Posts Tagged ‘ambient’

February 26th, 2010 Photo Blog 020 – Experimenting with flash, some examples

Good morrow kind sirs,

I decided to give Sonia a break from modelling for me last night by giving some self portraits a go as she went off and did her thing taking some twilight shots of the Opera House and city skyline. I felt a little dorky setting up my tripod and light stand and posing for myself whilst all the tourists passed by – I got over the whole self-consciousness thing pretty sharpish though mostly by harnessing my powers of ignoring.

I think I got the lighting and shadows on my face just right in this shot, giving enough of an angle to de-fatten my face (you’ll see some not-so-good examples in a minute). Underexposing the background a couple of stops resulted ina really nice deep warm glow just behind the silhouetted city buildings and overall I thought this was my best effort.

Going through the bunch of photo’s I came back with I hit across a couple of examples which sprang the idea to make this into a bit of a tips/how-i-did-it post. Read the rest of this entry »

February 10th, 2010 Photo Blog 018 – La Perouse sunset shoot

Hey there,

Well what do you know, two posts in two days – must be some kind of miracle! Today I am sharing the results of my first try at shooting some sunset portraits with off camera flash. I had planned to have a go at using an underexposed sunset as my backdrop and my two flashes to cross light Sonia and that is pretty much how it went. I didn’t quite get the sunset I was expecting after a roasting 30+ degrees day in Sydney, with clouds completely drowning out any sun for the golden hour before sunset, but I quite liked the moody atmosphere the overcast skies helped to create anyway.

These shots were taken using a ratio of 2:1 or 4:1 between the main light and the fill. Again, I was too excited to really concentrate on making notes on the exact settings used for each shot but in essence it was a pretty standard setup. The main stepsI was trying to think about in the above shot were as follows: Read the rest of this entry »