Just realised this blog post never went live today – there was some problem with the scheduling (I try to write these a day ahead of time if I can to keep the updates relatively constant), so it’s better late than never, hopefully. My work the other night to print and mount photographs for the DCC club panel that goes to competition at the weekend brought me and my Kilmainham Gaol photographs together once again, and reminded me of an upcoming exhibition that I intended to tell you about sooner, but which has not yet started. It is by a friend and fellow DCC club member, and if you have any interest in Kilmainham Gaol, Irish history, or just great photographs it is one to go see.
The exhibition is called “Discovering Kilmainham Jail… a photographic journey through the corridors of time” and it is being held in the Central Library at Dublin’s Ilac Centre from the 6th to the 28th of May this year. It features photographs taken by Tess Buckley, and while I don’t know exactly what photographs Tess will have on display, I do know that they will be worth your time to view them, and will give you a view of Kilmainham Gaol that even those of you who have visited before will either not have seen before, or not have noticed. Tess, more than many other photographers I know, has a great eye for detail and I remember on the few occasions that we were both in Kilmainham photographing at the same time, I was struck by how she would find photographs in places I would never see them.
I suspect many of her photographs of the building will have been captured during a project which led to a number of members of Dublin Camera Club exhibiting in the gaol previously, and it was as part of that project that I took the photograph above.
It was captured in the basement area, and on this particular occasion I was trying to see what I could do with off camera flash in such a space. Off camera flash presented a possible solution to the main challenge I encountered when photographing the basement – the lack of light – but it was not without its own problems. With foot-thick dark stone walls, which were neither inclined to bounce signals from my CLS-enabled pop-up flash, nor allow radio waves from my ebay-sourced triggers to propogate, getting any remote flash to fire was problematic.
The radio-based solution should have worked were it not for the fact that the triggers I was using were cheap. I’ve since upgraded to reliable and robust Elinchrom Skyports which have an excellent range and never miss a shot. At the time of the photo above though, having battled with ways to trigger the off camera flash hidden in the room to the right (and there so as to light the room, which was even darker than the dim corridor), I resorted to the old fashioned way. Firing it myself.
To do this I changed my exposure from what it had been (high ISO, wide aperture, fast shutter speed) to a small aperture, low ISO and slow shutter speed, and mounted the camera on a tripod.
The 2.5 second exposure gave me plenty of time to fire the flash from within the room to the right by using the self timer to allow myself 10 seconds to get from the camera to the room, position the flash, and ready myself. I heard two clicks, 2.5 seconds apart. The first was the mirror lifting and the shutter opening. The second was the mirror dropping and the shutter closing. I just had to fire the flash in between.
It took a few test shots to get the flash power right (about 1/8th if I remember, from an SB-800), and having got close to a shot I liked, and getting cold in the basement (it was February), I decided to ignore the blown out highlight at the top of the frame near the artificial light, thinking to myself that I’d fix it later if I ever wanted to use the photo. Well here it is in all its glory, with that blown out highlight still present, but who cares. The image was a triumph of man over machine (ok, that might be overstating it a little, but at least I figured out a way to get the shot) and that will do me.
Recent Comments