I continue to avoid sorting through several hundred photos of Venice, this time by going out for a walk with Wilf the dog and two of his friends Baggins and George.

I’ve written here before about Wilf’s neurotic character traits. He’s been examined and observed by a number of vets and dog psychology experts who have diagnosed his excessive obsessive tail chasing as various things such as epilepsy, and come up with various ways to cure him – none of which have worked. Fortunately with some recent work his tail chasing seems to be getting better, which is promising.

He’s also been diagnosed as exhibiting “extreme fear” when taken on a walk, which results in him not wanting to get out of the car, or leave the house unless it’s to get in a car. All this leaves Wilf as a bundle of pure energy (typical of the Staffordshire Bull Terrier breed) who gets little or no exercise.

When the opportunity to walk him with other dogs arises, it’s always worth a try – he seems less fearful when other dogs are around to take the lead (pardon the pun).

Here’s a rare photo of Wilf enjoying the great outdoors:

After the walk, we take Baggins and George back to my studio and attempt to get them to sit still for five minutes so I can photograph them. Once again I had issues with the optical triggers on the Vivitar flashes – you would think I would have learned by now and given up.

Meet Baggins:

Baggins is the Brother of Bailey and Simba, who I photographed a couple of years ago – back before Wilf had developed the worst of his current psychological traits.

And this is George, who lives with Baggins:

Two dogs at once is difficult in the extreme – I hoped to get a photo of them together but all my efforts were in vain. Sit still you buggers!!!

When I do eventually process and post my pictures from Venice, you’ll see I’ve developed an apparent obsession with panoramic photos. This seems to have continued after my return, with this one resulting from the walkies with the doggies.

Click on it for a larger version, go on, you know you want to.

I’m back from holidays and slogging through several hundred photos trying to obtain some sort of order from it all, so decided I’d take a break and share a picture I took before I left. My buddy Sami is selling his car, and wanted some nice pictures of it before it was gone. I couldn’t promise they’d be nice, but I said I would give it a go. I’d planned this shoot in detail using my new notebook approach and was only missing a location.

Cue an hours frenized driving around looking for somewhere interesting. It did highlight the issue that planning a shoot is all very well but if you don’t know where you are going to do it in the first place, it’s all a bit pointless.

Anyway, onto the results. I had terrible problems with the optical triggers for my Vivitars – they simply wouldn’t work reliably. Or to put it more bluntly, they were utter utter shite. One flash would constantly fire on it’s own, whilst the other only fired one time out of every five or six attempts. Clearly the optical triggers need to go, they are are no good outside of a studio. In spite of this I got the static shot I wanted. I’m not totally happy with it, but equipment failings are the main cause of this unhappiness.

The only other image I wanted to get was a car to car tracking shot – this worked less well for two key reasons;

1.) I had to push to ISO 800 to get the shutter time I wanted – this caused a lot of noise which I hate.
2.) The boot of my Ignis is not a nice place to be whilst driving over bumpy ground. I was too busy concentrating on not falling out to be able to give enough attention to the shots I was taking. I’ll share the picture here if only to illustrate my points.

Despite these problems, I’m confident my new approach to shooting cars is really helping to improve the results I’m getting. on to the next car which will depend on which of my friends I can convince to stand around for an hour whilst I mess around taking photos!

Last night I used my new Vivitar 285HV Flashes for the first time in anger.

I set out with Rich for whom I’m currently working on a website. He buys and sells tasty but affordable motors, and I take the opportunity to take pictures of them. We made our way to a pitch black industrial estate, and after convincing the security guard not to “release the hounds” and that we weren’t there to instigate a terrorist plot against a double glazing company, I set up my gear.

Inexpert clumsy fumbling in the dark is my forte (just ask my Wife), and last night was no exception. Note to self – buy a torch.

The next lesson was a more painful one. When trying to work out if the remote flashes are firing, staring directly into them is not a good idea. MY EYES!!!!

I had in mind two images I wanted to create, and although I struggled a bit in this first one getting the lighting even, I got there in the end. This was shot with the two Vivitars off camera, and my Nikon SB600 on the camera, set to underexpose by 3 stops.

By saying “underexpose” and “3 stops” I appear to know what I’m talking about – don’t be fooled, I heard those terms somewhere else and thought they might make me sound clever if I used them. (this may be a lie). The idea was for the car to loom out of the dark, like some sort of sinister zombie monster. This is admittedly less convincing when the car is sunshine yellow coloured.

This next one was taken by cranking everything up to full power, and then pressing the button. Oops, looked directly at the flashes again, now I’m definitely blind.

Anyway, I was pleased enough with these for the first attempt, and I’m looking forward to exploring the creative opportunities these flashes open up for me. I am however in the hunt for some radio triggers which I hope will be more reliable. It does mean spending yet more money, but as I only have one set of eyes, I’d like to protect them by avoiding beaming flashes directly into them in future.

Ebay here I come!

Flash. A-ha. Saviour of the Universe.

fffffftt….splrrgggh…ft.

That is the sound of money, hemorrhaging out my wallet across the pond to the YEW ESS of AYE, where these bad boys were purchased;

Not the boxes silly, but the stuff in the boxes. In nerd parlance, these are two Vivitar 285HV flashes, and two Morris hot shoe optical slave units. In normal speaky they are bright lights what flash when you press a button on a camera… Oooooooh.. Like this! Flash! AHAAA!

Mistake one. Looking directly at these and firing off the shutter hurts my eyes. The blindness eventually subsides, which is a relief I can tell you. On to a more advanced test; Here you can see the flashes illuminating stuff, which is basically what they are designed for. Those grey things at the bottom are record decks – remember when I said I used to not be a SuperStar DJ – these are leftover from them days.

These flashes, or flashoids as I want them to henceforth be known, are pretty much all manual so you have to do actual working out before you use them. This seems primitive but then I remember I’ve been playing with a Holga for the last few weeks, and then these suddenly are elevated to space-age technology status in my addled little mind.

This white dial here is for the worky outy stuff;

And this here ‘Vari Power’ dial controls how badly you are going to blind someone. It’s physics Jim, but not as we know it.

I call it the Blind-O-Meter. Set it to stun!

Anyone that is still reading this is a glutton for punishment, so I will punish you with more nerd speak.

The Morris optical slaves seem to work well – although my tests so far are limited to indoor work in low light. The Vivitar flashes seem to be quite powerful, which is great – the above were all shot at 1/16th power, triggered by an Nikon SB600 in the hotshoe of my D200, which was set at f/22 and 1/250th.

Punishment ends.