day 253 - menacingly well lit

exploring the gold-silver cover used with the softbox containing a gold gel. put some raw daylight balanced flash in the back there for contrast, and that's it.

setup shot:

day 252 - pirate face

yep, you can't tell with the greyscale conversion, but this is using a gold gel on the softbox. i'm really becoming a fan of it, it just makes caucasian skin tones look good. 

setup shot:

day 251 - long throw

got the idea for this shot from a kelby training video by joe mcnally. in the video joe talks about how he likes to sometimes set up a flash quite a distance from the subject, with a diffuser screen close to the subject to create that soft light. he says that this "marinates" the light, since a lot of the raw flash bounces around the room and mimics natural light more closely.

i realized that i almost always set up my flash and modifier really close to the subject.... in all the setups i've done i've never had the flash far away, and the diffuser close. so i gave it a try.

so for this one i've got the flash in the far corner of the room, maybe 15 feet away from me. and my 32" trigrip is maybe a foot and a half from my face. the flash is zoomed to 85mm (the max on an sb-28), and honl gridded to shadow the background a bit.

i think it came out pretty well. some random things i like about the setup:

1. that background gradient
2. my eye reflections
3. the possibility of adding a reflector camera left.

and some things i don't like:

1. having to walk to the flash to adjust it every time i move anything.

setup shot:

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: