High Speed Flash Workshop

This workshop is great fun!

It is dedicated to the applications of high speed flash, and how the photographer can solve photographic situations that might require high speed flash. Imagination is the only thing that limits potential applications. There will be a modicum of theory (nothing that a 5th grader couldn’t handle), but more importantly the workshop will highlight the enormous number of possibilities and the many pitfalls that can occur when trying to illuminate a subject/event with high speed flash. Applications will include balloon popping, popping corks, droplet or splash photography, including droplet collisions, and maybe even some ballistics. Keys to succes that will be covered will be shutter lag, auxiliary shutters, ghosting, transparency, ‘midnight shots’ and other things. It overlaps quite a bit with all other workshops, but takes students a lot further in terms of application and understanding. Students get to play work with some very, very specialized flash gear, but more importantly will learn how to use their own flash gear for high speed flash applications. Students are welcome to bring along their own flash gear for guidance and experimentation.

An air pellet impacting a red Jelly Belly (the inedible ones!). The only good thing for them, really.

High Speed Flash gear that will be used or demonstrated: EG&G Microflash, VHSF System (Yoric Inc. Custom Design), Strobotac 1531 and 1538 and others. I will also show how standard flashes can be utilized for high speed flash applications, such as Canon 580EX’s, 580EXII‘s, Vivitar 285′s, Sunpak 555′s and any flashes that students wish to bring themselves. If the flash has a ‘manual’ mode, we can use it.

We will also learn how to photograph droplets – from the very simple to complex collisions!

Learning how to configure standard flash equipment such that it produces very short duration flash is one thing, but triggering it at the precise moment a balloon bursts, or a champagne cork pops, or an air pellet impacts a  target requires precision timing. A good deal of time in the workshop is spent covering different triggering techniques and gear, such that students will be able to decide on what gear they may wish to acquire if they would like to pursue this exciting and differentiated avenue of photography. Most do…..

Above is a pair of images taken seconds apart. The four colored water droplets have been hit by an air pellet travelling around 500 feet per second (about half the speed of sound….)

For the sake of full disclosure, I am currently working with Cognisys Inc. as a field tester for a lot of their equipment. They do not pay me, but I do get to use some of their latest gear for nothing. Over nearly 30 years of doing remote photography in one form or another, I am happy to honestly report that their equipment is far and away the best I have ever used (and I possess and have used a lot of different systems). Students at the workshop will be exposed to many different systems, including the StopShot from Cognisys, the Time Machine from Mumford, the TrailMaster, the LPA Wavesensor (now obsolete), and even some of my own designs. All demonstrations and hands-on exercises will be done with StopShots. The cool thing about the StopShot is that every student that attends my workshop will receive a (very) significant discount from Cognisys, should that be the direction they wish to pursue.