Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Posts tagged Flash
Model Pose
Feb 26th
Another non wedding photography post today, It seems my only willing models at the moment are bits of fruit and, well, models. This strange old figurine looked to be striking an interesting pose and as I had the camera out I thought I’d try and get an interesting shot.
Photograph of a Figurine and a shadow on a blue background
I’m very big on coloured backdrops at the moment, I know for studio photography portraits the white out, high key look is still popular but as this was a hobby shot I thought I’d use a bit of colour. I have altered the colour in Lightroom, the original backdrop was a bit of a deep, dentist room green look which didn’t do the shot any favours. The great thing about the target slider on the HSL panel in lightroom is you can just set it to hue and click and drag the mouse left or right and it adjusts the hue you targeted, in this case I moved it over to blue and then adjusted the luminence slider up a little, I was going for a sky blue but this slightly darker tone seemed to work well.
Anyway back to the shot. I loved the pose of the figurine and it’s always good to try and remember interesting poses you’ve seen when working with real models just in case you need something a little different. Shadows on walls are generally avoided, especially sharp, harsh ones such as here, this is why it’s always a good idea to bounce a flash of a wall or ceiling as opposed to straight on flash but in this case I thought I’d include it. Having the flash just off to camera left also allowed me to position the shadow wherever I wanted, simply by moving the flash. Nothing else really to it, I used my ST-E2 to trigger my flash and the camera was set to 1/200, f/2, 50mm ISO100. Thanks for reading folks.
Fine Art Banana
Feb 19th
It’s one of those non portrait or wedding photography posts today which I do from time to time, especially when it’s not wedding season, so if you are a bride looking for a wedding photographer this post may not be of great interest, unless you like off camera flash and/or fine art photos of bananas.
Fine Art Banana
The main reason I’m posting today is I have just received my wireless flash transmitter, the ST-E2 and I was having a quick play round with it. I have had a bunch of pocket wizards for some time now so I’ve done quite a bit of off camera flash stuff but I find they aren’t the quickest things to set up which isn’t ideal for things like wedding photography. The good thing about the ST-E2 is you an just pop it on the camera and set your flashes as slaves and away you go. You don’t have the sort of range you get with the pocket wizards but if you are just taking photos in a room (eg a bride getting ready) these seem to work great. If you have a couple of flashes you can also change the lighting ratios remotely which is pretty cool.
A good understanding of how to use flash both in automatic mode and manual are very important and after a bit of reading around the best way to develop this to just get out your flash(es) and practice. Still life photography is a great way to practice, if you can light something a little bit differently you can make something as plain as a bit of fruit look quite interesting. That’s pretty much all I have done with this shot of a banana from earlier today. I had 2 flashes either side of the banana triggered with the ST-E2, one was direct and one bounced off a nearby wall. My camera was in manual mode but the flashes were in ETTL, one of the main advantages the ST-E2 has over pocket wizards is it’s ability to talk to the camera with the complex infrared bursts just before an exposure. I processed it in black and white with siver efex pro to add a bit of film grain just to give a bit of a fine art feel to the end photograph. So far I am happy with the ST-E2 and hopefully it will give me a few more options when wedding season rolls round.
Danbo Walks the Line
Dec 11th
Danbo Walks the Line
I’ve got a bit of a side project at the moment taking photos of these crazy little Japanese toys called Danbo (Japanese for cardboard, I think). They are off a cartoon as far as I can gather and they make great photo subjects. There are quite a few of these types of photos out there on the web so I thought I’d add a couple more. Macrophotography is great for cold, rainy days, as I’ve said before, if the light isn’t great outside or you just can’t really be bothered braving the cold, a cool indoor subject works really well, better than shots of the dog/cat next to the fire anyway. If you have a few flashes and some off camera triggers (either a flash cord, sky ports or pocket wizards) it opens up loads of options and helps you get to grips using small flashes without the stress of having a model, wondering why you keep taking a photo and then scratching your head as you look at the LCD screen. In this shot the Danbo was lit from camera right and the guitar neck was lit from above, I wanted the rest of the room to be dark, as it was a bit messy and I wasn’t in the mood to tidy up! This was taken with a 50mm f1.4 at f/2 ISO100 1/160 with both flashes on about 1/32 power.
Mushroom Lighting Tutorial
Sep 15th
It’s been pretty overcast today so not the most exciting in terms of light so today I created my own, in a non divinical sort of way. I’m posting 2 shots, a sort of before and after the addition of some directional light. As it’s autumn the fungi are starting to come out and these make great photographic subjects. This one is a fly agaric, or a close relative, which is actually a toadstool. They are the traditional, Alice in wonderland, mind expanding type mushroom and well worth a shot if you find one.
The light however was less than ideal, luckily I had my 580II EX and an off camera cord, if you can get the light off camera, do it. These cords retain all the automatic ttl functions so you don’t have to worry about flash powers and such if it’s a bit in depth. I prefer to keep the flash on manual as it’s a bit more predictable.
70mm, ISO100, f/11, 1/20
The first shot was straight out the camera (on aperture priority) just to show how it would look if you just wanted flat, overcast light. It was taken at ISO100, f11, 1/20, 70mm. I wanted a smallish aperture to maximise the depth of field.
It’s okay for a macro shot but not the most interesting in terms of light, I could warm it up using the white balance during the RAW conversion but it wouldn’t change the direction of the light, this is where the off camera cord and flash come into their own.
The next shot I have attached the flash which has a diffuser and a CTO gel to give that warm, sunset type light, I also opened the aperture to f/8 and reduced the shutter to 1/80. So from the last shot the aperture has been opened by 1 stop (f/11 -> f8) and the shutter has closed by 2 stops (1/20 -> 1/40 -> 1/80) so we have reduced the ambient light by 1 stop, however it looks brighter as I’ve zapped it with an external flash gun. The flash output on the 580 was set at 1/4 power and the zoom to 24mm and it was about 2 feet to camera left.
65mm, ISO100, 1/80, f/7.1 (pretty much f/8)
The 2nd shot is a marked improvement and I actually packed up after getting it as I was quite happy with it but I thought what if I wanted to do a light tutorial for the blog, what else could I do? Well I looked at the LCD and thought the background could do with being a little darker to draw more attention to the toadstool (for anyone looking at the out of focus, under exposed grass on the right). Luckily this was a very easy adjustment to make. I could leave the flash how it was as I was happy with the levels on the Fly agaric, but to reduce the background light I just needed to speed up the shutter from 1/80 to 1/200 (about a stop and a half). How come the shroom didn’t get darker you ask? Easy the flash only cares about aperture as the pulse of light is the same if you have the shutter set to 1/200 or 1 second. The toadstool would have got darker if I had pulled the light back further from the subject or lighter if I’d have increased the ISO (this would also effect ambient) but I didn’t.
Final Shot ISO100, 68mm, f/7.1, 1/200
We are left with this last shot that looks (in my opinion at least) as it was taken during a nice sunrise or sunset as opposed to midday in the drizzling rain. Obviously if the conditions had been anything like I was trying to convey I would have said nuts to this fungus and swung the camera round to the mirror like lake I was next to that would have looked like something out of a fairytale, instead it looked like the river Styx! Thanks for reading guys.