe has F16 on 1/125 it’s not also F16 on 1/4000. In fact it could very well be F2.8 by that time. And no that’s not a bad thing, it’s simply how these systems work, and the same happens with speed lights, you loose light output the higher you set the shutter speed, ANY system on the market has this “problem”, but thanks to the digital polaroid on the back of the camera we can check.

 

We did some tests very quickly with the Elinchrom Quadra and the HS head in combination with a Canon 5Ds and it was easy to reach shutter speeds of 1/8000 f2.8 and get some stunning results that were not possible before during day time. It’s a bit getting used to for me to constantly check my digital polaroid, but within a few minutes it becomes second nature, and because the skyport is very easy to operate and give more and less light to the strobe it’s actually something you get used to very fast… and if you never  used a meter before… you will probably don’t even notice this.

 

In practice
It’s incredibly handy to be able to control your DOF on location, but most of all to control the ambient with the shutter speed over a MUCH greater range than from 1/125 to the minimum you can hand held. You do (again) have to take notice that if you change the shutter speed to let in more ambient light you have to adjust the strobe, but already after one hour of use I found myself doing it almost automatically and nailing the exposure almost spot on every shot I took. And let’s be honest I rather be able to break the barrier of 1/125 and not being able to meter than to meter and be stuck on 1/125. For your creativity this is a HUGE step forward. Plus you can now do almost everything with just the Quadra, add a maxi light and you’re in lighting heaven so the say 😀

 

Canon and Nikon
At the moment the system only works on Canon and Nikon, Sony will follow soon (I hope very soon), you can of course use the new skyport already on Sony, Fuji, MF etc. but it will do actually everything EXCEPT the HS option.

One could say that Elinchrom is late in the game with their HS system, but I have to be honest the product I see now (and worked with) is superieur to what I’ve used before (note : I don’t really care for ETTL on these systems) and I rather wait a bit longer and have something that works like this than cut corners.

 

I’m very excited about the system and can’t wait for the Sony version.

We filmed two small videos for the HS system, and today I share some images from the video with Nadine, videos will follow later.

 

Let’s start with just natural light, everything else is strobed.

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