Questions about the iPhone photoshoot

[Patrick Hall]

Well, a lot of people across the web have been asking about specific details dealing with our behind the scenes photoshoot with The Greatest Camera Ever! Okay maybe it's not the greatest camera ever which is probably why you guys have questions. Instead of trying to explain technical aspects of the shoot in a dozen or more places, we are just going to answer them all here. So if you have a question go ahead and ask and we will be happy to share our secrets. If you want to tell us how bad our video was because we still used a million dollars in studio equipment, well I guess you can do that too (we find your banter quite amusing actually).

Update: One big misconception I think we have is that this post was directed towards photographers who complain about their gear. Usually these same photographers already own at least one strobe and softbox and argue that they can't make compelling images with their gear. We set out to disprove that and in one of our photos we only use one light. This video was not meant to show that anyone with an iphone can produce great photos on the street or in the bar. It was aimed towards photographers who said "I can't make a video with one camera," or "my camera is 3 years old, how can I compete in your BTS contest?"

[tobi]

Patrick, I am particularly interested in the lighting, how did you scale the light power? What I understand is that you were using the modeling light of your studio flashes, but I am not aware if there is a possibility to modify its intensity, it's always something around 40 Ws isn't it? So distance is the only thing that comes to my mind, but there are limits, right?

[david_lr]

Tobi, most studio lights (except maybe for the cheapest ones) have modeling lights with varying intensity, it's a fairly important and useful feature when trying to work out lighting ratios. Those big floodlights don't, though, I would imagine...?

Patrick, it was a pretty interesting combination, studio lights / iPhone haha x-D I'd like to challenge you and Lee to do the same thing MacGyver style with only the items an extremely frugal enthusiast would have. I want to see strip banks and soft boxes made from toilet rolls and bedsheets! Still, I was impressed I have to say.

[tobi]

Tobi, most studio lights (except maybe for the cheapest ones) have modeling lights with varying intensity, it's a fairly important and useful feature when trying to work out lighting ratios. Those big floodlights don't, though, I would imagine...?

Oh, I wasn't aware of that. I'm more like a strobist guy with speedlights, but looking forward to get the Elinchrom Ranger as soon as there is budget ;-)

[david_lr]

I've used speedlights a lot in the past, too, they definitely have their uses :-)

[Patrick Hall]

In terms of lighting power, honestly, I think everything was set to full power. Unlike using strobes, you really need all the light you can get out of the lamps especially for the iphone which handles light poorly. So in every case, I think the lamps were on full blast.

There is one shot we did where we have a bunch of strip boxes near the ground under the octabox. There is nothing fancy going on here, we just needed a lot more light so we used every box we had. If we could have gotten the octabox brighter we probably would have been okay especially since the seamless was white and reflects light. But we barely had enough light with the modeling lights which proves even more it's not about professional gear. If we had more of those cheap garage lamps we would probably have had even cleaner images.

As for using homemade softboxes, yes of course we could have done that and it would have turned out exactly the same. So many people are complaining about all the extra pro gear we used but honestly, if we made our own softboxes the results would have been the same only we would have turned a 7 hour shoot into a 24 hour shoot.

[david_lr]

if we made our own softboxes the results would have been the same only we would have turned a 7 hour shoot into a 24 hour shoot.

The people want what the people want, Patrick ;-)

I'd also be interested to see if the built-in flash on the new iPhone is powerful enough to trigger the optical slave on your lights, and if it would be able to sync with them... I was able to sync a Powershot S90 with some studio strobes once just using the pop-up slave, it was kind of interesting haha

[Patrick Hall]

I don't think the iphone's sensor is able to record flash. I've 'caught' other people's flashes before on my iphone and it exposes only have the screen. So I think the flash's duration is shorter than the sensor's capture speed if that makes sense. So even if you could trigger the flash via your phone, the resulting photo would not be lit 100% by the flash. It is kind of like shooting at 1/500 when your camera's sync speed is 1/250th.

[david_lr]

I don't think the iphone's sensor is able to record flash. I've 'caught' other people's flashes before on my iphone and it exposes only have the screen. So I think the flash's duration is shorter than the sensor's capture speed if that makes sense. So even if you could trigger the flash via your phone, the resulting photo would not be lit 100% by the flash. It is kind of like shooting at 1/500 when your camera's sync speed is 1/250th.

Yeh that does make sense. It might have changed with the newer iPhone, but it's all pretty moot, really. The only time you'd really need to do it is if you had a studio shoot and you somehow managed to forget your camera, and then you'd probably have bigger problems hahaha. I imagine as well, though, that because the iPhone uses an electronic sensor, if it actually had a sync port and manual controls you'd probably be able to sync it at way faster shutter speeds than most DSLR's. Maybe someone can homebrew up an iPhone input to PC sync adapter and we can find out?