Radiopoppers. I now have five of them, and they are awesome. What follows is a field-test user review from Brandy and Tony’s awesome Bahamas wedding. A slideshow of their day will come later this week!

To sum it up, I think Radiopoppers are the best thing to happen to flash photography since the invention of the flash.

For those who don’t yet know, Radiopoppers are little flash gadgets that combine ETTL with the radiowave goodness of the trusty Pocket Wizard. That’s pretty amazing. Until now it’s been basically impossible to have reliable ETTL off-camera flashes.

When I first started with off-camera flash photography, I’d use my ST-E2 infared trigger and put my 550EX and 580EX flashes on slave mode. Basically I had fully automatic ETTL flash. It was point and shoot, and it was oh-so-easy. This setup was awesome, or so I thought. I loved having spot-on flash exposures every time, but I soon grew annoyed. I couldn’t shoot outdoors at all, since the bright sunlight usually interfered with the infared sensors on the flashes. I was creatively stifled because I couldn’t hide the flashes behind rocks, behind people, behind walls — the infared beam only works with line of sight. If I wanted to shoot wide angle, I’d have to basically put the flashes way off to the side, and usually that just didn’t work. To be out of the frame, they’d have to be at such extreme angles that the infared beam couldn’t get to them. I mean, try using a master-slave IR setup with a fisheye. Impossible, unless you don’t mind having a flash, a flare and a light stand in your image.

Inside, and in the right conditions, the ST-E2 was marvelous. I loved shooting weddings in tents or white rooms, where the IR beam just bounced all over everywhere. But it never was all that reliable, so I eventually stopped using the combination and just used my ST-E2 as a very expensive autofocus assist beam.

Then I discovered Pocketwizards. I loved them because I could put my flashes everywhere. They were reliable. I could hide a flash behind a rock if I was shooting a bouldering image, like this one:

I could hide flashes behind dancing couples during weddings, like here, to produce a nice rim light, like here:

The PWs unlocked a lot of hidden creativity, and I could even use them in conjunction with my ST-E2 (so I could trigger the flashes but still use the ST-E2’s autofocus assist).

But with this reliability came a few huge limitations. First, when you use a Pocketwizard, you have to have your flash on manual mode. This is fine if you’re shooting in a controlled environment, but I found it could be difficult when shooting something like a wedding, which is an organic, free-flowing, sometimes chaotic event with rapidly changing lighting conditions. Wedding photographers don’t really have the time to run around and change the outputs on three separate units all the time.

More importantly, the Pocketwizards can’t do high speed sync. On my 5d cameras, the fastest shutter speed I could shoot at outdoors was 1/200th of a second. If I was at ISO 50, the lowest setting on my camera, I would need to be shooting around f/11. That means that unless it was almost dark out, it was basically impossible to get the beautiful, smooth bokeh I love from my 135 f/2 or my 200 f/2.8 or my 85 f/1.2. My images would have to have a totally uncluttered background to have the look I wanted. Sometimes that’s just impossible.

So then along came the Radiopopper. When I first heard about them I thought they were some sort of cruel joke, but no, they’re real. I have five of them and just used them for the first time in the Bahamas, at a destination wedding at the Atlantis Resort. I was astounded. Here’s one of the first frames I captured with them — there were two flashes going off at once. This frame was taken outside in extremely dark conditions.

I get automatic flash exposure, I can dial up or down the flash output from my camera, I can change the flash ratios from my camera, I can hide the flashes behind rocks, behind people, or behind walls for cool lighting effects, and I can shoot with huge apertures to get that awesome low depth of field — all in broad daylight. I even dropped one of my transmitters in a swimming pool, fished it out, dried if off, and it worked perfectly. What more could I ask for?

Check this out — a shot done with two flashes, fully automatic. Very nice! I actually used radios to dial down the right hand flash — all from my STE-II on the camera.

Here’s another one, just a few hundred feet away in The Dig at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas.

Basically, the Radiopoppers sense some sort of electronic signal made by the infared beam, convert it to a radio wave, and send it to the receiver. The receiver converts the radio wave back into an infared beam and sends it to the IR receptor on the flash via a little fiberoptic cable that you have to tape onto the front of the flash. Brilliant.

And get this: here’s a shot done with two flashes, outside, broad daylight, shot at 135mm @ f/2.0.

Like everything in life, nothing is perfect, but these things are an excellent solution that I will be using at basically every wedding and social event from now on.

