In my case, my primary means of additive lighting control is the flash, also called a strobe. Fortunately, the shape of the strobe and its relatively cool temperature when compared to other lighting alternatives make it very easy and cheap to attach a snoot. Specifically, I used an empty cereal box, 6 or 8 strips of velcro, and about 20 minutes to make one.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Find an appropriate material to fabric a snoot from.
The material should be fairly rigid, but pliable. It’s usually easiest to use a single piece of material and bend it rather than trying to join several piece of material together. Cereal-board cardboard works perfectly and is essentially free.

Step 2 : Attach two strips of “hook” velcro to the side of your strobe.
The “hook” kind of velcro is more coarse then the “loop” kind, but attracts lint less easily. You may have already attached some velcro already if you have made some gels to attach to your strobe.

Step 3 : Cutout the snoot material.
In my case, the height of a cereal box was long enough and half of the circumference of the oversized cereal box (from Costco) was wide enough to wrap around the strobe, plus have one long side of overlap. The overlap is so you can attach velcro strips to “close” the snoot. The snoot will be strongest if the material is made of one piece and does not have any flaps or tabs from the (cereal) box.

Step 4 : Form the material around your strobe.
Leave just a little play, since we’re about to add some velcro strips to the inside of the snoot to attach it and hold it together. Make sure to crease or otherwise mark the corners well.

Step 5 : Attach “loop” strips to match the sides of your strobe’s “hook” strips and attach a hook/loop pair on each end of the snoot to help keep it closed.
It’s important the business-end of the snoot (where the lights comes out) is uniform in shape. Otherwise, the beam of light will be more difficult to control.

Step 6: Wrap your snoot around the strobe
The fit should be snug. Also, the snoot will produce a more narrow, controlled beam of light if the business end of the snoot is as narrow or more narrow than the strobe end.

Step 7 : Set the focal length of the snooted strobe to its longest value.
This will increase the efficiency of your snooted strobe by asking the strobe to please aim its light in as narrow a beam as possible. In my case, 105mm is the maximum focal length range of my Canon 430 EX strobe.

Step 8 : Test !
Fortunately, I had just gone to Costco that morning and had come home with the same kind of cereal box I just hacked up above. I set it on the table and took a couple of exposures, one highlighting the name and the other the bowl of cereal below the name. The setup was simple : snooted 430 EX just outside of frame left and ceiling bounce fill from 580 EX II. Snoot was +0.5 EV, fill was -1 EV, and ambient was -3 EV.

In this first exposure, snooted strobe is pointed at the letters of the box.

In the second exposure, snooted strobe is aimed at the picture of the bowl of cereal, thus accentuating it and downplaying everything else.

Special thanks to David Hobby of Strobist for providing the inspiration and specific idea of using cereal box cardboard to fabricate a snoot.

“No different, only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Yoda, Star Wars, Episode V

What I had learned is that available light == best and flash == bad. Yet, that bit of “knowledge” was more of a hindrance than an aid. Typically, when we think of flash photography, we think of mug-shot, over-exposed faces, gloomy backgrounds, and the dreaded red-eye. And, when we think of available-light photography, we think of “natural-looking” photographs. Neither of these extremes is always true and, in real life, is rarely true.

In my opinion, adequate photography is capturing an interesting composition that is properly exposed. Better photography is enhancing that same composition with creative and complimentary lighting. Not only is the exposure that much better, but it’s fun as well.

Can you guess which one of these recent photos of Susie used available lighting and which one almost exclusively relied upon flash lighting?

Despite both of these photos being properly exposed and post-processed to fine-tune brightness, contrast, and color, I prefer the bottom one (flash-lit) better, mainly because the lighting played an active and contributing role in the exposure rather than merely “showing up” and sitting around.

I feel I’m at the beginning of a journey along a recently-discovered trail that has revealed yet another mystery about photography. I hope soon to be able to put into practice what I’ve been reading with the equipment I recently purchased to take some amazing photos.

Has anyone else noticed a definite uptick in the amount of gochujang and gochu garu restaurants are using lately? At first I thought it was a quirk of one of our favorite take-out places, but the curse appears to be spreading.

Tags: food, Seoul

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sissy expat can’t take the spicy Korean food. But we’ve been here more than two years and I’ve usually been able to eat most Korean food, just a few dishes here and there that were too spicy for my taste. But recently, I’ve had several instances of ordering pretty reliable basic dishes and getting something that was so laden with pepper I couldn’t even eat it. Have my taste buds just suddenly wimped out?

There is a tiny mom-and-pop place across the street from our building that we order from regularly. The couple appear to be in their mid-30s and have two young sons and are really nice and friendly, so we’ve been trying to support their fledgling business. Also, it’s rather interesting that the husband cooks and the wife doesn’t. According to her (related to me by Mrs. H in translation), she just rolls the kimbap and cuts up cabbage and peppers for the kimchi. All the real cooking is done by her husband.

And he does a killer job (in more ways than one). Fresh ingredients, lots of inventive banchan based on what’s fresh at the market. But, he loves loves loves hot pepper. Even Mrs. H, who is a fan of some very spicy food, has had to admit—while wiping away tears and fanning herself—that he goes over the line. Not that it’s bad, she always hastens to add, just that she’s never seen those dishes made that way before.

To give you an idea, I ordered doenjang jjigae for lunch one day and when it arrived, the broth was bright red and liberally saturated with flecks of gochu garu. Am I crazy or is doenjang not supposed to be spicy?

Anyway, I thought it was just him, but twice in the past week I’ve seen spicy red-hot doenjang jjigae at other places, too. Is this a new trend or is it just our ‘hood, which is usually known for a different kind of flavor?

We’re not precisely sure what we’ll be doing next, but it does look pretty certain that it won’t be here. One option is to return to the U.S. and another is for David to take a short assignment for his company in Hong Kong.

I am having surprisingly mixed emotions about leaving Seoul. On one hand, I am excited about a new adventure or the chance to move closer to friends and family and all the comforts of home. On the other hand, I know there are many things here that I will miss very much.

David and I began our married life together here and this is where our daughter was born. So many of our ‘firsts’ together were here, and I am feeling a little sentimental at the idea of possibly never seeing all of these places again.

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be trying to visit some places in Korea that we’ve been meaning to see, and I’ll probably post a lot of reflections about our life here and how it has changed me, and us. But I wanted to do this quick short note to let people know what’s going on.