I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a little Marumi ring flash unit for a while. Mostly I’m planning to use it to take some Macro shots, but I’m told ring flash works well for portrait light as well.

Given my reluctance to post (and therefore take) portraiture, I’m not going to comment on this aspect. Although, for reference, Marvin had a bit of the ring flash about him. And now I think of it, he was taken with a 100mm Macro lens as well….

… Anyway.

The nice thing about Ring Flash is the ability to get light to the front of your lens. When you’re shooting at a distance of 30cm and you’re using F22, you need a lot of light in a little area. Straight on flash can be an issue. It actually makes it almost possible to shoot Macro hands free.

This is actually a bobble my daughter has for her hair.

the Marumi seems like a decent little light. It’s a lot cheaper than the others on the market and I guess you do get what you pay for. The Marumi only has one bulb so no individual side control as offered by Canon ring flash. Also, it’s fully ETTL so there’s no manual control of the light (unless you use flash compensation on your camera).

However it does come with a set of adapter rings so mounting on a selection of lenses is possible, and it’s pretty quick to charge and recharge as well.

The light it throws off is pretty consistent, certainly meeting the challenges I gave it over the last day or two.

If you’re going to be spending your life with macro, invest in the Canon or Nikon ring flash. If you want something to supplement your gear or you’re shooting on a budget, I’d suggest taking a look at the Marumi.

Oh, and there is one for you Nikonites as well.

“You make me very angry...very angry..” – Marvin the Martian.

Life. That is. How dare it get in the way of me playing with cameras.

“Oh, I'm going to blow it up, it obstructs my view of Venus.“ – Marvin the Martian

There’s about 1 week left in the Daily Rituals challenge.

If you haven’t taken the photograph yet, its time to get those thinking caps on!

There’s a macro themed competition this year, so I’ve been trying to get the hang of macro photography. I guess the stereotype for the competition will be an inset shot and so I started out with those because I love stereotypes and it’s a decent way to practice focusing.

I ended up converting this to B&W as part of my messing about with the image and actually quite liked it.

I’d love it to be sharper though.

Been a while since I posted something just because it’s Friday…

If you hate HDR, look away now…

(I kind of expect this to turn up on one of those 50 images that prove HDR is evil sites….)

I’m playing with a new add on for Photoshop (Well, new to me anyway).

I’ll put a write up about my thoughts with it later in the week, but I wanted to throw up an image now so I could look at it in the cold light of day and see what I think.

Sometimes with these things I can get a little target blind, seeing only what I want to see, not the actual picture as a whole. It’s good to reflect a little.

Anyway, this picture was originally taken in December 2007. It’s always been on my pile of “I wish it was better…”, it seemed like a good sample image for the new utility.

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.

One of the problems with being an amateur and having to fit photographer around that life thing is that I never seem to have the time for lighting shots. By the time I dig out light stands, lights, umbrellas and all the do-hickeys I want to play with, what time I had for shooting is gone.

Take today. After discovering I had 45 minutes for me. I spend 40 minutes getting the kitchen set up for some shots, took a couple then spent 10 minutes rebuilding it.

Man, looking around my play room I’m beginning to wonder if it really is time to sell all my board and role playing games…

(Yes, I am that nerd).

Anyway. Reason I had the camera out is because I have the poker chips from the shots a few weeks back and wanted to try and get a few nice pictures of them. I figured they’d make a nice colour study thing.

Maybe slightly overblown?

Honestly. How he was able to sit beside me for two days listening to my rambling madness and still keep a smile on his face is beyond me…

How exactly do you explain to people why sitting in the street watching the world pass by and dodging the occasional rain shower can leave you inspired and enthused?

Well, all I can say is when you’ve spent the time with photos on the fence at Peoples Photography, that’s just what it does.

(Sorry for the rather spongy intro. That’s just kind of how I felt about the whole weekend…)

Saturday and Sunday saw the 2009 People’s Photography in Dublin. This year I managed to attend and exhibit for both days, combining the trip with a chance to meet up with Eoin and Dermot as well as spend a bit of wedding anniversary time with the missus.

Both days ran from 9am to 6pm and each day was a completely different experience.

Saturday

I arrived about 9:30 on Saturday morning to find Dermot already there hanging his photos. I’ll never understand how he can be so efficient and effective at getting them hung neatly in such a short time. (Personally I think he has an army of invisible midgets that do it when I’m not looking.)

I got to work, only to discover that my approach to hanging was, frankly, awful and worse yet the mounting I’d done in preparation was a mess with lots of mounts separated and photos having slipped. So began 45 minutes of banging heads of the wall before I gave up and tried to relax.

I’m always a little nervous when I first show people work, especially strangers. I panic that they’ll just point and laugh.So, it took to about 11:30 before I’d actually be near my photos and get down to the serious business of people watching.

It’s always interesting to see someone walking past who slows to look, or comes back for a second time. It’s gratifying to see people comment to their friends or look round to see who might have taken it. As always I kept well back and didn’t get involved unless I was singled out. Maybe I would have got more feedback if I’d been up front, but I wasn’t really there to sell anything just to have a nice time.

Most of the rest of the day was spent catching up with Dermot and browsing.

Sunday

On Sunday I managed to get to the green for 9am and thanks to a whole new approach was set up and ready to roll by 9:30. A few little repairs later and I was settled and enjoying the calm of a Sunday morning for 10am.

The nice thing about Sundays exhibition, and something I didn’t realise last year, was that people have more time. More people stopped to look or to chat and the atmosphere was much more relaxed. So much so Dermot and I started plotting about 2010… Any rumours we’re booking extra space are totally rumours…

Overall

If you’re even half considering this, I’d recommend it. And if you’re not considering it, I’d say you should start. It’s a fantastic way to understand what’s good about your photographs and to see people of amazing calibre who are willing to share tips and tricks. It’s also a great way to relax in a decent European city.