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!

Sunday project.

So- spending far too much time at Flickr reading the Strobist discussion threads while anxiously awaiting the arrival of new light stands, umbrellas and a used SB-25 picked up for an excellent price! ;-) In the meantime, I did a DIY project inspired by David Hobby, the Strobist himself.

There is a lot of discussion at the Strobist group on Flickr about Do-It-Yourself  (DIY) light modifiers and such. Inspired, I made my own. So for your viewing pleasure- a 10x8, foam packing material softbox, for about $4.

Cardboard and duct tape to start with.

Mmmmmmmm...time for spray paint. Fun outside (kids- always spraypaint in a well ventilated area. I prefer 'outside'). 

Gloss white goes on the inside for better light, black on the outside for that 'professional' look.

Here is the finished product. The piece of 2mm packing foam that inspired this project makes a GREAT diffuser, but wasn't big enough. I am getting a lot of light spilling out the sides. Tomorrow I will swing by a packing store and get a bigger sheet and cut it so its fastened all the way around. I am also looking forward to experimenting with different materials, as I used velcro around the rim- making 'quick changes' easy.

Given that its a totally home built rig- it fits on the SB-600 perfectly (had to re-enforce some of the key points with extra-duct tape). The light it produces is actually quite even. I am glad I used white paint inside and not tinfoil as I originally planned, I think the glossy paint is better.

And now that we are done...

 an homage to David Hobby. 

The original can be found here(scroll to the picture at the bottom of his post).