Yeah, it’s been a quiet few weeks. Great thing about a hobby is when you get distracted it’s not quite the end of the world. My couple of weeks staring sullenly at my camera have passed and hopefully things are getting back on track.

Anyway….

This time last year I was tinkering with a set of cheap Ebay triggers and whilst they were fun, there was lots of issues with range, misfires and just general reliability. So much so, that they were almost a chore to use at times. Don’t get me wrong, they had their uses and I got some fun shots with them, but I hated relying on them for anything which involved people.

I was reading Paulo’s blog again recently and he mentioned picking up some Phottix Strato triggers, so I dropped him a line to see if his initial recommendation was holding up. Whilst it was, it turns out they weren’t made anymore. He recommended a look at RF-602 triggers.

Tonight I managed to get playing with a set I picked up.

First impressions are they’re fantastic. No misfires at all. Easy, clean operation with good signal lights to tell you what’s happening. And the range is to die for – they claim 100metres, but I don’t have a house that big – I was able to trigger the flash from 2 rooms away with no line of sight (OK, not sure why I’d ever need to trigger a flash I can’t see, but….)

All in all a cool set of triggers, and at £26 for a set it’s well worth a punt.

While playing with them I took a few self portraits (using Strobist for inspiration). They’re nothing special, but I couldn’t post and not post an image now could I?

(Yes, my eyes look odd. You hold a fekking flash under your chin and see how your eyes go…)

I’ll come back to the light box and other lighting tool another night….

I mentioned the pain I got through having to set up gear and then take it down every time I try to do something studio-esque. I think part of my frustration is that quite often the effort is wasted and I come away with nothing to show for it.

I spent a little time taking photos of Liquorice Allsorts on a white background this evening and it’s typical of the problems I seem to face. Either I end up over-exposing or the white background feels grey and not uniform in some way. Now occasionally, I can recover to a degree or I get a nice shot despite my best efforts, but often it’s just a wasted hour.

I’ve read lots of tutorials on how to set up this sort of shot and I’ve spent money buying gear to try and do it, but it’s just not sinking in to my thick skull.  It’s always hit and miss.

Well, in an effort to get better at this style of photography, I’m going to try and do at least one session a week like this. Needless to say I’ll share my results and try to explain what I was doing with lights and such.

Liquorice Allsorts

For this shot, I had two flash guns behind umbrellas. One strobe was on each side of the setup, the gun on the left being more powerful than the one on the right. Both strobes were shooting down onto the sweets, with the strobe on the right coming from slightly behind.

The above image is the cleaned up post processed version with sharpening and curves adjustments to help fix the white background. The original isn’t so pretty.

My current thinking is there are a couple of things I need to consider further.

1. White Balance – It’s probable that the white balance was wrong since it was on auto and the lighting was provided by flash (chained from cheap ebay wireless triggers)

2. Two flash guns does not a lot of light make. Maybe I need to add more light, or at least more defused sources. Maybe next time I’ll add some reflectors.

3. Lens choice. This was shot with a 100mm macro lens. Down side here is that I need it up around 1/125sec to get a shot without shake (damn my tremors). Maybe a 50mm lens would be a better choice?

If you’ve other thoughts, drop me a note.

I mentioned I was in Galway this week. Well, the weather was a bust from a photography perspective – and I was in a grump anyway.

Sometimes it’s better I don’t pick up the camera.

Anyway, as I was checking out of the hotel yesterday morning, they were getting ready for a wedding party later that day. The manager was putting flowers into a vase, and while she was running through payment I decided to see if I could take a shot of one of the flowers on the hop.

I think its a Chrysanthemum, but I know as much about flora as I know  about fauna so…

Anyway. The lighting in the room sucked, so since flash and off camera cord were to hand, I tried a little unusual lighting by illuminating it from below and just left of the camera.

Considering I had all of two minutes to grab the shot before going to work, I quite like it.

Now that the late evenings have arrived, the camera club has organised a series of expeditions rather than locking us in a room in the heat.

It’s a good opportunity to get out and see how other people approach problems. And no matter how new you are to photography, you might just come up with a nice idea for a shot.

Tuesday night past saw a gang of us descend on Mount Stewart. Some fancy talking had arranged for us to have access to the gardens after their usual closing time so we were alone in the grounds for a few hours. Even better, we had some fantastic weather to shoot in.

During our ramble a bunch of us came across this tower like structure beside a path.

Because it was getting late, it was impossible to pick up the detail of the stained glass, but a little lateral thinking got this:

By planning ahead (or by forgetting to lift them out of my bag), I’d brought a selection of ebay triggers and light sensors for flashguns. One of the guys was able to go into the room and hold the triggers at the window, allowing us to fire them remotely from outside.

