Off camera flash – Sloth Shots

2021-12-072022-05-26

Oz Comic Con Homegrown | Sydney | 2021

Covid still lingering on but not dampening the enthusiasm for cosplay at the second Oz Comic Con of the year here in Sydney, some great work on display and I fortunately got to capture some of it.

Feel I’ve upped my game this year, breaking out of my comfort zone of natural light and shooting with flash has made a noticeable improvement, though still more work and testing needed I feel!

First 24 are shown below, click the title to go through the album on Flickr!

[flickr_set id=”72157720224425247″]

2019-06-082020-12-07

Oz Comic Con | Melbourne | 2019

Last time I went to Melbourne’s Oz Comic-con I was mistaken for a professional photographer, this year, I was.

Quite different approach, I shot for two hours Saturday morning and have twenty eight more pictures than the two days of floor walking last time I was here with people queuing up for a picture.

[flickr_set id=”72157709147645556″]

2018-06-17

Supanova | Sydney | 2018

Fun at this years Supanova, saw some familiar faces (well, familiar voices, totally didn’t recognise the faces!). Managed to find a good spot for taking pictures, end of an aisle with a nice black backdrop and bit of carpet (maybe it was supposed to be a stall and they cancelled late?), quickly snowballed as people started asking me to take their picture, even had a queue at one point!

[flickr_set id=”72157670203875528″]

2015-02-21

Week 8 | Still Life

Nikon D5100
35mm Prime Lens
ISO100
f/8
SS 1 sec

I’ll be honest, I had to google the meaning of this weeks challenge and wasn’t massively happy with what I saw. It was simultaneously full of potential but also seemed so boring, I couldn’t really think of what to do so I googled some popular images and came up with the top left of the one below:

I had a quick practice, broke out the speedlights and triggered them from the body flash to try and capture the water in motion being poured from a bottle and quickly realized this isn’t how they achieved that image due to how the water behaves when it’s poured.

With this I went back to thinking, it must be poured, also, all the flash reflections (even with a polarizing filter and flash diffusers) in the glass must mean it’s ether back or top lit.

So, come Thursday night and it being (a conservative estimate) around a billion degrees I couldn’t sleep so figured I’d have another go and broke out all the gear (the fun part of breaking out is all the gear, the downside is having to put away all the gear when done).

I stripped the reflector off my giant diffuser and set-up both speedlights on remotes behind it to back light on full power, lined this up behind the sink and set the camera up at the far end of the counter on the tripod so I could capture the water being poured (I’d actually picked up some cheap raspberry cordial as I thought the undiluted mixture would be a little more syrupy and give it a little more body to its movement).

The results weren’t too bad – with a couple of obvious flaws:

The big flaw being fingers. We don’t drink so we don’t have any stemmed wine glasses which I could’ve then cut off with the fake reflection/table.

Also, I shot this a little late, the timing between tipping and using a wired remote to fire the camera (I figured wired would be a little more reliable than the cordless as the infrared one doesn’t always shoot when you ask it). This has led to it looking a little obvious that it’s being poured out, I guess instead of going all the way pouring I could’ve just jolted the glass to get the liquid to escape too.

I also didn’t do the reflection as well as I could, it looks quite obvious but, to be honest, I couldn’t really care, it could be it was two in the morning but mostly it’s the fingers – there’s no way around that it’s going to look fake.

Now, I could’ve gone out and bought some stemmed glasses for this and re-setup and re-done the shoot but my curiosity was sated. I’d worked out how to get the image I didn’t really want to go through all the hassle to actually get the image. If I need a shot like this, I know how to go about it, but right now, can’t be arsed.

So, this moved us on to having to do another shot and I was a bit of a loss until I saw some glasses lined up at work and each looked to have a smaller version inside it due to how the glass warped the view behind it.

I thought I’d isolate off some we have at home and grabbed some black paper from the local craft store and made a mini-studio drop but the black in the card was a bit reflective and bright (if you can say black is bright?) so this meant I struggled more with the lighting as I couldn’t have the aperture/iso/exposure (take your pic) too long otherwise you’d start to see the shoddy card box.

So using the flash on a remote held above to bounce off the ceiling to diffuse and soften the flash I went through and tried several setting before getting what I thought was a good enough mix – using helicon remote to set the focus (with a bike light to see what I was doing). The end result I’m thoroughly ‘meh’ about, it’s not what I had in my head, the glasses we have at home warp and distort unlike those I’d seen at work and having to make the image dark enough to not see the framing means the edges of the glass just disappear into the background.

