Updates?

Yeah, it's been a little while since I've posted. Life got busy over the holiday season and has stayed relatively busy so I haven't had a whole lot of time to shoot. Hopefully that will change soon :)

So, just a quick update for today:

• As always, I've got a bunch of Christmas photos without me in them. I did use my lights off camera this year--kept with the setup of having one on a light stand and one on camera bounced off the ceiling. I wish I had read David's post about his lighting setup before Christmas morning, but there's always next year, right?
• Got a 5-in-1 reflector and a lighting book for Christmas. Sweet.
• Totally missed the signups for the Strobist seminar that took place last weekend. Apparently it sold out within MINUTES. Suckage.
• But, I'm going to be attending a meet-up this weekend in San Rafael. I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully I can network and learn some stuff from the pros that are attending.
• We've started up our own little Bay Area Strobist faction on flickr. We've got 22 members so far--hopefully it continues to grow!
• I took my first step towards making some money with my photos--I submitted a few to a stock photo site (photoshelter.com). It's a site where they're trying to get away from the whole microstock thing and actually have people sell their photos for a more realistic price. I submitted 10 photos for review, which will take a minimum of 5 days to hear back from them. Let's keep our fingers crossed! Wish me luck!
  

Tree Farm

Sorry for the lack of updates. I've been busy and haven't had much time to shoot or post. We went to a tree farm to take some pics a couple of weeks ago. The weather was beautiful--the sun was out and it wasn't too cold. Here's a couple of pics I took with a hand-held 580. They were taken close to noon. In the past, the time of day along with the harsh sunlight filtering through the trees would've wreaked havoc with shadows on their faces. But now that I'm not afraid to use a flash, I'm able to get some decent shots. There's a bunch of flare, but I was having a tough enough time just trying to get a decent shot. Gotta love 4 year olds :)

Simulated sunlight: Follow up

Someone revived an old post in the flickr group that was for a guy selling pre-cut color correction gels. In that thread, there were a couple of links to some .pdf files from Rosco (gel mfg.) The second one was of great interest to me, because it looks like it has suggestions for specific gels to create specific looks! Nice. They have several ones to use to simulate sunsets/sunlight/moonlight/etc. I'm gonna have to test all these out!

Link

Bouncing with fill

I had tried taking pics of the girls while they were putting ornaments on the tree. I thought this'd be another good chance to fiddle around with my lights (much to my wife's chagrin). In the past, I would shoot this with my flash on camera, bounced of the ceiling. The pics would come out decently...


...but I knew that now having multiple lights, I could do better. You can see in the photo above that her eyes are pretty dark. I initially tried lighting this with one flash in a shoot-through on one side of the room, and another flash reflected by an umbrella on the other side of the room. I wasn't too happy with the results and quickly removed the reflective umbrella and instead made that flash bounce off the ceiling. It was a little better, but it really did depend on where the kids were--and they were of course all over the room. I turned to the strobist flickr group to get some suggestions, as I didn't want to be constantly adjusting my lights as they moved.

First off, they told me to change the position of my bounced flash. On the side of the room, it wasn't in the best place with the way my ceiling was sloping. For the 2nd flash, I had two suggestions--the first was to keep it on camera and fire it directly at the subjects as fill, and the second was to keep it on camera but bounce it off the ceiling as well. Keeping one flash on the camera helps to compensate for the kids moving about in the room. Here's the first test shot using a direct fill flash:


I had the 580 turned down as low as it would go (1/128). Not too shabby, but I still wasn't completely happy--it still has that "flashed" look to it. Not a lot, but enough that I notice it. It may be something I just have to get used to--which is tough because I really, really like a nice, soft light. Thinking back on it now, I may have to try this again using my mini-softbox on my flash. It really does fill in the shadows; so much so that there's really not a lot of definition and it looks a tad flat.

So, next I tried bouncing my on-camera flash. For the sake of comparison, I did one shot with the 580 turned off so I could see how it looked with the off-camera flash bounced:

Much better than the first pic with just the 580 on-camera bounced. You can definitely see a color cast from the walls/ceiling when compared to the 2nd picture in this post. Finally, here's a shot with both flashes bounced:


I didn't find there to be much difference between the two. Looking closely, there is a little more fill in this last shot--her cheeks are brighter, and the background (esp the bottom of the couch) looks a tad brighter. But again, not much difference. I will have to say, though, that I did correct the exposure in photoshop for the images--out of the camera the picture with just the bounced off camera flash was really underexposed compared to the last shot.

So which method is better? I kind of lean towards the look of the bounced 580 rather than the direct flash. I think I need to fiddle more with the ratios between the two flashes--perhaps reducing the off-camera one a tad and increasing the on-camera a bit will help. Maybe I'll be able to give it a try tonight :)

Simulated Sunlight

I was experimenting with some gels from the Rosco sample pack to try and find one that would give me the effect of golden sunlight right at sunrise/sunset.

This one is with the pale gold, I believe. Not bad. It's a nice and warm light.


Here's a shot without the gel for comparison:


Another with 1/2 straw (I think):


I don't think either of them *quite* hit it, but they're close. I wonder too if I've diffused the light too much shooting through the umbrella. It may look more like sunlight if I shoot a bare flash.

Cross lighting with the Sun

We got our tree this past weekend, and as is tradition, getting the tree turns into a photo shoot of the girls. I usually shoot this sans flash, and I always end up dealing with harsh shadows as the sunlight comes in through the trees. This year would be different, I thought to myself. Armed with some new strobist knowledge, I was going to use my flash and balance it with the ambient, using the sun as the main light and my flash as fill, and perhaps get a couple of shots using the cross-lighting technique.

Of course, with the girls being 4 and 2, it was pretty much impossible to contain them to really give any of this a decent try. They were running around like crazy, never standing still. Not being anywhere near fast with these techniques and flashes, it was not what I would call a success (though we did get a fantastic tree!) I did manage to get the girls to stand still for a pic by getting them to show their rocks that they had found to the camera. I positioned them with the sun above and behind them to their left, and had a 580EXII directly opposite low, to the front and to their right on my ultra-portable but very expensive light stand (i.e. my wife). I think it turned out OK for my first cross-lighting attempt. Yes, the highlights are blown, but I didn't really have time to check and adjust my settings as they quickly ran off after I snapped the pic.

My first favorite!

Woo-hoo! Got my first (strobist) "favorite" on flickr today! I uploaded this pic to the strobist pool that was taken over Thanksgiving. 430EX in a shoot-through umbrella, camera left.