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….

Macro round is just around the corner. This could be another example of how I get hooked into a photo and don’t see its bad points until much much later.

Colours are as shot. A little sharpening was about it. I’ll probably play with it in Photoshop over the weekend, but I thought it was nice as a starter for 10.

More from the day out shooting.

About new year time last year I was at my brother in laws and we did a spot of Clay Pigeon shooting. At the time I took this.

Well, since we spent Christmas at their house, it only seemed reasonable to go out and shoot some more. After all, you really need to keep on top of that Clay Pigeon population in case they… erm… they… OK. So after two days of feasting, pretty much any excuse to get outside works.

Continuing my current obsession with mono conversion. I’ll not get into how much tweaking the image got, but I’ll own up to moving the exploding clay a little (It was in the shot, just a little more to the right than I liked and I wanted to crop it a little).

there’s a photo essay competition coming up soon and I’m seriously considering using this image in it – I’ve abut 15 images of clay pigeon shooting from the last two outings.

I have been mostly eating

And playing with Mono Conversions…

As part of my messing with the Button flowers a few nights back, I also tried to get a nice tight macro shot.

There’s a macro competition in the camera club coming up shortly, so I wanted to do things “by the book”. A definition of macro photography being that the image on the film (I’m not sure what this film thing is) should be the same size as the object, but that up to 4 times smaller is also allowed. Now, I’ve no idea how you measure that in Digital world where cropping is so simple, but I decided to work to a simple rule for this shot…

The lens had to be sharp at 1:1 and focused at the minimum focus distance. For this shot I used a Canon EF 100mm F2.8 on my 400D. If you’re in the market for one, I’d recommend it.

To get the shot above, I shot at F/29 from a tripod. You can see that even with an aperture this small, the depth of field is still pretty shallow.

Focusing also required me making use of a Macro Rail for the first time. A Macro Rail is essentially a fine adjustment mount for your tripod and camera. In my case, the rail mounts to my existing tripod mount and then the camera mounts to it. Adjustment is performed along two axis by use of small screws. It’s pretty neat, though I’d suggest the ball mount I have isn’t the right choice for a tripod head in cases like this as the initial set up was a nightmare!

One of the nice things about having photography as a hobby is that if you don’t pick up the camera a lot for a few weeks it doesn’t cost you anything.

Apart from a frantic weekend sorting pictures for my brother, I haven’t been taking a lot of pictures recently. Lots of reasons for it, but none worth wasting your time with. Interestingly, even though I wasn’t taking pictures, I was still reading other websites and magazines. I guess I’m still addicted to the camera.

Anyway, I picked up an unusual button flower vase at a recent craft fair. It made an interesting subject, so I thought I’d see if I could do something with it. Rather than break out light stands and umbrellas and reflectors I decided to see if I could just light it with available light…

So, these shots are lit with some halogen spots under my kitchen units and reflected with either a piece of A4 paper or a 60watt desk lamp. As basic as you could get.

I guess I could reshoot this and remove the highlights by diffusing the light some. But I kind of like them on it. It gives the image a more rounded effect or something

And in black and white…

As usual, thoughts on a postcard, or a comment box, or an email.

Like I said before, I was lucky enough for a mate to volunteer to model for me. I’ve taken plenty of pictures of friends, and Kevin isn’t the first to let me take a photo of them. However, he was the first mate I specifically set out to take photos off rather than just shot as part of a days activities.

The difference is, this time the sole objective of the evening was to get some good photos, not to play poker and have a laugh.

I also got myself worked into a bit of a tizzy coming up this this as I really wanted to impress.

Looking at the photos from the night, I don’t think I did.

So, where’d it go wrong?

I think my first mistake was not planning the shots more carefully. I knew I wanted the lighting effect in the third picture above and I wanted a sort of head on B&W pose, but I never considered what sort of approach to actually take to achieve that. I also never considered that taking 60 pictures of Kevin with similar looks on his face would become problematic – the expressions are not his fault!

I think I got the gear a little wrong to. I obsessed over using a single light for the subject and a reflector, but because there were just the two of us I couldn’t get the reflector to set up how I wanted. In retrospect I should have just set up a second strobe on low power and lived with the impact.

One interesting thing which I’d been told and tried but really only became convinced off during the session was the power of F/11. These are all taken at F/11 around 80 - 100mm and they give a nice feel. Possibly helped by the nice plain wall, but it’s nice to see peoples heads in focus…

When all is said and done though, I did have a great time doing this. I’ll be hassling more mates to volunteer in the future.