day 250 - a little light painting

two ideas in this one, first i wanted to see what taking the diffusion screen off the softbox would do, and second i wanted to experiment with a bit of light painting. so this is a longer exposure, two and a half seconds if i remember right, and i'm hand holding a small maglite flashlight and swinging it around after the flashes go off.

in order to avoid direct flash from inside the softbox, i taped a piece of white paper to the struts about an inch in front of the flash head. i totally forgot that i have a small internal diffuser screen i could've used..... oh well. next time.

setup shot:

day 249 - gold down, blue up

i wanted to give the whole umbrella on the floor thing another try. gelled it blue just for fun, and there it is.

setup shot:

day 248 - gold gel

quick one exploring using a gold gel on the softbox strobe to warm up skin tones. i think i'm a fan.

setup shot:

day 247 - poser

i was thinking about how i was a terrible terrible poser in these pictures. seriously, same stance, same look, same angle everytime. so i tried to work my arm in there as a triangle. didn't quite get the elbow, but i think that leaves a bit of mystery in there, right?

setup shot:

day 246 - one off

just a one-off. pretty much the same setup as day 245, just with no colored gels. i wanted to see the double diffuser in action without color. looks pretty good, i think.

day 245 - light from back corner

lit from the back sidish area.... at this aperture (1.8) tiny bits of light are crazy bright, so i had to double diffuse my main, first into the softbox, then into 40" disc diffuser. that cut it down a few stops, and kept the light source big, which is what i wanted.

awesomely out of focus setup shot:

day 244 - looking up

yep. getting bored with the same old camera angles, but being on a tripod has it's limitations. so for this one i hand held the tripod/light stand and clicked until something looked good.

setup shot:

day 243 - super contrast

not too sure about this. very contrasty, but didn't quite get to that "graphical element" level.

setup shot:

day 242 - dark smoothness

this is a softbox above, angled down and a reflector below, reflecting back up. the result was a very wrapping light quality, with a lot of shadows. i dropped the picture into imagenomic's portraiture and massaged the sliders a bit to get a higher contrast but not noisy image.

setup shot:

day 241 - soft w' a kick

setup shot:

day 240 - softbox no diffuser

this is using the softbox without it's front screen diffuser.... all that's left is the reflective softbox shape, which results in a very crisp almost beauty dish light on the subject. very strong, very contrasty. i setup the trigrip reflector camera left to lower the contrast a bit, and that's it.

setup shot:

day 239 - hardish warmish

this shot is set up with one flash, camera right, pointed mostly at a silver/gold reflector, high camera left. the flash being in front of the camera leaks light into the lens to make that lens flare blue/purple thing, and the gold/silver reflector warms up the light coming back to the subject.

it has a great effect. the light isn't soft, it's very directional, throws a solid shadow, and is warm so it contrasts with the blue/purple flare. i like it.

setup shot:

day 238 - harsh sides

yeah, so on this one i wanted to do a sort of a super harsh double side light, with a soft reflector just below the camera, providing a soft bit of fill down the middle of the face. i ran the finished image through imagenomic's portraiture for skin texture smoothing, and here it is.

setup shot:

day 237 - four lights

i got a new ebay sb-28 in the mail today. this brings my flash total up to 4 sb-28s and 1 colorsplash. i wanted to get another so that i can do a more complete two lights for subject two lights for background type thing. so that's what i did here. these two pictures were taken about a minute apart, one with two lights on the subject, one with two lights on subject, two lights on background. it's not quite white with no detail back there, but a minute with the dodge tool in photoshop would fix that up right pretty.

setup shot:

day 236 - outside in the night

setup real quick in the alleyway we park in. two lights, one for me and one for the garage door back there. the one on me has a cto gel to warm it up, balance for that and the garage door goes a bit blue. it was windy out there, blew over my light stand, broke the base of one of my slave triggers. i need to figure out a way to fix 'em, they keep breaking in the same way.

maybe i should just figure out how to keep my stuff from falling over. probably.

setup shot:

day 235 - outside in the wind

yep, wanted to get back to doing some outside twilight type stuff, so i threw this together really quick in the back yard. it's a decent composition, the buildings make nice converging lines, and the sky was cool. i couldn't set up an umbrella because it was too windy, so i went beauty dish, and never looked back.

setup shot:

day 234 - flashlight spirograph

so this is a flashlight on a string with paper taped into a cone on the front of it. i'd swing it around a bit, push the button on the camera, the flash would go off, i'd duck out of the way, shutter stays open for 15 seconds in the dark room while the flashlight swings around. it creates a spirograph type halo look, and everyone's happy.

setup shot:

day 233 - no red

so, the setup shot down there shows that i had a red gel on the gridded sb-28 camera left.... but this shot was taken before i put that red gel on there. so this is actually pre-red gel. everything else is the same, just not red.

setup shot: