Vicky and James

I shot a wedding recently with my able colleague Ken and we decided to stay late to make the most of the beautiful grounds of the Bowden Hall Hotel in Gloucester and try a 'twilight' shot of the bride and groom, Vicky and James.

Using Ken as my 'couple', I set up two 580EXll's on stands with brollies, one ten feet to the right and one to the left and slightly behind him.  I used the ST-E2 trigger and played with the ratio control until I got something I liked, roughly 2:1 in favour of the right-hand strobe.  Keeping the shutter speed on 200th sec (manual) I then played with the aperture until I got the background 'twilighty' enough.  The ST-E2 ably adjusted the flashes to illuminate the subject as I went along.

When I was happy with the look of the light, we rushed off to find the happy couple and plonked them into the shot, and fired away.  This meant they got a great picture with minimal hanging around, so they could go straight back to partying.

Avram Grant Lookalike Crazy Lenny

Again I used the ST-E2, this time employing two flashguns for the stereo lighting effect.  They were placed pretty much equidistant either side of my subject, side-on.  The ETTL made light work of the exposure, leaving me to decide how much lighting ratio to give to either side of the face, which, as you can see, ended up being 50/50.  Setting the ratio is ridiculously easy, involving a simple press of a button one way or the other depending where you want the most light.

I used no diffusion on either flash to give the 'hard light' effect.

I think it has the look of one of those football manager shots you see on the front of Four Four Two magazine.

You may disagree!

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.

Quiet Time

This shot was taken during the same session as the previous post, with the same settings, but I played around in Photoshop this time, adding a texture borrowed from Flickr user NinianLif.

Blue

Today we used my Lastolite Hilite backdrop and aimed a 128th power flash at it (from the left) with a blue gel attached, zoomed out to 24mm, to get this 'graduated' blue background.  We were then left with just the one flash to light up the long-suffering Nicky, so I snooted it, put it up high on the right (on about 64th power I think....sorry...) and aimed it at her face only. Again I used the 1.8 lens for shallow depth of field. This is the result.

I think Nicky would have liked it if I could have used one more light to take away the nose shadow, but hey, that's hundreds more pounds...

Working late

I'm quite pleased with this one - it's been done before but you have to emulate others and then add your own touches in order to learn.

Snooted flash camera left with red gel pointing at laptop and table, 128th power, flash on laptop keyboard bounced against white paper on screen into model's face, 128th power, triggered by pocket wizards, aperture f1.8 so only the face is in focus.

How shallow can you get

This shot was taken with a single flash at about 64th power through a white umbrella to camera left a couple of feet away - nothing fancy, except I added a pale gold gel to the flash to warm up the skin tones just a little (Nicky is very pale at this time of year!).  Maybe I could have gone warmer but I still wanted some realism...

I also used my rather nice (and cheap) Canon 50mm 1.8 lens for that extremely shallow depth of field which gives the tree lights a lovely bokeh.  The only thing to watch out for is that neither you nor the model moves once you have your focus point!

Off-Camera Flash

Having been a wedding and portrait photographer for a little while now, (see www.bluesunphotography.com) I've recently taken the plunge and invested in some off-camera flash gear. I've seen many fantastic examples from the 'strobist' community of work using wireless triggers and have been longing to give it a go.

This blog is a document of my 'journey' towards hopefully mastering the art.

To start with I am using: three pocket wizards, two Canon 580 EXll flashguns, two stands from an Interfit studio lighting rig customised with attachments for umbrellas (found on ebay), and a pack of Rosco gels.