Tents Are Funny
Abby’s Mimi got Abby a Snow White camping set for her birthday. The set has a sleeping bag, tent, backpack and water bottle. Gina set up the tent today and Abby loved it. Abby found it hysterical when Gina would hit the inside of the tent and make it billow out. It gave me a chance to practice a little Strobistry. A put one flash inside the tent at 1/8 power pointed at Gina’s face and another flash with the umbrella reflector outside the tent at full power pointed at Abby. I think it turned out pretty well.
Jar O Corks Redux
I found this guy’s tutorial on the Internets and thought to myself, “This might work for the jar o corks.” So I totally ripped him off. Surely he expects people to straight copy him if he puts all the details on the Internets, right?
R.I.P. Plecostomus
We woke up to a death in the family on Sunday. Our plecostomus was lying motionless on the bottom of the tank. I don’t know how long he was dead, because I don’t remember noticing him moving for the last few days. Gina said she saw him alive Friday night. Abby was less than devastated. She said, “It’s gross!”
The garage is turning out to be a pretty good photo studio. It’s nice for Abby because the mosquitoes aren’t as bad in there as they are in the back yard. I gave Abby the white-background treatment like I did Gina the night before. (See those on Flickr.) Then we put the bubble grill in there and Abby went crazy rubbing the bubble elixir all over her arms and legs.
Shampoo Ad
Fooling around with my flashes, I tacked a white sheet to the wall in the garage and fired one flash into the background to overexpose it and the other flash into the silver umbrella on camera right to light Gina. This what they call lighting on two planes. The flashes light specific parts of the image separately without affecting each other. The straight headshots weren’t that interesting other than to prove the light setup worked. So we came up with the flying-hair idea.
We did get one regular-type shot I thought was pretty good. Gina had just about run out of patience with me when I snapped this one.
Strobist info: SB26 at 1/2 power into the background and Vivitar 285HV at 1/4 power into a silver umbrella at camera right just out of the frame.
My First Hummer
Since we got the sugar water mix right on the hummingbird feeder, these little guys have been visiting the back yard every night. I set up my two flashes on opposite sides of the feeder set to 1/4 power. I put the camera on a tripod at about 90 degrees to the flashes. Setting the camera to shoot with the remote, I sat on the patio and waited for the hummers to show up. One did. I cranked up the shutter speed to darken the ambient light so that most of the lighting came from the flashes. The flash duration at such a low power is very short, meaning it can stop very fast action, such as a hummingbird’s beating wings. At least that was the theory. And it worked for the most part. I’m not too happy with the background or the angle of the flashes, so I’m going to try again tomorrow.
Two-Flash Donnie
My well-used Nikon SB26 flash came via UPS today and I was pretty pumped. In the Strobist world the 26 is just about the be-all, end-all of flashes. It’s almost 15-year-old technology, but it has a built-in optical slave that fires when it detects the light from another flash. Unfortunately, the Strobist craze has driven up the price on these babies. I almost opted for buying the current generation SB600, but the 26 was $75 cheaper and the 600 won’t fire wirelessly with my D40 camera. The little pop-up flash on the camera will fire the 26 if I don’t want to use the big Vivitar. The 26 won’t do the fancy through-the-lens-exposure control that tells the flash when to stop putting out light when the right exposure is reached, but I want it for manual use anyway. I dusted off old Abe and fired light at him from two sides.
Now I can get on Flickr and say things like: Vivitar 285HV into a silver 43″ umbrella on 1/4 power camera right with a snooted SB26 at 1/64 camera left and little behind model for hair light and a white card at lower camera left for fill on model’s face. 285 fired via poverty wizard with 26 slaved.
Going Green
Another in the continuing saga of Strobist Lighting 102. The assignment was to use a single flash combined with some other light modifier to make it appear as if there is more than one light source. You had your choice of three concepts: financial planning, going green or physical fitness. I chose the going green concept.
My first thought was to shoot our recycling bin and its associated contents. I first turned over the bin on the coffee table and tried putting the flash behind it for some backlighting and a huge mirror on the opposite side to reflect some light on the front of the trash. I got some nice glow through the back of the bin and the reflected light from the front worked pretty well, but the edges were ugly. Walls and couches and clocks showed around the edges of the bin. Light from the flash spilled around the edges, too. Snooting the flash didn’t allow enough reflected light from the front.
