Ian La Rue & the Condor

Been a while since I have done any band photography. So when I was asked to photograph Ian La Rue & the Condor I didn't know what to expect. Last time I did this there were no such thing as digital cameras. But hey photography is photography. Just point it in the right direction and push the button, right?

Well some things have not changed with digital. The lighting sucked just like it did when I shot film. But this wasn't the band's fault. The venue was in control of the sound and lights. Sound was pretty good though.

Truthfully the lighting wasn't that bad. (unless you were photographing the show) Cameras don't have the same abillity to make things look right compared to our eye/brain combination. There was a hot spot on Ian when in front of the microphone. The rest of the stage was quite a bit darker as you can see in the above image. And unfortunately the drummer was I what i called The Black Hole.

DIY Optical Slave trigger

So I have a number of ebay radio triggers for triggering off camera flashes. After modifying the transmitter to get reliable operation I have been quite happy with them. The problem I have with the receivers is that I keep forgetting to turn the power off on them when I done with them.

I also have a Canon A570 IS point and shoot camera and I would like to be able to use off camera flash with it. It has no hot shoe and no other flash trigger output. So I figure I could use some optical triggers for my flash use. I can set the P&S camera for minimal flash output (not that it has a very powerful flash) and optically trigger some remote flash units. Or I can still use an radio transmitter on the camera to cause a a remote flash to fire and that flash can trigger the optical triggers firing additional flash units.

So do I head out and buy a bunch of optical slaves? No way, not me. Instead I make my own. So I take a look on the Internet to see what others have done. Very little out there and I was not happy with the little I found. The better design required a battery to operate the circuit. But I didn't want to have to bother with batteries and power switches that I forget to turn off. So I come up with the following (for those with an electronic background and just wanna know).

Low tech gun photography

I spend some time at the Canadian Gun Nutz site. I am disgusted with some of the photographs of the guns. Some guys are fantastic. Some pretty good. Most don't seem to know more than how to zoom and click. Once in a while I add to posts on how to take a decent picture. I'm not talking magazine cover pictures but decent well lit simple but attractive pictures.


One person had a pretty special gun and posted some pictures of it. On camera flash typically looks like crap for these kind of picture (actually most pictures). At some point he listened to someone and used another light source other than the on camera flash. I usually tell people to use natural light if possible (not direct sun light) and a tripod. Well back to the special gun. Like I said he turned off the on camera flash of his point & shoot camera. He used a lamp to light the gun. The following is one of the posted pictures.

Pretty bad but much better than some. At least its not badly out of focus. So I had to reply to his post. I wrote the following.