UPDATE: Corrects backpack, adds links to backpack and duffel.
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I have logged a lot of air miles over the last few years, and am getting ready to pile on a few more en route to Dubai this week.

On of the biggest advantages of being speedlight-based is being able to avoid the excess-baggage mafia. Given that I usually travel with computer, camera gear, lighting gear (including stands, etc.) in addition to the typical clothing stuff, I thought I would do a quick post on what and how I pack.
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Two In the Belly

First off, I always strive to get all of my clothing/personal items into a medium-sized L.L. Bean White Mountain backpack. I can get a ton of stuff in there, and it doesn’t take any hands to schlep it. That bag always gets checked.

The second checked bag is an L.L. Bean roller duffel. It is modestly sized but can really swell up to handle extra clothing and/or souvies for the kids. That bag takes my light stands, umbrellas, grip, mods, etc. Nothing in the soft roller is very fragile. And more important, if it gets lost there is nothing in there that I cannot replace quickly in any medium-sized city.

Being able to throw four light stands and umbrellas into a normal-sized bag and still have room for plenty of other stuff is one of the reasons I love 5-section compact stands and Westcott double-fold umbrellas. Pint-sized powerhouses.

Two in the Cabin

Never lost a bag yet, knock wood. But if I do, the goal is to still be able to do a shoot with the carry-on stuff. To that end, the most important stuff stays with me.

My one carry-on bag, pictured above, is a Think Tank Airport International Security. I cannot tell you how much I love this roller. It is built like a tank, has locks (and locking cable), holds all of my critical stuff and is designed to be a legal carry on just about anywhere in the world. They make a bigger one that meets U.S. domestic limits, but that one is too big for many international carriers.

Pictured above, it has my core and/or breakable gear. In addition to the pockets full of cards, papers, gels, fold-flat Lumiquest mods, speedstraps, etc., here is what I typically take in the main compartment:

1. Nikon D3 — main body.

2. Nikon D300 — backup body. Bought two weeks before the D700 was announced, of course. Grr.

3. Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 — my most frequently used lens by a mile.

4. Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 — great lens, but I use it way less now that I do not shoot for papers anymore.

5. Nikon 55 f/2.8 AI (MF) Macro lens

6. Holga (80mm portrait) and Diana (wide) plastic lenses in Nikon mounts — light, cheap, quirky and occasionally invaluable.

7. Six Nikon SB-800s — I know, I am a little bit addicted.

8. Orbis Ring Flash Adapter — gets heavy use. Will sometimes take a Ray Flash, depending on circumstances.

9. Charger for D3 — (D300 charger rides in checked bag.)

10. Two Nikon SC-17 cords — one neutered, one not.

11. Honl grids (underneath other stuff) — prefer the 1/8 to the 1/4.

12. Four Nikon diffuser domes for SB-800s.

13. Three PW Plus II’s (and 4 more in the second case.) These will get me by just in case, as I can SU-4 the other SB-800′s.

14. Extra AA’s — Kodak slow-drain Ni-MH’s are my favorites.

and, special for this trip…

15. A couple RadioPopperJrX’s, because I am doing the GPP Shootout against JoeyL and Zack Arias. And I just know Zack is planning on trying to pwn me with his Pocket Wizards after what we did to him last year.

Oh, and I got me a nice, long SYNC CORD, too, Mr. Zack. ‘Cause I wasn’t born yesterday.

Last, I have a small “personal” bag which gets the laptop, iPhone, spare hard drive, coupla magazines and a book. And, just in case: An extra T-shirt, skvvies and a toothbrush for the inevitable airport delays/cancellations. And for overnight flights, I have a big, poofy jacket that I wear onto the plane. It transforms into a pretty nice pillow once I am curled into that window seat.

I shop for tickets inclusive of baggage fees, so I compare apples to apples. (That’s one reason I love Southwest airlines.) Delta, which charges out the wazoo for checked bags, for some reason has no fees if you are going to the Middle East. So this week, it’s Delta for me.

(For lots more very good gear/packing/flying info, I recommend the blog Flying With Fish, by Steve Frischling.)

Seventeen-hour trip up next = guaranteed Hobbit feet by the time we get to DXB. But at least my gear will be none the worse for wear.
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NOTE: If you are posting Q’s on the Flickr photo page about the Think Tank bag, please be aware tham I am in Dubai right now and cannot access Flickr as it is a banned site. The Firefox plugin that worked last year is not working this year, either. Solutions welcomed!

Local tech blogger Gus Sentementes popped down to The Cave for a headshot recently. And that was a good excuse to play with some atypical (for me, anyway) light.

