Better Beamer

[SCraig]

I griped in an earlier thread about a Cougar at the Nashville Zoo that always sleeps in the same place, all day, every day. Unfortunately the spot he chooses to sleep in is apparently a magical spot since no matter the time of day his face ALWAYS seems to be in shadow.

His spot is also a stretch for my SB-700 but, as I found out this weekend, not as big a stretch as I first thought. Anyway, CGipson1 recommended that I take a look at a device called a Better Beamer which uses a Fresnel lens in front of the flash to increase its range. I ordered one last week and gave it a try on Saturday. The results are below. All three are completely unretouched except for cropping, resizing, and embedding an sRGB color space. I may not have gotten the crop exactly the same on all three but the difference in light is still obvious.

First shot - Natural light. Notice the deep shadow on the side of his face.

Second shot - SB-700 alone. I was actually surprised that it provided that much light since the distance was about 20 yards or so. The washed out appearance is from shooting through a chain link fence and having the flash reflect off of the wire. It can be fixed, see the last shot. Still a little bit of shadow in the line of his jaw.

Third shot - SB-700 plus Better Beamer. AS can be seen there is a lot more light on the subject. The shadow along his jaw line is gone. Compare the inside of his ear on all three shots as well.

Final Version - I compensated for the reflection from the wire and added a little bit of sharpening. I think it looks much better than the first shot with natural light alone.

All in all I'm pleased and consider it to be $40 well spent. I shoot a lot of birds and wildlife with a 500mm lens and this will be a valuable tool.

Thanks for the idea Charlie! Much appreciated.

 

[Majeed Badizadegan]

World of difference between 1 and 4!

 

[SCraig]

World of difference between 1 and 4!

You got that right! And #1 is about a decent a shot of him as I've gotten up to now.

 

[cgipson1]

NIce color on that last one! Awesome.. glad it worked for you!

 

[SCraig]

NIce color on that last one! Awesome.. glad it worked for you!

Yeah, that's the color I've been trying to get for a couple of years. Thanks for the guidance, it worked great.

 

[Joel_W]

Nicely done. Wonder how the Cougar feels about it, as it seems to have gotten him up.

 

[SCraig]

Nicely done. Wonder how the Cougar feels about it, as it seems to have gotten him up.

Nah, it didn't bother him. He does that every few minutes; wake up, look around, go back to sleep. I've got another shot taken 75 seconds later (per the EXIF data) and he's just like he was in the first two.

 

[Joel_W]

Some tough life he has. come to think of it, so does our cat.

 

[SCraig]

Some tough life he has. come to think of it, so does our cat.

Yeah, mine are the same way. One is usually sleeping in the dining room window and the other here in my desk chair.

The Cougar's life is fixing to get a bit more interesting though, or perhaps a bit more lively is a better phrase. They have two new Cougar cubs that haven't been turned loose yet. I suspect when they do he will have to spend a bit more time worrying about them wanting to play with him all the time.

 

[Overread]

First up I like the final edit (few sunkissed spots on the face, but honestly considering that you can oft get stuck shooting at the more sunny periods of the day when shooting a zoo not bad).

However the shadows in the first shot are what I'd consider fairly weak (unless you've touched up that first shot in any way from default?). I suspect you could get a fairly similar result editing just boosting the shadows and a touch more noise reduction in those shaded spots.

I say that only as the final shot is almost a little too flat with lighting possibly - though I might be being overcrical just for criticals sake here.



One point though is if you can raise (or lower, but raise is most common) the Better Beamer up from the hot-shoe you can help eliminate the headlight eye effect on the animals eyes. Better Beamer tends to make that worse than bare flash as it directs the light closer to the same angle as the lens captures the light, which causes those reflections in the eye.

 

[SCraig]

First up I like the final edit (few sunkissed spots on the face, but honestly considering that you can oft get stuck shooting at the more sunny periods of the day when shooting a zoo not bad).

However the shadows in the first shot are what I'd consider fairly weak (unless you've touched up that first shot in any way from default?). I suspect you could get a fairly similar result editing just boosting the shadows and a touch more noise reduction in those shaded spots.

I say that only as the final shot is almost a little too flat with lighting possibly - though I might be being overcrical just for criticals sake here.

One point though is if you can raise (or lower, but raise is most common) the Better Beamer up from the hot-shoe you can help eliminate the headlight eye effect on the animals eyes. Better Beamer tends to make that worse than bare flash as it directs the light closer to the same angle as the lens captures the light, which causes those reflections in the eye.

I agree that the shadows are relatively weak and could easily be cleaned up with curves. The point of the exercise was to compare natural light, my SB-700 alone, and SB-700 with the Better Beamer so the first three are completely un-retouched. All I did was crop them and embed an sRGB color space.

I like the last one simply because those are the colors that I see when watching him. The color may be a bit flat, you are right in that, but it's always so shaded in his pen it's hard to tell what he is supposed to look like. There is a hot spot on his nose since that's the way the sun was coming from.

Raising the flash is a very good point. I do have an off-camera TTL cord but didn't think to take it with me. I didn't put a lot of thought into the shot and should have thought of that. I was mainly just curious as to how well the Better Beamer was going to work.

Thanks for the input. It is most appreciated.