Pictures, Videos and other meanderings…

The Hat, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

Recently bought some gels for the flash units from ebay, and have been trying them out, they can give quite interesting effects.

This picture was taken with a flash on camera right with an orange coloured gel on it and a shoot through umbrella on it, the other flash was simply left bare behind her.

I set the white balance on the camera to tungsten, as that matches the flash with the gel on it, and also why the un-gelled flash came out blue.

I kinda like the effect, and i have a whole bagfull of gels and wireless triggers, just need another couple of flash units for use outside and anywhere, as the one at the back has no manual controls on it, so it was getting a bit flashy for the model as both flashes were firing on full power – you could feel them go off!

Watching TV, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

First step in using artificial light is to get a balance – unless you’re using only one light source of course.

In this photograph, my son is lying on the sofa watching TV, and behind him is the window, so I had nice window light which was fairly diffused as it’s overcast and with around a foot of snow outside, that gives the hair and backlight.

On the right of the frame, I had a 580ex flash on a stand fired through a white translucent umbrella at 1/4 power.

This gives light without it looking like flash and good detail in the image with the contours and textures of his jumper.

Increasing the strength of the flash caused it to overpower the window light too much and resulted in a much flatter image.

Balance!

Spent some time thinking about this, I have lost a lot of inspiration over the past few months, and it’s time to stop the rot.

I plan to get my flashes out and take them back to basics, I haven’t had any truly inspiring shots that I’m happy with so it’s time to make time to do this.

Understanding flash is not an easy concept to get your head around as I remember well from when I first started using it and now is the time to revisit all those lessons that I learned to ensure that I’m getting what I want from it and producing good quality, well lit and interesting photographs.

One of things that you need to do when you want to be great at doing something, is to constantly practice, and that practice should include the things that you are good at and the things that you are not good at – as that way you can get good at them – all takes practice, so for that, it’s back to basics with light and lighting – kinda looking forward to it, and it starts today.

Hopefully I’ll keep the blog updated with my trials and tribulations as then I will have a reference to look back upon if anything becomes a bit grey in my mind and if anyone else finds things that they can use, feel free to ask any questions as one of the best ways of learning something is answering questions that you don’t know the answer to – go and find out!

Happy 2010!