I abandoned my first plan and just shot a pile of stuff piled on the table with the flash fired into a silver umbrella and a reflector on the opposite side to reflect. I used the mirror in some shots and a piece of white cardboard in others as the reflector. That kept the light from spilling on other living room objects so the background went pretty well black, though there was a little spill on a white pillow on camera right. I was too lazy to get up and move the pillow. I think the shot you see here is one with the white cardboard. I figure the shot could be used to illustrate the concept of what’s acceptable to recycle.
Still Strobin’
Here’s Abe again modeling for me on the Strobist Lighting 102 assignment concerning umbrella specular reflections. The idea is shoot a portrait using an umbrella to create a specular reflection behind the subject so as to outline the shadow side. It worked pretty well, I think, even though the wall I used for a backdrop is not highly reflective. I’m still not happy with Abe’s modeling. I think it might be because he makes his own specular reflection.
Snoot Full
Today’s Strobist lesson, kids, is light restriction. I made a free cardboard snoot about 11 inches long to fit over my flash head and throw a narrow beam of light. (Gina cracked up when I told her it was called a snoot. She cracked up further when she surveyed the dining room and saw my myriad homemade pitcher-taking accessories.) I was a little surprised at just how narrow my snoot made the beam. It made a rectangle of about 2 feet by 1 foot on he wall when shot from about 7 feet away.
The point of the exercise is to see how light restriction affects your photographs. You can see here the light hits the side of Gina’s face and falls off quickly at the top of her forehead. It falls off quickly at the bottom, too, but that’s off camera in this shot. She was sitting inches from the wall, but by shooting from about 45 degrees from the flash, the area of the wall the light actually hit is out of the shot.
I made the same shot of the Abe Lincoln bust I bought for $15 at the charity e-mail auction held at the office. Abe has been a patient photographic subject, but he’s all coppery colored and I don’t really like the actual photos of him. The real Lincoln wasn’t all that photogenic, either.
Jar O Corks
I love this jar o corks that sits on our kitchen counter. I shot it back when I got my TTL cord for my little SB400 flash and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. When I read the Strobist Lighting 102 exercise about specular highlights I said “Snap, I can try that out on the jar o corks.” (I didn’t really say “snap.” That would be stupid.)
I know there is a great shot to be had involving this jar and the corks. I just don’t think this is it. I did learn a great deal about moving the highlight around and making it bigger or smaller, however. I tried to use a desk lamp diffused with some tracing paper to provide some backside fill. To balance the light from the lamp, I tried a CTO gel on the flash, but I couldn’t get it right. The lamp made a specular reflection of its own, compounding the problems. I seem to remember reading on the Strobist something about bouncing the light around with mirrors to fake like there’s more than one flash. Maybe I’ll try that.
Strobist info: Vivitar 285HV camera left at 1/16 through a sheet of typing paper.
I’m A Dork
I’m going off the deep end with this photography thing. There’s this blog by a guy who calls himself the Strobist and I fell for his schtick. I bought a Strobist-approved off-camera light kit that consists of a flash, an umbrella, a cheap set of radio-wave-powered flash triggers and other assorted flash-photography crap. It was my Father’s Day gift to myself.
The Strobist has two programs of exercises designed to teach the fledgling strobist how to use small flashes to create fabulous pictures. They’re quite interesting to dorks like me and, best of all, they’re free. I’ve decided to run through the programs and post the pictures on the blog here. (What the hell else am I gonna do with them.)
All over Flickr you can see photos with these little notes on them: “Strobist info: 580ex into 6×6 softbox camera right, Vivitar 285 HV with gridspot camera left and behind model to light hair, SB26 camera left in shoot-through umbrella at 1/64 for fill and golden foam core just below chin to reflect some golden goodness onto the face.”
The first assignment in the Strobist Bootcamp program is a headshot. I drafted Gina into helping me with this one. She’s really loving it, too, let me tell ya. She might be in for a rude awakening because she’s the only model I really have a chance of lining up to help me.
I used a Strobist suggestion on shooting heads in the corner of a room. The model was seated with a wall to her back just out of the frame. The flash fired at 1/4 power into a silver reflective umbrella at about 45 degrees on camera right. The idea is to use the wall behind the model as a clean background and the wall to the side to reflect some light onto the shadow side of the face. I tweaked the white balance in CS3 and sharpened for the Web.
I like the bottom pose better, but she’s sitting too close to the wall, I think.
I turned the camera over to Gina so she could get in on the fun. I think it looks pretty good considering the glistening skin and the funky hair, courtesy of an earlier treadmill session. I could have used the shot for the yearbook in 1987, except without the wrinkles and with more acne. Oh, and a much lower hairline. And a less fat face. And … oh you get the idea.
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