It's the way I gel 'em

Another shot from the session I had with the amazing Luke Roberts.

This time I wanted an effect that suggested a live performance, as if he were onstage, so I used a blue gel on the strobe camera left and an orange gel on camera right. Each was on half power, no diffusion. The one on the left was pretty much directly side-on to luke, about six feet away, zoomed to about 50mm, with the same home-made gobo to stop it glaring into the lens, and the one on the right was up as high as the stand would go and also sort of side-on, zoomed right out to 24mm, and about eight feet away.

The hardest thing about this shoot was capturing the right moment, when the yo-yo was in just the right place. This guy is FAST. But he was also very helpful and understood when I needed to fire off a few frames before we got one in the bag.

World on a String

Local yo-yo wizard Luke Roberts (current UK champion, no less) and I got together to make promo shots and here is an example of what we were able to achieve with a very simple setup.

One strobe camera right, up high and brollied, half power, one camera left and slightly behind, home-made gobo keeping it from fogging the lens, half power and zoomed to 50mm. Both about eight to ten feet away. Camera f16 (hard to get much dof with full-frame) at 200th sec, iso 400.

What I've quickly learned to love about these Canon flashguns is they have way shorter flash duration than my interfit studio lights, so can freeze the action, and they are also way more portable. I also seem to be able to control how much light falls on the backdrop much more easily, which saves so much time in post-processing!

On location

Happy New Year!

Well, I remembered to record all the details of this shot so here goes:

Strobe camera right on 8th power, widest zoom, about 6 - 8 feet away - should have used an umbrella but it was so cold we didn't bother..;

Strobe camera left on 16th + 0.7 (precise, eh?), widest zoom, same distance away, slightly to the rear of subject/model/wife;

Camera 400 iso, 1/80th sec, f5.6.

This is shot on Painswick Beacon, Gloucestershire - five minutes drive from our house. The wind chill was severe and my ears are just recovering. As you can see, my wife didn't want to wear the bikini I asked her to model - what a primadonna.