Venice workshop wrap up
Shehab Hossain and I wrapped up our Venetial light painting workshop recently and while we we weren’t there to to shoot for ourselves we were able to take some of the educational moments and capture some of that magic. We felt like the people coming to this workshop also wanted opportunities to find their own personal magic and reserved the time between lunch and dinner for everyone to explore the city at their leisure.
First up: Venice from above! After arriving via water taxi we started our first Saturday evening on a rooftop above the Rialto bridge and worked into the evening captuing the existing light and light trails before finding a dark corner to create some light orbs with a light wand.
An early morning shoot at the basin and during our class time we checked the tide levels to discover that Piazza San Marco met our expectations of acqua alta during October and we took a break to get some crystal ball shots to play with those watery reflections. with some of the locals Later in the day we got back on schedule with light orbs and rainbow waves in the quieter Cannaregio neighborhood.
Mondays are always manic and starting at the busy Accademia bridge set the pace for the day. Classroom time was spent going into depth with some techniques and working with students to have them create orbs of their own. The evening started with an after hours trip with unbelivable views in the breathless Basilica San Marco. This is truly a remarkable space and the construction over hundreds of years is magnificent, if you are ever in Venice I would recommend.
Afterward we came outside and continued into the later hours at a nearby basin filled with gondolas and wrapped up the day creating some little planets in the piazza with the towering buildings popping up from the horizon.
Everyone was hitting their stride after three amazing days and four fantastic nights and so we threw the students into the deep and gave them all the tools from our bags and set them loose into the Venetian night. More light orbs, rainbow light trails, and just taking time to talk through locations we were able to provide, hopefully, some great feedback and help through some of the specific tricky issues and questions.
I didn’t get as many photos as I wanted to this night as I was more often acting as the model or describing things in front of the camera.
Our last day in town the weather caught up with us and it was rainier than expected and we all agreed the night before to skip the morning shoot due to the lack of sun. Some people hopped a train to the mainland for a winery tour where it was a bit drier, and we all met up to have dinner together before going out to dodge the storms as best as possible.
Shehab and I ended up getting very few shots that night because we were so busy helping and demonstrating techniques. We worked on helping people create their own light orbs and brought out some light stencils to explore layering those in the field. It helped to have a laptop along to quickly show some of the options available and the creative ideas once can create in post.
Overall, this workshop was a delight, exactly what we thought it would be: an incredible opportunity to demonstrate a variety of light painting techniques in a staggeringly beautiful location. October turned out to be a great time to visit, much less crowded than the summer and certainly less hot. The high tides worked well to bring some reflections to San Marco for the acqua alta but they weren’t too high to cause issues getting around. And the hotel was excellent both in location and services, the breakfast was superb and the elevator was exactly what was needed after the end of a long evening when a hike up the stairs was too much.
Would we do it again? Absolutely, it was the perfect location to get amazing reflections from light painting and to have the opportunity to steep ourselves in that history was astonishing. We’d love to do some smaller, more localized workshops both around New York and Boston so add your email below to hear about upcoming events!
Ulanzi and Lulxi light panel shootout
Luxli panels light the underside from left and right, the more magenta Ulanzi can be noticed lighting down onto the hood.
I have had a few conversations with people recently about Luxli Fiddles being discontinued. Apparently they have been out of stock for a few weeks now and there doesn’t seem to be any indication as to when they might be available.
So I asked around to see what others were using and one name that kept coming up was Ulanzi, which is a Chinese manufacturer of a variety of photography elements, mostly centering around smartphone and mobile content creators. Their product line includes travel tripods, mounts, cages, stabilizers, and some lightweight LED lighting options. These lighting options include ring lights, small stand lights, and on-camera panels, the latter of which I was interested in as an alternative to the Luxli panels.
I ordered the $30 VL49 Pro and the $40 LT002 7” RGB video light. The former is a square format about 2 1/2” in either direction on the face and slightly thicker than 1”, the latter is 3” by 5 1/2” and less than 3/4” thick. The exterior is all plastic with a built-in white plastic diffuser covering the entirety, for a very elegant look. Both units have a 1/4”-20 thread on the bottom for tripod attachment and a USB-C receptacle (the VL49 is on the side and the 7” RGB is on the bottom). There are magnets on the back on both and the VL49 also has them on the top and sides.