The first problem I experienced was that there was some sort of sync issue whereby the flashes weren’t being triggered reliably. I, of course, didn’t read the instructions — but once I did, I realized that it was the result of the fact that there are many different flash and camera manufacturers out there, and that I needed to adjust the Radiopoppers to work with my system. I pushed three buttons and fixed it. So that’s not really an issue with the Radiopoppers. Then there were the occasional misfires, where I’d get way too much flash juice. That’s an unfortunate byproduct of the actual ETTL system. It happens without the RPs, too.

There were two minor issues with the RPs themselves. First, I didn’t like having to attach the fiber optic cable to my slave flashes with gaffer’s tape. It was a little problematic in the Bahamas, where the hot air seemed to loosen the stickiness of the tape. Now I’ve got goop all over my flash. I wish there were a way to somehow attach the fiberoptic cable better (perhaps a little plastic clip that I could attach to the flash that would hold the cable in place strongly - hint, hint!). Anyway, I am now over having sticky stuff on my flash, and I’m such a convert that I now think that the fiberoptic cable will be permanently attached since I’ll be using the Radiopoppers so much, so no biggie.

I also didn’t like having to screw the battery case onto the back of the unit. It’s a pain to have to find a screwdriver to get the batteries in and out (I wound up using a steak knife), and, if you drop the unit in the pool, you’re not going to have that much time to find your steak knife, unscrew the back plate and remove the battery before the circuits fry. But of course, if the unit can survive a splash in the pool, what difference does it make?

All in all, I give the Radiopoppers a 9.75 out of 10. Certainly one of the best pieces of photo-related equipment to come out in a long time. I think they’re going to permanently change my approach to event photography, and like I said before, these might be the best thing to happen to flash photography since the invention of the flash.

In March I hit up Vegas for the 2008 WPPI wedding photographer convention, which made Sin City even weirder than it was before all us 12,000 photo geeks showed up. (12,000! That’s not a typo!). I cruised out there with John Heisel, enduring lots of stormy weather and perhaps the mankiest hotel room on earth in Cedar City, UT.

The convention was definitely an eye-opener — lots of inspiring talks by some of the movers and shakers in the industry, an out-of-control tradeshow the size of several football fields, lots of random photo shoots, and, of course, partys! Woohoo!

The convention took place at the Paris hotel and casino — the domed ceiling is actually painted like the city skyline, complete with clouds. The elevators up to the guest rooms had movie ads on them, so I took some self portraits with Jack Black, et al. I’m a dork. Sorry.

In that last post I mentioned I got to check out all the vendor booths at the trade show, and I signed up with a new online proofing service, changed around the album lineup a little, pestered the Canon reps about new cameras, started carrying Finao albums, got some new canvas prints made for some local hotels, picked up all sorts of camera stuff, blah blah blah. It was fun.

Toward the end, I cruised out on the Strip with a bunch of other Colorado wedding photographers, one of whom dressed up as a bride (kudos to Kammi at http://elegant-image.com!). We also had Brynn Hyatt along — she was in the cool blue dress. I brought my wireless flash setup (the same kind I use at weddings — pocket-sized and portable) and came up with some cool shots. Never done this kind of posed, faux wedding stuff before, but it was kind of fun. Also a bit of a scene, but whatever.

Check out the last shot, taken by my friend Kevin Bergthold — he borrowed my little flash transmitter and snapped a cool pic of me breakdancing. (Note: I don’t actually breakdance. I only pretend to. I’d love to learn.)

Word to the wise: if you ever see someone dressed up as a bride in a really weird place, without a husband, and surrounded by six to ten photographers, she’s probably NOT a bride.

Back in Cali kickin it with the crew. Miss it here. Good times, great friends. Toots got his first chance to visit one of our favorite places on earth, the stunning mountaintop boulder field at Lizard’s Mouth, home to the best moderate sandstone bouldering anywhere. And actually thanks to our buddy Bernd, a bunch of new hard lines have gone up in the last year.

Here we are on one of them, an unnamed route overlooking the ocean. We spent sunset here taking pictures.

If you want to know how it’s done, I used a really fast prime lens at f/1.4 coupled with a single flash bouncing off a gold reflector disk. Reflector was pointing up from ground level, flash was triggered via a PocketWizard. Very low ISO (100) allowed me to get the dark blue sky at 125th of a second. It also let me have a very noiseless image. I passed off the camera later on and Bernd grabbed it to take the last two shots, one of Steve and one of me.

