Posts Tagged ‘strobist’
After a little while away from my camera I finally got a chance to get out and snap some more portraits last weekend. We have at last found and settled into a new flat in Sutherland which makes Cronulla our new local beach, so off we trotted with a camera and a couple of strobes down to the northern end of the beach to see what we could do.
Sonia @ Cronulla Beach
These photos are a mixture of one and two flash setups whilst using the sun as the back or rim light. The session was mainly an experiment to see how far I could push my 2 little Cactus flashes in overpowering the ambient light from the high noon sun. Given that my 5D Mark 2’s only synch’s with the flash at a speed of 1/200s or slower, could the flashes produce enough light to light the subject with my ISO and Aperture closed down enough to underexpose the ambient?
One flash worked quite well, but when I added the second it just gave me that little bit of leeway with my camera settings. I pushed the aperture all the way down to f22 for some shots and still had enough light on Sonia to make the picture.
I am a big fan of Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Hello! I was out and about with my camera again tonight and have a handful of new images to share with the world. I had another go at some off-camera lighting using my 2 new Cactus flashes at a local park after finding a cool graffiti wall there as to use as a background for some portraits of Sonia.
The basic setup for these shots Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Well its been long enough, but I eventually got myself a couple of flash units, light stands and umbrellas so that I could try my hand at some strobist-style photography.
I went the budget route, getting a couple of Cactus KF36 flashes and some cactus v4 wireless triggers from gadgetinfinity.com and then a couple of light stands and shoot-through umbrellas from my local camera store. This I figured would give me the basic setup to get started playing around with light and seeing the effect that controlling it would have on my photo’s.
My first subject was, predictably, my girlfriend Sonia. I tried a handful of different lighting configurations and have uploaded some of the best results below.
The above photo was taken using the basic two light setup, the main Read the rest of this entry »
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