I was pretty amazed at the effect (and the dexterity of the guy holding two flash guns, an extension cord and a trigger and getting a decent even light from inside the (very dark) room).

I felt the stone work in the finished image was a little dark and since I really like stone work of this type in black and white, decided to see how the shot looked with some selective colourisation. There’ll be those that prefer the one above, but I kinda like this.

My father was showing me a flower today in his garden. He has a bunch of yellow tulips (I think) and a single red one.

Annoyingly. it was close to a fence with really bad light for taking a picture – I know, I tried. There was lots of cross light and dense shadow because of a fence right behind the flower.

I was about to give up when I remembered I had my flash gun and off camera remotes with me and, never having used them outside the house before, it seemed like an opportunity to try some form of fill in flash.

OK, my understanding of “fill in flash” is that when you have a subject that’s back-lit or has a shadow on it, you can use a little “pop” of flash to compensate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a compact or an SLR, if you can turn on your flash you can use it to help fill in the missing light. Using this, you can expose the image, front and back equally.

I guess I took it a little further, by using the flash off camera (with my father holding it) and deliberately under exposing the background I was able to mostly isolate the flower. A little photoshop later and I ended up with this.

I mentioned a while back that I bought some “ebay triggers” to allow me to remote fire my flashgun. At the time, and since then I’ve had real issues with misfires – the flash will fire at random moments, sometimes ruining a shot or forcing me to wait until it resets. No amount of fiddling has ever cured the problem. It simply seems to be an issue with the Canon 430EX and the cheap triggers (they’re marked RF-04 and PT-04).

Fortunately I put my hands on a separate flashgun which removed the pain for a little while, but still left me in a quandary about what to do for multiple strobe shots.

Well, I think I have a solution. It’s early days yet, but it seems if I separate the PT-04 receiver from the 430EX the problem goes away. It’s simply a case of putting a hot-shoe to hot-shoe cable between the two. For my purposes, I used the “Canon Off-Camera Shoe Cord OC-E3” though others may work just as well.

Oh, and you might want to check ebay for cheaper versions…

Ever since I read the post by Paulo about lighting the cocktail glass, I’ve wanted to try Dark Field Lighting.

I mean, even before we look at the science of it, it sounds like something sci-fi. I can just hear some alien captain telling his crew to fire up the “Dark Field Engine”.

Oh go on. You know you thought it too.

Anyway, when it comes to lighting, it’s a great technique for photographing glass. My understanding of it is that you need to light the object indirectly, providing a rim light only. To do this, you’ll need a few things.

• A flash gun you can trigger remotely
• Something white/light coloured to reflect the flash (I used a wall)
• A tripod and camera
• A black card or black background (I used a t-shirt and black card)
• A dark place to work

(It’s a good thing to try now when it’s dark early)

Basically, place the object you want to shoot in front of a black background. Make sure the background isn’t too big (bigger than the image you’re shooting is all you need). Now, behind the black background, place your flash gun. In my case I pointed it away from the black card and bounced the light off a wall but you might use a translucent sheet to shoot through if you wish (it’s just important to diffuse the light). Set the camera up for a 6 second exposure, focus it (and change the focus to manual) and then turn off the light. Open the shutter, fire the flash and hopefully…

My result is OK. If you want a good example of it, check Paulo’s picture.

There are a few lessons I learned while trying it.

1. In a dark room, shutter speed is irrelevant so you can’t use it to control exposure. Instead you need to use the power on the flash gun. But be warned, I think a higher power on the flash equates to a longer exposure so if you’re trying to capture movement you may well introduce blurring
2. Be sure where everything is before you turn off the lights…
3. Make sure the glass is clean. Very very clean. This lamp looked clean to the naked eye, but look at the dust on it and in it
4. Make sure the room is clear of clutter if possible or cover it out with black sheets in some way. If you look at the reflection in my image, you can see my dining room chairs off to one side

All in all, it’s a good thing to try. I believe it’s covered in the book Light Science and Magic and it’s on my Amazon Wish List so I can find out more.

As mentioned in the last post, as well as taking pictures of the Slinky(s) on a white background, I also tried it on a black background. In this case, a spare T-Shirt.

The black background and the strobe/flash light really helped the colours in the slinky comes alive.

The problem with these sort of pictures is that they can look very samey to some and utterly different to others. Sadly, I fall into the later camp and it’s been a challenge to pick 6 (3 white, 3 black) which I liked to show here.