Quite possibly the highlight of the day was seeing Alicia’s parents’ chihuahua Rosie wearing Bernd’s kid’s diaper. Finn, Bernd and Hjortis’ little infant, was nice and warm and had a spare diaper. Rosie was freezing and had nothing. So… What happens when you have a spare diaper and a freezing chihuahua? Diaper Dog. It’s was the only solution.

I just got Canon’s new G9, and it rocks! Hooray! I don’t have much to compare this to since I don’t have any other point and shoots — this is my first one since 2001, when I got a 2 megapixel digital Elph — and this is 12 megapixels. But what I am used to is my 1dII and my Canon 5d, of which the latter is a gold standard when it comes to low-noise shooting. My lens collection consists solely of L-series glass — primarily primes — so my standards are way high.

Since you’re reading this, you presumably already know everything about the G9. If not, in a nutshell it’s got:

An image stabilized lens, equivalent to a 35 to 210 (f/2.8 to f/4.8)
12 megapixel sensor
3 inch LCD display
Digic III sensor
RAW capture mode
The ability to work with remote flashes

The last two features are what interested me in this camera. I’ve been looking for a point and shoot that has RAW mode, and all this stuff about the G7 not ‘needing’ RAW is to me a big load of hooey. I shoot everything in RAW and I batch process them in the Adobe Camera RAW, which lets me tweak my images so they have the best color rendition, saturation and range. JPEGs don’t cut it, so I’ve been waiting for this thing. Since I’m a Canon guy with Canon flashes, I also wanted one that would work with my STE-II or 580EX flashes.

First, the camera’s ergonomics suck when you’ve got a 580EX attached to it. You pretty much have to walk around holding the camera by the flash. Observe:

It’s a lot less ridiculous with an STE-II or a PocketWizard attached to it.

Will I ever use the camera with an external flash? Absolutely. With an STE-II? Maybe. With a PW? Very infrequently, but at least I can if I need to. Each of those three options increasingly nullifies the point of having a point and shoot, but I digress.

Let’s just skip right to the important stuff. The RAW write speed is decent. Nothing to phone home about, but it’s definitely useable. It takes 1 to 3 seconds to write a RAW file, depending on the card speed and the ISO (or so it seems). Recognizing that this is not a DSLR, I’m fine with that.

And the other important question is: how do the images look? I’m just going to post some full-size images after RAW processing, and you can see for yourself. All images were taken with my new G9 and my old 5d with the trusty 70-200 f/2.8L IS zoom. All the images were exposed the same in manual, at 1/200th and f/6.3. I just changed the flash output (wireless 580ex from a Pocket Wizard) and shot at the following ISO settings: 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600. The images were all processed in Canon’s (IMHO ridiculously useless) RAW converter and saved to highest quality JPEG. I applied no sharpening and no noise reduction, and then I made them 100% crops in Photoshop.

Here we go at ISO 100:

And at ISO 200:

And at ISO 400:

And at ISO 800:

And at ISO 1600:

Basically I think according to the above test, the G9 holds its own until ISO 1600, at which point it totally sucks and is completely unusable. But that little lens is surprisingly sharp, and the noise control is very good at ISO 800 and below in good light. That’s pretty dope for a point and shoot.

Now, for an UPDATE thanks to some feedback: note that the above test was performed in the best of circumstances. Great light and good exposure. Now a pretty harsh test with low ambient light and no flash. I’m not comparing the two cameras, I’m just using the 5d as a baseline. By the way, everything in the below test was shot at f/2.8. That means wide open for the G9 and stopped WAAAY down for the 5d (it’s a 35mm f/1.4).

At ISO 200, pretty good.

At ISO 400, the differences appear:

At 800 they are really apparent:

And at 1600… Well, yikes.

Clearly the G9 doesn’t work that well in poor conditions, but hey, I still think I can pull out some good pictures — especially with a good flash attached. Now I’m not a professional gear reviewer, so take my words with a grain of salt, but I’m pleasantly surprised and pretty happy with the G9. I might even use it professionally for weddings! I’ve thought about mounting it in the rafters and making time-lapse videos of the reception (yes, it has that feature too) and giving them to the bride and groom. That could be super fun! Or maybe I can mount it to a tripod and have guests take photos of themselves. Or maybe I could … Anyway, point is, the camera is way cool, and I’m psyched on it.
I got it at Amazon.com (go Amazon.com Visa Rewards!) via J&R Music World. Shipped in two days. Niiiice.

