I love reflectors. I love flash too, but sometimes the simplicity of a reflector is a much better option. And so it was just last weekend. I met up with a friend and a friendly model and off we went for a couple of hours photography just to have a play around really. We didn't have a goal in mind, we just thought it was a nice day and we should take some pictures!

Having shot quite a few images using flash (and yes, using the PocketWizard Flex and Mini units) I then had a go with a reflector - in this case, a California Sunbounce with silver/gold sheet. The sunbouncers are very lightweight and although they don't pack as conveniently as disc reflectors, they do have a very flat surface to bounce light from - and they are very reflective. 

Anyway, these two shots - taken more for their comparison value of showing with and without a reflector - show exactly what you can achieve without expensive flash setups. The model (Laura) was placed with her back to the sun to provide some backlighting to the hair, and a reflector was held in front of her to pump some light back into the face - the difference is quite marked - there was no change in exposure, just the reflector added. Had I opened up the exposure to get better lighting on her face, the background would have been completely blown. Essentially, the reflector has been used as a balanced fill flash. 

So, before you go out buying lots of flash guns, first pick up a reflector and learn to use it properly. Once you get a flashgun, you'll be glad you did - and even then the reflector won't be obsolete as you can still use it to bounce flash from for softer results.

I've talked before about the sense of having a camera that can produce both stills and video, and I showed an example of a twister I caught on video in the Farne Islands earlier in the year. this worked as an example, but maybe didn't quite catch the imagination of all of you.

However, now a good friend of mine (and  training partner for anyone interested in Apple specific software training or Photoshop) - Anton Nelson - has produced a bit more a show to help explain why you should be looking at this technology. Just a couple of weeks ago he was in Paris with his girlfriend and they stumbled upon a 'mega rave' in the middle of the city. It seems the entire population of young Parisiens had decided to have a big street party. With his EOS 500D he shot some still images and a couple of clips of video. He did say his head was in the stills mindset so he didn't shoot as much video as he'd have liked, but upon returning home he put them together and added a music track to the whole show. 

You may be watching it and thinking that it's only for photojournalists looking to cover news stories, but think of it in terms of being with your family on a day out - the ability to capture a couple of short movie clips, with nothing more than an EOS 500D and a couple of lenses, has created a much more interesting piece to show people. Granted you can't print a movie out, but if you want to show what you can do or create a rich tapestry of media records for when you're old and looking back at your life, the combination of both looks much more appealing. 

If you're still not convinced by movies, then at least look at this from the point of view of putting still images into an interesting slide show... we've been projecting images for years, sometimes even putting music with them. Wouldn't it be nice to do it a little easier and more professionally?

"Mega Rave" from Anton Nelson on Vimeo.

The web is awash with Timelapse. It started with Ross Ching and his Eclectic series, and now Tom at Timescapes.org has started to do some really amazing stuff particularly in low light. This has kicked off Philip Bloom as well.

Now, if you want to have a go at timelapse and you're using a Mac to put the sequences together then you really should make use of Automator as well. I mean, you don't really fancy resizing thousands of images by hand do you?! (Or even working with bigger files than you need to....!)

When shooting timelapse, you have no need to shoot at full res. In fact, you're better off shooting at Medium or Small JPEG to save card space and because you don't need all that file size to create a full HD film. However, even with the Small or Medium JPEG settings on cameras like the EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D your files will still be bigger than needed and also the wrong format. Automator can solve this problem for you quickly and easily. 

The settings for Automator that I use are as follows:

1. Get Specified Finder Items

2. Copy Finder Items (to ensure you don't resize the originals)

3. Get Folder Items

4. Crop images: To Dimensions (1920x1080) Scale before crop: Scale to Width.

This will take your files and crop them to the 1920x1080 resolution ready to be put into an image sequence. It's also quicker to do this to the files beforehand rather than trying to deal with over large files afterwards. 

If you're a Mac user and you can't be bothered to create the automator action yourself, I've created it for you and you can download it from here. Just unzip it and import it to Automator. I'd then save it as an application on your desktop so you can just drop files onto it to re-size.