Power is via a switch on the side and fixture controls are via four buttons on the back: mode control, menu control, up and down. Mode control switches between variable white, variable color, and preprogrammed scenes, menu control changes what menu functionality you are changing (color temperature or intensity), and up and down increase or decrease the setting (take the color temperature up, for example). A small, rectangular, monochrome 1” LCD shows the current mode, setting, and fixture intensity.
Functionality is the same on both fixtures and I suspect they are using the same chipset on both units. Settings include variable white from 2500-9000K, RGB color (adjustable Hue from 0-360 degrees and saturation from 0-100), along with 20 creative light scenes that essentially flash the fixture in different configurations like emergency vehicles, flame flickering, and rainbow chases. All of these are adjustable in brightness from 0 to 100. Accessories in the box include a white silicone diffuser, black silicone hexcell louver, power cable, and two small adhesive metal panels that can be placed to allow magnetic attachment anywhere they will stick.
At 4100K the Luxli Fiddle is about 87 footcandles at 24” and the Ulanzi 7” is 26 footcandles (the VL49 Pro is 13 footcandles) at the same distance; this is mostly due to the Luxli using 18 watts and the Ulanzi’s 10 watts of power, but the built-in diffuser of the Ulanzi accounts for the remaining difference. However, the Ulanzi is much smoother as a wash unit as a result. The Luxli claims a 102 degree beam and the Ulanzi claims 120 degrees but the reality on the Ulanzi is closer to a 180 degree beam. The included hexcell grid for Ulanzi is something I would recommend for typical use in order to have some level of control, but the light loss will be significant, about halving the intensity.
Performance-wise the fixture is classified as having a 95+ CRI, similar to other LED panels of this size. CRI is short for Color Rendering Index, which is a metric based on the percentage of light wavelengths reflecting off fourteen specific color chips picked in the 1960’s. It may not be the best metric but it is the one currently in use by a number of manufacturers. I feel the best way to compare things is to look at comparisons of the same colors under different conditions and the X-Rite ColorChecker happens to have eight of the fourteen colors for CRI and eight steps from white to black so it seemed like the perfect way to compare the 95+ CRI sources of the Luxli Fiddle and the Ulanzi.
For comparison, consider that the sun, with its broad full spectrum, has a CRI of 100, as do halogen and incandescent lamps. A source with 95+ CRI is therefore missing over four percent of the visible light wavelengths. One concern is where in the color spectrum these lights are missing. With most LED sources, the loss ends up being in some of the more robust reds.
I set up an X-Rite ColorChecker and a camera and captured the Luxli Fiddle set to 5600K, natural daylight on a cloudy day, and the Ulanzi 7” RGB also set to 5600K. As you can see from the image below the sun’s full spectrum provides some additional red tones that the Luxli and Ulanzi are not able to replicate. (Again, this is fairly common with LEDs and can be clearly seen in the top two and last two colors.) The blue, green, and yellow colors, which have the least amount of red, are fairly closely replicated. The eight tones from white to black are also within reasonable metrics of similar.
Now that we better understand how LEDs are doing at replicating the sun, the question then became about how well they do against each other. How does the $40 Ulanzi look compared to the $260 Luxli? The answer is “incredibly well” as you can tell from the images below where the daylight column has been removed and the two LED fixture color charts are placed next to each other. In the whites the Ulanzi shows a slight magenta tone in comparison to the Luxli panels. This is also visible in tones 2, 3 and 4 on the left, where the lavender, periwinkle and aqua tones have a cooler green tint in the Luxli and the 5, 6, and 7 tones are slightly warmer on the Ulanzi due to the magenta shift.
Real World Use:
I had the opportunity to try out the Ulanzi on a workshop I was hosting on 47 acres of vintage cars with the intent of seeing how well the panels worked outside, where I assume most people would be using them. This also gave me the opportunity to test out the white and color options in comparison with the Luxli panel. The intensities are vastly different so when set to white the Luxli panels had to be dialed down to about 25% of whatever the Ulanzi was set to in order to balance, when shooting a variety of colors then the intensities will always be different regardless.
Upon arrival I brought out the smaller Ulanzi fixture to start and, although it was fully charged it did not turn on, only emitting a small buzzing noise that electronics should not have. So it went back in the bag and I changed to the 7” panel instead which did not have any issues. The smaller panel did end up working about an hour later for reasons unknown and has remained operational since so I remain unsure as to what the is or was.
