As a dedicated follower of the Strobist blog http://www.strobist.com/ I was very excited to see the announcement of the Strobist Boot Camp 2 Assignment 1 http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/06/boot-camp-ii-first-assignment.html It not only gives us photographers a chance to exercise our creativity and get off our butts and shoot something, there is an awesome prize up for grabs also.
I’ll let you read David Hobby’s explanation of what Boot Camp is, but I’ll take you through my entry into the foray.
This is my final entry that shows my subject Belinda on the left and myself on the right, shot in the same lighting conditions. All shots were taken hand held to allow the freedom of movement with the camera. Camera choice is my trusty Canon 50D with a Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 lens, which is a very capable lens providing it nails the focus properly. Lighting equipment consists of a Nikon SB-24 and a Nikon SB-28 triggered with my modded Gadget Infinity wireless triggers. More details on the setup are with the photos. My official entry was shot with the SB-28 mounted to an umbrella swivel mount on a studded alligator clamp. The clamp was attached to a painters pole found in the garage, but it rotated due to the weight of the flash, so that was reinforced with two spring clamps. The pole was mounted to my flash stands at full height with another two spring clamps. The flash had a Lumiquest Velcro Diffuser on it to further soften the light going through the umbrella. The flash was choked a bit into the umbrella to control the light spill a little and the feathered light was used to light the subject so it wasn’t so over powering.
To light the background (a white Holland blind) I used the Nikon SB-24 gelled with two full CTB (Colour Temperature Blue) on a mini flash stand pointing at it at an angle to feather the light. I only needed to set the flash to about 1/4-1/8 power at f4 as too much power kills the colour. I probably could of gone lower but I was more concerned with the subject exposure. I tried various power levels and flash angles/feathering and resulted at a lowly output so i could get fast recycle times on the flash. With well used batteries I still got about 1-2 second recycles. I changed my aperture between f4-f5.6 to control the exposure. My shutter speed was generally 1/160th of a second, fast enough to avoid motion blur and camera shake but slow enough for the flash to sync. This also to kill the ambient kitchen light and the shadows it cast on the blind. To fill in the shadows a foam core board was used that I bought from Riot and Craft for AUD$15. This is the best priced white reflector you can use.
This was another variant of lighting technique I explored, though I was happy with the result, it wasn’t challenging enough for me. The SB-24 was used camera right propped up on some boxes set to 1/16th power zoomed out to 85mm with one CTB gell.
Here is another photo that made the short list. The SB-24 was used camera left about 3/4 back over the shoulder. Again the flash was propped up on some boxes and a home made gridded snoot was used to give the light some directionality, but remaining soft at the same time. The only problem i felt was the uninspiring background.
This is the same technique as the blue background shot, but with a double red gel. The colour appears magenta because of the white background, but would look more red if the background was close to a neutral grey. Our cat Sooty dropped in to see what we were doing so we had to get shot of her.