The Glass Floor

I was doing some studio portrait shots yesterday and thought I'd have a go at this technique I saw a while ago. It's easy enough to do and gives a decent effect. You don't need to be a genius to figure out how it's done, probably not a great idea if are photographing subjects with skirts on, or Scots in kilts for that matter. This was taken at 45mm 1/125, (studio flash) f/8 ISO125, I increased the ISO by 1/3 because they were a little underexposed and I couldn't be bothered getting up to increase the flash power by a 1/3. A quick Q&A for you, I could have also opened up the aperture to 7.1 instead of the ISO increase. Remember when lighting with just flash the shutter speed is irrelevant as long as it's under the cameras x-sync (usually around 1/200th).

Long lense if you don't feel like walking

I got this a few mornings ago and pretty much forgot about it until today. I wasn't dressed to brave the snow and I didn't really have time to get to a location so I got another view of my favorite tree! I had the 100-400 lense on, I think this one was about 230mm, I got a few with the tree isolated but wanted more of the great sunrise so I pulled back a little and used the tree and horizon to just set the sky. I didn't use any filters.
It was a bit tricky setting the white balance in the end I set it on the cooler side, about 4000K but desaturated the blues slightly. I added a bit of a vignette in photoshop and that's about it, there might be a few dust spots as I don't think I took care of them at the start.

Motorbike Photography

I'm going to start doing a bit of motorbike photography, this was quite a quick attempt largely due to the freezing conditions outside. The garage wasn't the tidiest I've seen and there was a car just behind the bike so I had to be careful not to light any of it. There was no ambient light so everything was lit by 3 flashes, one you can see in the top left and another between the car and the bike, both these were hard unmodified lights. The third light was an umbrella just to camera left and this provided the detail to all the chrome. Everything was on full manual and with the flash powers varying from about 1/2 to about 1/64. They were all fired with pocket wizards, the quick mono conversion was done in CS3. Hopefully I'll be getting out and doing some moving shots with more riders and less lights!

Snow... with trees

It's been far too long since I've posted anything on here so I'm putting up a couple from today's outing. I'd seen this tree a while back and wanted to get some shots of it and with the recent snow it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get out. I waited until the sun was quite low in the sky and did some side lit shots but these weren't really that great so I went a backlit shot. I wanted the light to really show the texture of the snow (hence the side lighting) but still have a focal point.

I wasn't out for very long and I certainly wasn't lying down for very long. I kept the sky under control with my Lee Grads and tweaked the levels in Lightroom. In hindsight I should have done a killer HDR with about 9 exposures but my mind must have been elsewhere. These two were taken at (about) 16mm f/16 1/60 at ISO200, I went to ISO200 as I took the camera of the tripod to get (frostbite) really low, I was at about 1/30 before and I didn't want to handhold at that speed. Thanks for looking.