Monthly Archives: June 2011

Strobist shoot of Eddie and a 75 Nova

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My friend Eddie and I headed up to Mounds View Park in St. Paul for a little evening photo shoot. I wanted to let you know how I took this shot.

First, we are in the twilight hour, just before the sun goes down. I decided not to meter this manually. I set the camera on aperture priority, with -1 2/3 exposure compensation. This is what is controlling the background exposure. For the lights, I used manual. I usually shoot in TTL, but I both wanted to experiment, and I knew that for the light on Eddie it was going to need pretty much full power.

I started with a SB800 speed light toward the front of the car, that is skipping across the side. I had one SB900 mounted on a stand to the left of the car in a 24″ lastolight softbox. This was pointed at Eddie. My 3rd light was on the camera, a SB900 acting as a commander. But, the back of the car was too dark, and as the light went down, I was able to switch to just the popup flash on my D7000. I was surprised, but happy that I had another light. I was out of stands, (only 2) so with only the foot, and pointed up at 45deg at the car, I lit up the back end of the car.

So, if you caught that, I am using the pop up flash on my camera to trigger the flashes in manual mode. The cool thing about this, is that I could change the power of the lights without going over to the units themselves. I would have had to do this in SU-4 mode. Instead I was able to adjust the power and settle on 1/4 power while staying at the camera.

The next issue was that I didn’t get enough power out of the flash on Eddie. I had it zoomed to 200mm, but it was fairly far back to stay out of the frame. (Shooting at 55mm if you were wondering). So, to fix it, I upped the ISO from 200 to 400. This gave me the power I was looking for from the flash, and we were good to go.

The rest was all composition. I think some of the best shots came from the low position when I was kneeling on the ground. The only issue is that you can’t really see the city in the background this way. Anyway, there are some other pictures on my portrait site.

Lily catching Kate jumping from the swings

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Lily catching Kate jumping from the swing.

This is my first attempt at a composite using my girls as subjects. The inspiration for the photograph came from Justin and some of the pictures that he has created of his boys. I have been thinking of creating some more creative pictures of the girls for awhile, and have kept putting it off. This weekend I gave it a go. This is the first idea that I had.

I think the concept worked. I envisioned a picture of Kate flying through the air, and Lily trying to catch her. I gave her my ball glove to try to make it look like she was ready to catch. I had trouble getting Lily to look like she was nervous about being able to catch Kate. Kate’s jump worked well though. Also, to simplify, I went with a picture outside that I didn’t think needed flash. Most of Justin’s images are inside using flash, which I will move up to when I think of something good.

Technically there are a few problems. First is that Kate is blurry. I almost didn’t post this because of it, but decided to anyway. I learned that a kid jumping off a swing is faster than 640th of a second can freeze. Surprised me. I think I got the pictures aligned, but when I went to try to pose Lily, other kids kept looking in the camera and must have bumped it. (we had several over at the time) Also, there is a halo around Kate. I cut her out so I could move her up in the frame to make her look like the jump was higher. Every time I try to take someone off a natural setting I get this. I’ve got to get that figured out.

The other is the view. The kids are heavily weighted to the left of the frame. Not sure I like that. I did choose this angle on purpose though, and that was so that you only saw the garage in the background. I didn’t want to show the crap that is our parking pad and back lane. Thought it would be too distracting. I might try for a different location where I can get them perpendicular to the frame. Trick is to find that location where there aren’t a ton of other kids around.

Thoughts?