December Challenge: Day 6 – Doug Crimaldi
By Brian Auer • December 6th, 2007
Doug is the Director of Engineering at Ortho Organizers, a company that provides innovative products and solutions to the orthodontic community (braces plus other stuff). I work for Doug part-time as part of my full-time job (they’re contracting me through Quartus Engineering). Doug is one of the busiest people I’ve ever met — he’s constantly working frantically on something, and he’s almost impossible to snag for 5 minutes. But when he does stop what he’s doing, he’s a pretty cool guy and actually somewhat laid back.
In case you’re wondering about the photos, Doug has the gifted ability to blink EVERY SINGLE TIME his picture is taken with a flash. I took six shots of Doug, and he had his eyes closed in every single one. So rather than scrap the photos, I thought I’d make a little 6-in-1 set from these.
To see the rest of my December Challenge photos, check the “Challenge” category here on the blog or visit my Flickr Set.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Very funny.
I was a little frustrated at first, but now it’s pretty funny after putting them all together like that.
This was a good idea!
The bottom middle one really sets this apart. In that one you can see he’s tried so hard!
I have the same difficulty shooting animals sometimes, especially cats. Their reflexes are often sharp enough that they can react to the first TTL shot and their eyes are closed by the second.
So now with cats, I use manual mode on the strobelight, using the distance scale in the window to estimate the right power. The strobe throws only one flash instead of two; works pretty well.
That’s really interesting — I’ll have to test this out with Doug again.
Yep – Ron is right; I was just dropping by (from the feed) to comment on how to fix it. A good way to avoid this & still use TTL is to use the FEL (Flash Exposure Lock) button on your camera.
After you’ve composed the photo, press FEL. This will pop (and meter) the preflash – which is the one that’s causing Doug to blink – and store the value for the next picture you take. Now, when you actually press the shutter release there will be *no* preflash & therefore no blinking! I think if you press and hold FEL it’ll keep the setting across multiple exposures.
Now that you’ve got this cool eye-closed thing, maybe you could make a neat collage of the (future) “Eyes open” photo. Maybe put it larger in the middle of them or take several eyes open shots & alternate them with the eyes closed ones.
This is great stuff Ryan. I’m not too skilled with a flash, so you guys are definitely teaching me some new tricks. Most of my stuff has been all natural lighting, and my flash has just been for getting photos of the kids in the house. I’ll have to start working on my strobist skills.