Not so easy, after all

My stuff arrived yesterday (woo-hoo!) I won't go into details now--I'll save that for another post--but I'm very excited and at the same time a little overwhelmed. I went into this thinking that it honestly wasn't going to be *too* difficult. I mean, I've been taking pics now for over 4 years. Yeah, I know my work isn't the greatest, but I do like to think that I have a better eye for it than your average bear, and I've been paying more attention to my lighting and have noted where it could use improvement. So, I totally thought that I'd be able to jump right in, have a good idea where to place my lights and where to have a person look and where to shoot from...but boy was I wrong. It's a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. So much to think about! I can't just focus on composition and aperture (since I shoot in Av mode)--now I have to think about my shutter speed as well to balance with ambient, lighting position, strength, and ratios...and the list goes on and on.

I'm finding that I also have to put more thought into my background/surroundings. Right now, I usually shoot with very large apertures to get that shallow DOF and oh-so-creamy bokeh. Which also means that I don't have to worry too much about my background since it'll be blurred anyway. But after playing around with the lights last night, I'm wondering if I'm going to have to start stopping down quite a bit. Turns out these lights are a lot stronger and harsher than I thought--even when set at their minimum power. I took one shot with the flash on my camera in E-TTL mode in manual. Good exposure. Keeping the same camera settings, I turned the flash to manual mode and turned it down as low as it would go. Totally overexposed. It seems that with E-TTL you can turn the flash power down a lot farther than you can manually. I had assumed that it would be the same. This means that in some situations, I'll have to be stopping down a lot more than I usually do in order to cut down on the light from the flash.

Here are some pics that I shot last night. I wasn't paying too much attention to composition--I was mainly trying to see how the light looked. I shot this at f/2.8, 1/60sec. I think I had too slow of a shutter that allowed some ambient incandescent light in, because my wife's face turned out a tad too red in the photos and I had to desaturate it some. These were all shot against a brown wall in my house. 430EX camera right, about 2ft away and a little above the model with a shoot-through umbrella. On a couple I added a 580EX fired through a translucent reflector to light the background. Overall I thought they came out OK--certainly not bad for my first real go at it. I think the lighting was a bit harder than I thought it would be--gotta figure out a way to soften it up some more. They're not bad, but they still lack that "wow" factor for me.