cgardner
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Mike Mahoney wrote:
Agree on both points .. the earlier Strobist blog was big on placing simple yet effective lighting techniques & concepts in everyday situations and pulling out awesome results. Couple of triggered SB24's, a big imagination, a histogram and you were good to go  But I don't go there much anymore since it started to get so gear centric.
One mans perfect exposure is another mans totally boring flat lit piece of artless crap.
What you are seeing in 2012 in retrospect I saw a different way in 2005 when Hobby was telling people his manual method was the only "ethical" way.
By way of analogy manual flash is like a double-bit axe blade on both sides. That type of axe is an excellent tool for felling trees. But you can't use it for splitting the logs into rail fences. For that job you'd want wedges and a sledge hammer. A system flash is like a single-bit axe blade on one side, hammer face on the back. One side for felling the tree, the other for pounding the wedge to split the log.
It wasn't that Hobby's technique were bad, simply that his equipment suggestions, if followed back then by someone starting out, would limit not what they shot, but how the could shoot it.
Static lighting set-ups with stands and metering, vs. shooting on the fly putting the off-camera light any distance and letting the camera sort out the rest in TTL mode.
It wasn't manual flash that painted him and any one to followed in to the corner of how they could shoot it was the radio triggers available at the time. That and an apparent aversion for putting any flash near the camera. If you don't have a speed light connected to the hot shoe a PC cord or radio trigger is the only way to trigger it.
By the time the Stobist arrived on the scene I'd been Vivitars with Wien optically triggered optical triggered slaves two ways. For on the go shooting I put my "fill" Vivitar on my bracket with a 18" PC cord to trigger it with the Wien sensor firing the slave. When I was doing static set-ups and wanted all my lights on stands with umbrellas I used the same approach, triggering the slaves optically. I simply made the cord longer. I bought a 15' Vivitar - PC cord from Paramount cords. These are from back before I ever heard of "The Strobist Movement"....
http://super.nova.org/TP/VivitarPotsSetup.jpg
http://super.nova.org/TP/Flower1_setup.jpg
That approach wasn't any different that Hobby's except I didn't have an aversion to keeping my fill light on axis, and wasn't inconvenienced by the cord because I rarely shot were I couldn't keep at least one light within 10-15' of the camera. Being a "hobbyist" not a "pro" meant that I shot differently. Radio triggers weren't a necessity for me, nor are they necessary to use the "Stobist" approach for placing the lights if you can live with the inconvenience of the cord.
But if in 2003 if one based there equipment choices on two chiseled in stone commandments: "Thou must cut the cord to your flash" and "Thou shalt not place a light on the camera" the only equipment choice that met that requirement was a PW Plus radio trigger or a Chinese knock off that usually fell apart or failed soon after purchase. The decision to go with radio has a domino effect on logistics.
If for example you had never used a flash bracket (as Hobby apparently had not until about 2009 by his own account) all your lights would wind up on stands. If you only use one light that is manageable in run-and-gun situations, but you may wind up with dark shadows do to lack of fill when you can't bounce the single light. Where approaches take different paths logistically is when two lights are used. When one of them is used on a bracket the "fill" in the two light scenario travels with the camera and is always optimally placed for minimal unfilled shadows and there is still only one light stand to wrangle . But if you believe placing fill opposite key is the more effective strategy the same two light solution requires wrangling two stands, not one.
The reason started advocating the bracket fill approach as far back as the 1970s to other photographers was its logistical simplicity. The notion that approach is "unprofessional" is preposterous because it was the approach popularized by a top professional and copied by nearly every wedding shooter at the time. It hadn't fallen out of favor because it didn't work, but because photographers thought it was inconvenient compared to other options like bounced flash and because in the digital era higher and higher ISO speeds made it appear that natural light, perhaps with the addition of a bit of fill flash on occasion was all that is needed.
We all have our stylistic preferences but if working professionally the needs of the customer an the situation often trump them. Hobbyists have more options and only need to please themselves. For example Doug MacMillian one of my most vocal and least civil critics for the past ten years for example knows how to use flash, and by his own account used the bracket fill technique with an optically triggered slave on a pole back in the 70s and 80s when he was a pro because it was the best tool for the job then just as I did when worked for the pro that made that approach the conventional wisdom of the that era for shooting events like wedding receptions. But today as a hobbyist like me, using his Canon digital that can shoot at ISO 3200 when needed he prefers not to use flash. If he didn't have a camera with ISO 3200 (or whatever his max is) he might have to grit his teeth and use flash indoor like in old days.
