It’s a sunny day for some shadow photographing. I captured some shadow.

Before all the shooting, check white balance. I used a white A4 paper and took a photo of it. The image of the paper then was used for custom white balance.

The first photo is an easy weatherboard wall shadow. You can find these all around NZ. The classic diagonal composition makes it looks less boring.

Second photo is an outside table and its shadow on the wall. This time, there are more lines and they are no longer in parallel. This photo is kind broken the 1/3 composition rule. The separation is right in the middle. The thinking was that I want it to be balanced between dark shadow and bright desk. It also tells what object that shadow is from.

The object I am capturing is getting larger and lager. Here is the shadow from fence. Same as the first photo, it was composited in the diagonal way. More to that, this time I added 3rd dimension to it, the depth. The fence is way too colorful to make viewer to just look at the composition, therefore I changed it to black and white.

To upload the last photo is to proof I have done my laundry while I were taking photos. And it is diagonal too.

No tags

For people that new to camera flash, they tend to use TTL function. However, the capture can be more creative if both flash can camera set to manual mode. As a simple example, like the photos in last post. The way I took it is in 3 steps:

1. take meter reading of the sky, and under expo it 2 stops (by set it in manual mode and faster the shutter speed)
2. add the manual flash in, with a guess power setting (I usually start with 1/32, but depends on the distance to shooting object)
3. Take test shot and adjust the flash power setting accordingly, until I get what I want.

Do you see the problem here? I need to running backward and forward between my shooting position and the light stand. That looks really unpro. So I search the Internet, to find the right steps to set things up and shoot effectively.

After reading others posts, it sums up to two main points (from http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2009/05/28/shutter-speed-controls-background/)

• aperture controls flash light
• shutter speed controls available light

Think about it for a second, the flash light only lights up for a fraction of seconds. During the flash only think that can control the amount of light coming into the film/censor is the aperture. Whereas the case of shutter speed, shutter can still open after the flash. During this time the light coming into the film/censor is the ambient light.

According to this, the shooting steps should be as follow:

1. set up the flash with reasonable power setting (You should have an image in your mind of what kind effect you want)
2. adjust aperture to get the exposure right on the subject that flash is lighting on
3. adjust the shutter speed to get thing other than flash light on subject with right exposure (remember don’t go faster than your camera’s sync speed)

So what happen to ISO? ISO will effect on both lights. But if you are too lazy to run around to increase the power setting on your flash, increase the ISO is a good way to do it.

No tags

Hotshoe camera flashs can be very useful for taking creative photos. Nowaday, these flashs can be very powerful on their flash power. For example, the Canon 580EX II I own, it has GN number 58. In a short distance, it can beat the sun.

But most time, we don’t usually against sun. These hotshoe flashs  can also be dial down to be a great fill light source.

However, these flashs can be more useful when then get off from the top of camera. As show in these photos, the light even distribute to the face. This causes the subject’s face looks flat which will make them not happy.

To be able to use these flashs off camera, a remote trigger system is required. There are many options to do that. Options are long PC cable, optical trigger, IR trigger and Radio trigger. These can be found on Trademe. I own couple of Radio triggers. They are cheap ebay triggers with 4 channels. The can trigger flashs that is around 15 to 20 meters away from the camera. The reason that they are being cheap is they don’t support ETTL system. There are radio triggers that support ETTL system, such as PocketWizard, but they cost around 300 to 400 NZD.

I will try to take some off camera flashs shots when I got my light stands.

No tags