Folio Lighting

[Celeste Compton]

In Princeton we have a total of four folio operators and stations. Each station has two lights that flash when a photograph is taken. One light acts as the main flash unit and is directly connected to the camera. The second flash is not connected to the camera but is designed to simply mimic the the primary flash unit in brightness and duration. Typically this design would not be problematic but since we have so many folio operators working in close proximity to one another, the secondary flashes will very often go off accidentally with neighboring flashes. As a result, the images that are taken at that moment on any of the computers are the wrong exposure.

If this happens, the shot will be drastically overexposed or it will be completely black. Right now, since we are working in republisher(after blanks are shot), we are able to see immediately when this happens and can simply reshoot.

But, with this new folio system, the images do not automatically appear on the screen after being photographed so unless operators open each image after every shot, there is a large possibility that they will miss many shots. This is problematic because, by the time they return to that item in republisher, they will already have adjusted the camera height and light settings several times over.

Is there a way to either have the images appear on the screen immediately after being taken (as in republisher) or else set it up so that the camera will not go off if the exposure is that drastically off? Or maybe there is an easier solution that hasn't occurred to us?

Thank you for your help!