Overall the Ulanzi fixture worked well, incredibly so for its price range. While it produces lower light levels than the Luxli, it was useful for night photography and I was very happy with the results. In white light, the only shots where the color difference was noticeable were those when the fixtures were all set to 4100K and only on the all-white car. The color images were impossible to determine which fixture was where without notes.
Conclusion:
Overall the fixture colors are very similar and if the Luxli Fiddle continues to have supply issues the Ulanzi fixture line is certainly worth consideration, especially at the price. There’s certainly going to be a space in my bag for these units, as they’re small enough to fit anywhere and functional enough to adapt to my typical manner of shooting.
There are practical considerations to be kept in mind however. First up is the build quality. The all plastic housing simply can not be compared to a cast aluminum housing of the Luxli. I still have no understanding if the smaller Ulanzi is going to fail again in the future. Secondly, the button quality does give me pause, as they feel like they might fail at some point. I do wish there was some finer granular control than the Ulanzi has, stepping through 100K adjustments with no ability to modify the green and magenta tones and brightness is in 1% steps from 0 to 100, but the fact that the fixtures are not bright to begin with helps out.
The Bluetooth connectivity and app for the Luxli provides a tremendous amount of flexibility, especially when lights have been placed and focused. Not needing to touch them again saves a lot of time when correcting adjustments. The next panel I look into as a Luxli Fiddle replacement will need to have Bluetooth capabilities; there is a lot of range financially between the $40 Ulanzi and the $260 Luxli. While I appreciate the Ulanzi units coming with grid accessories, the light loss is significant. Similar to the Luxli, the beam could be tighter and there could be more control over the spill light, which is something that I will be looking to rectify. I am aware that SmallRig makes the Bluetooth enabled RM75 which has piqued my interest with its capabilities, but the fact that it is only 5 watts means it should only have a similar performance with the VL49 Pro.
In summary, the Ulanzi RGB LED units are worth the price, and the color and white rendering is comparable to the Luxli Fiddle. The issues are more than offset by the cost savings even if they require me to walk over to them more often. If you need something before Luxli can come up with a replacement for the Fiddle, these Ulanzi RGB panels should hopefully last long enough.
Little Planet spherical photography
My good friend Matt Hill recently gave me a very thorough primer about panoramic night photography, he’s been at it for a few years now and we are all indebted to Michael James Murray who showed all of us the way some 15 years ago when it involved a lot more fighting with Photoshop and other digital battles. These days it’s a much, much easier process during the capture if you take the time to set things up properly and test before you get out into the field.
But I had an opportunity to visit Quebec soon after my weekend at Matt’s and took the opportunity to put my skills to the test. Adding to the complexity was a bitterly cold night (about 30F with winds about 35 MPH at the top of the hill) so I was quite happy with these two final images from my first outing. Each of them is made from about 90 images taken on a specialized mount to ensure the rotation happens around the center of the lens itself instead of the camera. This prevents parallax, where objects don't meet when shooting panoramas which screws up the software processing these images. I also took two additional sets of exposures to make HDR images, which are sometimes used in challenging lighting situations with streetlights and unlit building parts.
I’m certain that the writing of it sounds a lot more complicated than it is in reality; mostly because I never fully understood it when I read about it online, the doing of it is a fairly straighforward process once you see it done. The gear to take spherical panoramas simply fits into a hand and is leightweight enough that I can throw it into my bag and not be anxious about needing to leave something else out when I travel as a result.
For Little Planets anything that sticks up above the horizon is a good start, add the fact the Chateau Frontenac is a dramatic subject and you can see why I braved the wind and cold. You can also see why I”m really excited about showing others how to capture similar shots in Venice this October, the campanilles, the narrow streets, the Rialto bridge, the churches, what opportunities for making great images. So come along and join my friend Shehab and I on our workshop, we’re going to help show you an amazing city.
Hosting a workshop in Venice
Venice always seemed to be one of the most foreign cities on Earth. No roads anywhere but streets made of water! And a Medieval city on top of it, with ancient buildings steeped in history. It seemed unreal when I read about it as a kid and when I had the opportunity to visit for a day in 2019 I leapt at it. Arriving by train across the lagoon I was like Katherine Hepburn in Summertime, looking out the window and wondering if I would like it.