Keep reading for some thoughts on working with differently shaped faces — and taking the final display size into account, too.
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Take a Walk on the Wide Side

Facial shape is something you really do need to take into account when designing your light. To that end, there are a standard list of pat solutions for just about any variety of face.

Problem is, I hate standard, pat solutions.

What they are really doing if you stop to think about it, is using light to push us all toward some idealized ratio. And who wants that?

As far as I am concerned, any time someone give you the “if they have this kind of face, light them in this way” speech, you can be pretty sure they are trying to cram you into some standardized portrait box.

Seriously, what’s the point in that? If the goal is to make everyone look the same, just use the liquify filter in Photoshop and be done with it. Everyone will come out looking like the Dove Lady.

That said, there are some lighting styles that will give you problems with some face types. I just like to try to find more interesting (and varied) solutions when practical.

Here is Gus, with beauty dish + ring lighting. It is similar to the AscendOne shots I blogged about a little while back, but without the rims. This lighting makes his face look pretty wide. And the effect would be enhanced if I added the rim lights.

Another thing you may be noticing is the reddish tones on Gus’s face. This is (as far as I can tell) a byproduct of the combo of my D3, which tends toward warm/red, and my AB’s — which do the same, but in an inconsistent way.

Shooting in RAW, I still have not been able to tweak things to a tone I am happy with. But I am not exactly thrilled about it and I am doing some testing with other platforms to see how to best swap out to correct it. More on that soon.

Anyway, back to the lighting position. In the pic above I have a AB in a beauty dish top/front, and a ring (a couple of stops down) for fill. There is an SB-800 on the background, and another SB-800 up top in a scissor-clip for a top light.

And this light really does not do anything for me, to be honest. It’s a headshot, but it really does not bring anything special to the party. But it is a start.

Lately, I am trying to approach each headshot as more of a unique experience. And that means working with the light as a variable to add interest or visual focus. And in this case I wanted to draw some interest to the center of Gus’s face with some restricted light.

Normally, I’d head straight to the grid spots for this kind of thing. But I already had the strip boxes out from another shoot. And besides, they had egg crate -type grids on them anyway.

So I killed the dish and the ring and brought the strips in very close — aimed at each other. They were right in front of his face. The falloff from each gridded strip light kept it from creeping around to the side of Gus’s face, which created a neat focus in the front.

The lights, of course, fall off kinda gradually, which accounts for the fact that there is some detail going back around his head. You can vary this falloff from how you aim the lights. Point them more toward the camera for a faster falloff, and aim them further back for more light on the sides.

To me, this light has way more interest than does the beauty/ring light above. It’s certainly not a pat response to a wide face, either — nor is it ever to likely be one. But playing around with different solutions is what makes tight portraiture so interesting to me. For something that is very standard in general shape and scale, there are still lots of creative possibilities.

Here’s a pullback so you can see just how tight those gridded strips were. His face is really just a few inches from the edges of the boxes, and that is the key to getting the control on the front of his face.

The SB up top is gobo’d with a strip of gaffer’s tape, and the (unseen) background light (another SB) has a dome to make that little separating glow.

You can modify how fast the gradient occurs in the background with the dome (180-degree light) and varying the distance to the wall. In this case, it was about a foot away.

Size Matters

As I said, my strong preference is for the shot with the more interesting light. But when we saw it avatar-sized (~50 pixels) it kinda made Gus look like, um, The Devil.

See what I mean?

Having worked with Gus for the better part of 10 years, I am pretty sure he is not, in fact, the Dark Lord Mephistopheles. (Although, to be fair, I don’t socialize with him that much at night.)

But for very small (i.e., avatar) usage, we both agreed it was better to go with the other pic. Interesting, as I think the more dramatic light kills the standard-lit stuff at any other size.

Valuing Experimentation

This was a collaborative shoot — no money involved either way — so there was plenty of room for trying new things. And next time out, I will have that extra lighting technique in my bag of tricks and will be comfortable using it.

And that’s what makes those kinds of shoots both interesting and valuable. I get to experiment and Gus gets new photos for his various social media channels. It works for both of us.

For his part, Gus is in at an interesting intersection for a newspaper guy right now. He is working in traditional media, but his blog’s subject matter means that he has strong visibility into both print and new media/tech.

Gus is a fairly young guy, and no doubt realizes that newspapers will not be a dominant information channel going forward. Fortunately, the people who work in newspapers are very well suited to transitioning to new media formats as individuals.

The printing presses, trucks, newspaper racks and dead trees — not so much.
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Check out Sentementes’ blog BaltTech, here.

Great rock climbing video from Nikon Australia showing off the video capabilities of the Nikon D3s!