Like Doug I love and use natural light. Outdoor in natural light I never use flash without first posing the subject or finding the camera position where the natural light is modeling the face or object. Then if the technical limits of the camera demand it I add fill and key flash from the same angles and the natural light is modeling the face (key) and rendering shadow tones (fill) I'm seeing with my eyes. My camera can't see by like my eyes to. I used flash to make my photographs look as close as possible to what my eyes see, not what the camera is able to capture with the natural light alone. Doug and I, both on par with knowledge of technique would handle the same outdoor scene differently and get different looking results in most cases if he opts not to use flash. His preference for natural might not work if he was still shooting professionally, but it works OK for him because he, as he says, only has to please himself.
Indoors in candid situations were many others would simply crank up ISO and use the "natural" light I continue to use flash more or less in the same way I shot weddings professionally in the 70s. Not because I don't know how to raise ISO and expose correctly with the room lighting, but because it really isn't "natural" light, nor does it come from a "natural" direction at times. Most indoor spaces the ambient light is either creating dark eye sockets if lit with tungsten sources, or uniformly diffuse and shadowless if lit with fluorescent ...
http://super.nova.org/TP/State02.jpg
In a situation like that I will take a wide shot like that with the ambient, but use flash to overpower it entirely in close shots of the people with my off camera light placed and my camera position selected based on not just capturing them randomly, but at the most flattering combination of lighting and camera angle I know how to produce. How do I know how to do that on the fly in any situation? Because I apprenticed with and shot wedding receptions professionally for two year when I was 20 with the expert mentoring of Monte Zucker, the original "Stobist" who popularized the bracket / slave optical approach in the 70s. He didn't invent it, he just took the conventional wisdom of the day for using fill and key in the studio and made it portable and logistically simple.
Zucker's approach could have been done with two assistants with lights on poles instead of the one Doug used when shooting weddings. But just as few copied the "Doug" approach we would have not have heard of Monte either. The reason there was a "Zucker" approach was because he found a simpler way, logistically, to use the same tools. He recognized, from his studio training in the 60's with Zeltsman that there were both technical and aesthetic advantages to using centered fill on a bracket. He made it even simpler by looking at the problem of needing the pay an assistant to shlep a light around and wind up pointing it incorrectly half the time intuitively and came up with a brilliant solution: put the stand on wheels.
If one builds their equipment strategy based on the commandment "Thou shalt keep thy fill centered and shadowless as possible" one winds up with a different equipment strategy that Hobby with the opposite belief did. WIth a bracket holding the fill only one stand is needed for a two light solution and since there is a flash attached to the camera anyway using it to trigger the off camera flash optically with a $20 trigger is the most economical solution.
But with the benefit of hindsight I see that what probably elevated Zucker to the status of being recognized as having a unique approach with "speedlights" back in the 70's wasn't just the lighting they produced but the simplicity of the logistics. What made Zucker famous wasn't an off camera light on a pole, or two on the floor, but the fact a modified wheeled medical IV stand allowed a single-handed photographer to cover a reception with LOGISTICAL SIMPLICITY.
Most IV stands are designed with 4-5 legs and a heavy metal base so they can be used in a cluttered hospital room or wheeled safety down a crowed hallway by an walking patient with one hand. Not unlike the conditions one might encounter at a wedding reception for example. The funny thing was (at least for me) is that either I didn't realize it was an IV stand. I thought it was a lighting stand and looked in shops and on-line in vain for something similar. Then one day in 2003 I walked into the local thrift store and saw this:
http://super.nova.org/TP/IVStand.jpg
Unlike the old fashioned stands with heavy base and four legs it is designed cheap and light out of aluminum with five legs to make it more stable. It is designed to be thrown out after use, eliminating the need to autoclave and make it sterile for the next patient. It was one of those "slap forehead so that's what it was!" moments. It was the best $5 investment I've ever made in terms of logistics.
This thread went off on a tangent about towels because of "in your face challenges" but that's not what my "approach" was about back in 2002 when I started providing lighting advice over on DPR. I was just trying to get people to consider and try the bracket / centered fill concept and the rolling stand that makes it logistically possible.
I didn't start advocating Canon flash until 2005 when I bought it. Even then I didn't advocate that it only be used in ETTL mode but exactly the opposite warning them to avoid the ETTL only ST-E2 and 420ex so they could use M mode, with I showed them by examples was better for things like portraits.
Centered fill has a domino effect on modifier choice. If shadows are lifted with fill big key light modifiers are not as critical. The domino effect is that smaller modifiers make the bracket/ rolling stand approach an effective solution for a pro shooting a wedding reception, or a hobbyist chasing rug rats around the house.
The advantage of combining the bracket / rolling stand with Canon flash? My approach, the flattering extent I'm seen to have one, isn't about the towels, it's always been and still is about shooting with maximum flexibility and minimum logistical problems.
I'm still waiting for Hobby to "discover" the rolling stand idea 
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