Entering into the chaos of a June afternoon I was in awe. I had no working knowledge of Italian other than “bathroom,” “please,” and “thank you,” and no map other than my phone. But I also had my camera, a tripod, and a plan to take the second-to-last train back to Trieste at 9:30. Into the masses I waded, in awe of the variety of boats puttering along the Grand Canal. I found my way to the Rialto Bridge and Piazza San Marco by surreptitiously following tour groups led by someone with a flag or an umbrella. It was crowded and busy and, as it was early afternoon, fairly boring light from above, so I had an early dinner and anxiously waited for sunset to arrive.
I was in Piazza San Marco at the time when the square lost its direct sunlight, leaving the campanile and gold-topped Basilica alight; it was phenomenal and I suddenly realized the city was too large to try and capture it all in a day. I wandered around the San Marco neighborhood shooting the colorful canals, lit in the diffuse fading light, with the sky above a magnificent azure, reflecting in the water. The blue hour really worked well to be able to still see the tops of buildings and define those shapes.
As darkness fell the lanterns came to life revealing an entirely different version of the city: smaller, more intimate, pools of light creating incredible silhouettes of pedestrians moving through the space. Well-lit restaurants with diners and light spilling into the sidewalks while the waterways reflected long lines across the images. Smaller canals had gondolas leaving light trails meandering through the inky canals created mystery to long exposures.
Every shot was fascinating and I felt my scheduled train departure creeping closer and closer. At 9:30 I found myself deep in the middle of the Cannaregio, 20 minutes from the train station and now well aware I had to make the 10:30 train unless I wanted to sleep on the sidewalk until 5 AM. I slowly wandered back towards the train station with more purpose now, anxious about taking a wrong turn to a dead end alley. But those dead ends! Even they led to such interesting locations, sill canals framed by flower pots or laundry forgotten on the line overnight.
In the end I still had to hustle for the train, picking up my bag of clothing from luggage storage and slumping into a seat with about eight other people in the car. It was a quiet ride and I spent most of it reviewing images. My trip to Venice had been a magical unreal day and I wished that it had been even longer. I have been lucky enough to come back time and again over the past five years and decided to help others create their own magical memories by creating a workshop to lead others through the city, you can find out more about it here.
3D printing and photography
3D printing and film photography
When I first heard about 3D printing I asked my friend Dave at a makerspace what they could really be used for. “They’re a hammer for every nail out there,” was the answer and it didn’t make much sense. It turns out that what Dave meant is that you need to review what your actual problems are because 3D printing can solve a vast majority of them you just need to consider what your actual problems are.
I still enjoy film photography, it’s slow, methodical, very limited with the shot quantity, and, in my case, monochromatic. The limits are what I like about it, being forced to really think about that composition and if it’s worth 1/12th of what I want to record that day. Quite the opposite from cards that hold gigabytes. One thing I had gotten over the holidays was a small Keks light meter, as hauling around a meter that is the size of my folding Agfa Isolette III is kind of ridiculous. So having a smaller option that slid into the cold shoe was a delight.
However, I looked over at my Hasselblad 500 and really wanted to find a way to attach the Keks to the Hassy, unfortunately for me the Hasselblad’s small rail would require a fairly expensive cold shoe solution. To add to the complexity the width of the cold shoe on the Hasselblad was larger than the one for the Agfa. So, checking the typical 3D printing file locations I found a good start to a printable rail onto the Hasselblad that I could modify to perfectly fit the Keks.
44 minutes later I had the solution in my hand and everything slid in perfectly to save me a lot of time, money and space in my bag.
Another solution to a problem that I found during this was with the Hasselblad’s dark slide. It slips into the film magazine and prevents the shutter from triggering until it’s removed. Whenever I’m out shooting I take it out and never know what to do with it, I’ll slip it into a pocket and forget about it untl it’s accidentally bent. So, delving back into a 3D drawing program called Sketchup I modified another design to clip snugly onto the back of the camera. Now the dark slide comes out, goes into the slot two inches back and reminds me that it has to go back where it came from.
So if you can’t figure out a solution to an annoyance you have with your camera gear contact me and we’ll talk over some ideas, there’s a very good chance there’s a solution that can be had in a much shorter time than you would think.
