Messin' Around

My friend Cory and I spent the afternoon in his office building (shhhhhh...don't tell), playing with lighting setups. Way too much fun. Here are a few of the highlights.

That is a gaffer tape base holding up the Buddah. Love that tape! Used an SB-50 to blow out the wall behind. I am starting to appreciate a small flash with built in slave, even if it only fires at full power. We used it a bunch to turn white walls into high key backgrounds. I will keep that in mind for the future. I did have to remove a security device from the background in Aperture.

SB-25 camera right with umbrella, and a reflector panel camera left, just out of frame from the statue.

Cory mugging for the camera here.  I included this one without cropping so you can see the effect of SB-50 in the back lighting up the wall. Natural light through a blind from the left- SB-25 with umbrella to the right.

Your's truly. Same set up as above. Just cropped close in to get that high key effect. I really like how the white background just disappears when you blow it out. 

All these were shot with a 50mm f1.8. Love that lens. If I had to have only one- that would be it. Used a PC cable to connect the SB-25 on a light stand. SB-50 on slave mode. Poverty wizards on the way- hopefully arrive this week!

Gotta get a picture up!

In the little picture taking time I had this weekend I was mostly messing around in my office with some new gear. I took the following shot with a Nikon SB-25 mounted on a stand with a shoot-through umbrella camera right, connected to the camera with a PC cable.  To the left was a Nikon SB-50dx with home made softbox and a diffuser panel (the SB-50 only fires at full power in slave mode, so I needed to extra panel to get the light down to a reasonable level. The SB-50 in slave was triggering off the 25's flash. 

Worked pretty well. I got bored with just the pen and ink, so I wrote my name. Quill pens are totally impractical for actual use, but they sure do make your writing look purty. This is the best of the bunch.

I really liked using the 2 light set up. I can't wait for my 'poverty wizards' to arrive from China so I can run all my flashes in radio slave mode (I have an SB-600 as well, but the PC connection doesn't work if you use the pop-up flash as the commander on a D300, so to get two flashes I had to break out the totally obsolete SB-50). I just got the SB-25, BTW, and I love it. 

Very powerful.

Well, at least I got a post up. I have a portrait package in a fundraising auction this week- hopefully it will generate some new photo ops!