I guess there was going to come a week when I didn’t enjoy the challenge so much, my inspiration was off and I’m not happy with the result – but that was bound to happen sooner or later and at least now it’s over with, roll on next week, hopefully we can get back to something that’ll spark the ol’ grey cells and light up the imagination.

Maybe I should’ve just recreated my “Han Shot First” picture I put on Instagram a few month back…

2015-01-28

Week 5 | Warmth

The warmth of a hug from a loved one..
The warmth of the morning cuppa to wake you..
The warmth of a sunset celebrating the days end..

OR a self portrait, sparkle/shine macro, dreamy sunset all set in a triptych about warmth. That wraps January in a bow 🙂

Self Portrait:
Nikon D5100
18-55mm DX Kit Lens @ 18mm
ISO 100
f/3.5
SS 1/15 sec

Speedlight on body, set to bounce at an angle.

Sparkle/shine Macro:
Nikon D5100
50mm FX prime lens with +4 macro filter
ISO 100
f/1.8
SS 1/60 sec

Off camera speedlite remotely triggered with fairy lights in the background to twinkle in the bokeh.

Dreamy Sunset:
Nikon D5100
35mm DX prime lens with a +9 ND filter
ISO 100
f/22
SS 30 sec

No additional lighting.

This shoot was basically “Use ALL the toys” as it’s the first time I’ve broken out the remote speedlite controller, the macro lens, used Pam‘s nifty fifty and the ND filter. Along with all the gear I usually use (such as my tripods, remote shutter controller, pad controller software).

Out of all the images I feel I rushed the portrait a bit (especially in adding the fake bokeh background I’ve accidentally given myself a much needed haircut, but missed a chunk at the front) and I struggled to find a good spot in Pyrmont for the sunset, but given the time I got out of work it’s all I could get (and at least we had a sunset today as it’d stopped raining finally!).

I’d’ve liked some ‘wisps’ from the cuppa too but I think they bokeh’d out as they were definitely there when shooting.

Oh well, just glad I managed to get all five themes into one picture (this is going to get more difficult as time goes on 😉 ).

A little behind the scenes, top image is the selfie set-up and the bottom is the cuppa – I figure a camera on a tripod for the sunset is fairly standard and folk know what that looks like :p

Link to the original Facebook thread here.

2015-01-11

January Bonus Challenge | Macro

Hmm, each month there’s a bonus challenge, the submission with the most likes gets to be the Facebook forum banner for the next month, I voted against the idea as I felt competition may bring out the nasty side in people – now, do I feel a little bit of a hypocrite saying I wasn’t interested in competition but still taking part in the monthly challenge? Yes, a bit, though Macro is something I wanted to “have a go” at and I was interested in the monthly challenges before that! (my excuses sticking with ’em :p )
I’ve actually got some magnification filters on order from Amazon but not sure if they’ll make it from the US to Aus in time so tried my hand at reverse free-lensing. Benny was kind enough to step in and model for me as it’s about three am and everyone else is asleep, I also figured such a precarious set-up didn’t lend itself to nature photography, especially the wee critters staying still long enough as I got so close to them!

Nikon D5100
35mm Prime Lens
ISO100
f/1.8 (manually held open all the way)
SS 1/80 sec

I lit him with my ring flash set-up off camera as a permanent light so I could get the depth of field right, it’s very small, only enough to cover his left eye and not even reach all the way to the right – which is incredible when you contemplate how large a Lego head is!

So this was fun, looking forward to doing it more ‘properly’ when my filters get here and I can shoot something a little more interesting! #Spaceship

So set-up on the kitchen counter with Benny and the ring flash, plus me balancing the prime lens the wrong road around single-handedly whilst holding the aperture switch open with my index finger.

I found the camera would only shoot in manual mode as it wasn’t getting the aperture information through, both Shutter priority and Aperture priority refused to fire (I guess the latter being fairly obvious why)

Link to the original Facebook thread here.

[edit]

Actually, it’s just occurred to me I never thought about the focusing ring whilst doing all this, it will’ve been in the position I last shot in, not sure if I’d’ve got a greater depth of field if it’d been focused all out/all in – maybe something to play around with later.