Lights

Only a few weeks ago I received my new Limited Edition Fire Orange Alien Bees B800 strobes. Looking to put them to good use very soon. Now if only I can find a willing victim model...

Changing the Sun With A Piece of Nylon

For portraits taken outdoors a very handy tool is a large, translucent panel often called a silk. My friend John often uses a silk in film and video work to soften harsh, direct sunlight and make soft, more pleasing lighting on the subject. A silk is basically a big sheet of nylon stretched onto a frame of some kind. Photo/film/video gear is usually expens(overpriced)ive but I recently learned on the Internet that one can be home-made for a fraction of the price. My first task was to locate the appropriate fabric, rip-stop nylon. DONE! Next I need to build a frame, probably from PVC tubes and figure out how I want to attach the fabric. Since I can't wait, because I have little to zero patience, I did some test shots by just hanging my nylon sheet to one of the beams over my back patio so that one side was hit by full sun.


Using my self as the reluctant "model", here are 3 examples: a. Direct sun. Notice how uncomfortable the subject is. b. Sun is shining through the silk. Hard to believe it's the same person! c. The silk can also be used to bounce (reflect) the sun back onto the subject so shadows aren't so harsh or, as in this example, to fill in some nice light when the subject is backlit. Gah...I need to get someone else to pose for my experiments! But this hopefully gets the idea across.

photography

I don't know, ever since getting my nikon d90 in October I've taken probably close to 5- or six-thousand photos. Not that they're all keepers and surely leaving the camera in continuous shot mode results in a lot of accidental duplicate images (is this one better or this other one?). Still, I'm shooting something almost every day. And it's not like I have such a wide variety of subjects, either. I rarely go anywhere so I've just about shot everything around the house that could make at least an ok picture. Doesn't keep me from looking though, or coming up with some new silly thing to try. It does present a particular creative challenge to try to see boring household items in interesting ways. I took pictures of the Weber for kry's sake.

My latest deal is flash photography. I never owned a flash back in the days of film, and cameras then didn't have built in, pop-up flashes. So I've been playing around with an SB-600 speedlight, bouncing it off walls, white cardboard, or through stuff trying to get a soft, diffuse quality of light that doesn't look like a flash. It's been kinda fun, and kinda dumb. The SB-600 is great in that it doesn't have to be fastened to the camera's hotshoe to work. It can be triggered remotely by my camera's built in flash and any camera tripod can be used as a light stand. I've realized this flash I have will suffice for a lot of the things I want to do, but I don't want to buy a lot of add-on equipment that's available to make it do all of the things that bigger studio strobes do better. My goal is to have proper lights to take portraits of friends and family so I think my next move is get a hold of some gear that is really designed for that.