Sean Esopenko

Photograph as Time Based Medium (aka: Fun With Flash)

June 9, 2010

Because of the gloomy Calgary weather I was stuck indoors tonight. Yeah, go figure? Calgary has rain!? Anyways I had some fun with my flash unit and a bunch of coloured gel sheets. I set my 5D on a tripod, adjusted it to bulb exposure and turned it to day-light white balance. Then I turned it to F22 and ISO 100 to make it as dark as possible. I even put my polarizing filter on it to give it another 3 stops of darkness. What I wanted to do was to make it drag out as long as possible so I could fire off my flash with the test button 2-4 times during one exposure, and not expose the background too much.

I tried to get a little creative with my poses. It’s kind of like acting, like drama back in junior high. I figured out how I could twist my body to end up in unique spots, and then twist my body further to fire the flash upon myself without dropping the coloured gel I’m holding over top of it. The results are single shots with multiple images of myself in them.

The key is that the photographic camera is a time-based medium, really. When you press the button, the shutter is open for a period of time. On bulb exposure it’s as long as you want. You’re recording something, not necessarily simply taking a photograph. You can get creative with this and lots of people do with tricks like multiple flash fires on a single exposure. This is what slow-speed-sync is. You get a still shot of your well lit main subject because the flash is fired for a fraction of a second. The rest of the exposure is recorded during the length of time that the mirror is up and the shutter curtains are out of the way. Once those curtains closed, you’re done your recording and left with a sharp image of your subject and a blurry, moving image of everything else.

In the early days of photographic technology, photographs were recorded over minutes, let alone seconds. Reportedly, the world’s first photograph of a person is Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, Paris 3.

It was a 10 minute exposure of a busy intersection of Paris. The only person visible is the man with his leg up on the post in the lower left of the frame. Everybody else wasn’t standing still so they weren’t recorded in the picture.

The principle applies to our digital cameras of today. Even shutter-less cameras perform in the same manner: they only record at a specific time period. This can be controlled in a creative manner that only the imagination can limit. What all this means is that even with digital your creativity can go beyond the perfectly still, perfectly sharp photograph.

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