If I’d to do it again, I guess I’d diffuse the flash a little more to try and negate the highlights on the coils. And as mentioned, I’d try to use an additional strobe as well.

What walks down stairs, Alone or in pairs, And makes a slinkity sound?

A spring! A spring! A marvellous thing! Everyone knows it’s Slinky!

I am reliably informed that ‘slinkity’ is indeed the sound they make.

My nephew and niece each adopted a slinky as part of their Christmas presents  and since I was in that post dinner, pre going to the pub part of the night I got to wondering if it was possible to take some abstract pictures of them.

These pictures are all taken using a 100mm lens freehand with my 440EX flash gun held by a voice activated light stand (also known as a niece). The slinkys (or is it slinkies or slinkii?) were placed on the back of a 2009 calendar. The V.A.L.S. held the strobe between 15 and 20 inches from the slink… subject at different angles.

The difference between these shots is almost purely the position of the light source. In the first shot, the shadows show it’s above and behind/right of the subject, whilst in the second shot it’s closer and more directly overhead. As a result, the shadows aren’t as visible (apart from under the slinky itself).

Looking at them now, I’m kicking myself for not trying to find an improvised reflector to reduce some of the shadows a little, especially in the first and last shot. I’m also now in the market for a cheap manual strobe that would give me a second light source – cause photographing using off camera strobes is just cool.

I have about 30 of the shots on the white background and I quite liked the cropping on these for some reason. I also have a bunch on a black background and they look really weird – and will follow later…

*And if you really need to hear that song again…

ps: PC is once more in the land of the living. A backup strategy now copies every file in my user accounts folder to a second drive every time the pc starts. I’ve also agreed a new strategy with my brother to keep off site backups on matched external drives – I keep his, he keeps mine. If I don’t mention this again in the near future, someone hit me and make sure I did it.

I like to try things. Even when what I read makes sense. Even when the photographic evidence proves the point. I still like to try things.

Sometimes it can take me a month or two to get round to it. Sometimes it happens sooner. But inevitably, I'll try a thing just to prove it is so.

So, finding myself alone in a house filled with food, beer, hundreds of my favourite movies and the web...

I ignored all those and got out my new light stand and umbrella to see if using a reflector with an off camera strobe really did make a difference to the light...

OK, not owning a reflector was a bit of a bind, but I happened upon a fantastic piece of A2 glossy white card, and necessity being the mother of invention, suddenly I had a compromise.

I set an apple on a chopping board. Then I positioned a flash high to the left pointing at the apple through a translucent white umbrella. For the reflector shot, I then positioned my white card to the right of the apple - the size of the card meant it ran from the surface of the table to above the umbrella in height. (For reference the chopping board was on a black surface). since I was shooting freehand, the position of the apple is slightly different in the two frames, but the setup was the same.

Without a Reflector...

With a Reflector...

OK, neither of these is going to win photograph of the year, but it proved out the theory I'd read about.

Whilst there is still shadow in the reflector shot, it's a lot less sheer and looks more natural in keeping the apple and board detail.  I reckon moving the reflector closer again would have reduced the shadow further.

So, lesson for tonight. Reflectors do work in reducing the harshness of a shadow.

I was playing with my flashgun tonight and decided to try and recreate a picture I'd seen in this Strobist post.

Because I was away from technology at the time, I had to try it from memory.

When compared to David's toy car, the highlights on mine are still very sharp and there are some burnt out patches on both pictures (I like them on the second car), but it's a fun thing to try.

Now the essence of David's post was related to light sources and what makes soft light or hard light, and to be honest I'm still trying to get my head round some of this so I'm not going to try and stick my understanding of it online just yet.

Still, it's a fun way to photograph toy cars.

Halloween is coming and the photographer has gotten fat,

and while he was sorting dinner he spotted the wee girls trike (OK, it doesn't rhyme.).

With winter arriving with vengeance I was cooking dinner tonight and looking out into the back garden. My daughters trike was sitting abandoned and I couldn't shake that "Here's Johnny" line. After saying it four or five times my wife cracked up and made me go and take the picture.

I think it's kinda sinister, but you maybe just think it's badly lit.

(f/8.0, 6secs, 100mm, ISO-200, 29/10/2008)

This was deliberately lit down low on the right side of the image to try and give it that partially lit appearance. To do it, I stood just out of shot and remotely fired the camera, then during the 6 second exposure I fired the flash manually from low to the ground and pointing up.

This is kind of a lead in for me to a concept known as 'off camera strobing' and something I'm hoping to do more off over the next while. There are a few good sites that deal with it, but the defacto best blog on the subject is The Strobist.