It’s always cool to see what graphic designers do to your work once it’s in their hands. Here are two head shots I took recently, and then the resulting pages/ads designed by Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. I think she’s pretty good! I was psyched to be able to squeeze in a short corporate head shot gig and a magazine gig right before I left Santa Barbara for the summer and drove out to Colorado to begin the wedding season. Good timing, and it got the mind limbered up and the creative juices flowing.

Anyway, here’s the camera geek inside baseball: the corporate head shot was for a VP of a Santa Barbara financial advising firm. After checking out the office and taking a few other images, I decided I wanted to have her standing in front of the board room, arms crossed, looking like the boss in charge, the lady who knows what’s up, and the person who’s gonna get your money issues sorted. She had to look authoritative, so she had to stand out from the rest of the frame. So I lit her with 2 small flashes, one behind her for some rim light and the other to her right shooting through an umbrella. I got these ideas from the brilliant Strobist.com site.

The pic of Sam Tyler was taken in the corner of a kid’s bedroom, in front of the only white corner I could find in the house we did this shoot at. So he just stood in the corner, maybe 3 feet in front of the wall and a few feet from the wall on his left. I lit him with just one small flash at 1/128th power shot through an umbrella. It was so low power that I was able to stop my 85mm lens down to about f/1.8 to get a nice shallow depth of field. The idea was to have the umbrella light illuminate Sam and then bounce back off the wall to the camera’s right to fill in a little bit of his face.

The image was for a story about Sam, who makes documentaries. He’s going to produce a doc about what’s going on at the Santa Barbara News Press, my former hometown paper that’s hemorrhaging employees thanks to a billionaire owner who doesn’t understand the idea of a free press and instead uses the paper as her soap box. I’m glad I turned down a job there about 4 years ago! Since last spring, more than 20 (I lost count — I don’t have that many fingers and toes) editors, designers, reporters, etc. left because of disagreements with management. Without going into too much detail, it’s been unprecedented and extraordinarily ugly. As a result, the paper has become the laughing stock of California, and the readers in Santa Barbara don’t have a viable, reliable source of daily local news. Bummer. So anyway, Sam’s doc will likely be very revealing.

So this is kinda neat — Coastal Woman’s new summer 2007 issue features a shot I took a few weeks ago on its cover. An honor! Check it out!

For the camera geeks in the house (hi Dad!) I lit the shot with two off-camera Canon 580 flashes. I didn’t need to break out the bigger White Lightening studio stobes because I was shooting at twilight and wanted to utilize a lot of the ambient light. One flash is directly behind the chair, adding a little rim lighting to the subjects and also reflecting light backwards to fill in the background a little. The other light was on a stand and was shooting through an umbrella to my left. Both were triggered by Pocket Wizards. By the way, if anyone wants to learn a lot about quick and dirty lighting techniques, they should hit up the Strobist blog at strobist.blogspot.com.

Managed to squeeze in one last cool photo assignment before the big trip. This one was for Coastal Woman magazine, a cool magazine that’s designed by the talented Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. A few years back I shot her Bahamas wedding in Eleuthera, which was a lot of fun. At any rate, Andrea needed two quick portraits, one for a cover and the other for an inside profile. For the cover, we had a few ideas, one of which was our model jumping on a trampoline for a Spring beauty/fashion issue. The other was a more classy portrait in a huge chair, with a little rim lighting from an off-camera flash to add a little magic light. I think both came out well — now Andrea is figuring out which image will be the cover shot. The next was a head shot of a counselor, which I actually shot in a friend’s hallway against a white wall. It’s fun to try to make the best out of not much! I used two tiny Canon flashes with umbrellas and came up the two black and white images. I’d like to think the horizontal shot has an Avedon-like quality to it, but then again, that’s just a pipe dream! Here are the pix!

Lately I’ve have a number of people ask me about the lenses I’m using to achieve that weird-yet-cool-can’t-put-your-finger-on-it look in some of my shots. The secret? Canon’s 85mm f/1.2L. The lens itself is like a work of art, and it’s considered by many to be the Holy Grail of bokeh; the background blur it produces is breathtaking. Here are some of the shots I’ve taken lately with it — it depth of field is so shallow that if you focus on someone’s eye, their eyelashes and nose will be out of focus!

Another thing that’s cool about it is you can take pictures in the middle of the night! Without a flash! Here’s some cool shots that were taken when it was almost too dark to see…

Of course, there are a few extra secrets behind the look of the 85mm, but it’s simply amazing and it’s a lot of fun.