Sunday, October 25, 2009

Revenge of the leftovers



Once a year the camera club I belong to plans a weekend trip to Tiri Tiri Matangi Island, a smallish land-mass, 30 mins by boat off Auckland's east coast.

The island is a bird watchers paradise, and admittedly this is what draws most photographers.
I however have evolved, and realised after last year's trip that the patience for bird photography was something I just didn't have. (And me cursing just ruins the birdsong anyway!)

So this year I came with the idea of furthering my flashwork and using the abundance of fellow photographers to work on a few shots I'd had rattling around in my brain.

And so there we were, flashes, gels, willing subjects and a soon to be less than cold fridge.


The idea initially was to see what effects we could get by placing a blue gelled flash and a fisheye lens inside the fridge.
Flash was placed off camera, triggered with Elinchrom Skyports which I have absolutely fallen in love with!

Our first attempt was a good start, but as it often is with an idea, you roll with what you get and refine things from there.

Problems:
1) The camera needed to come forward to accentuate the effect of the fisheye.
2) We needed to make sure the flash was positioned in a way to avoid casting shadows on the subjects.
3) The background really needed something to make it pop - Enter a second flash with a yellow gel, triggered with a hotshoe photo receptor



Attempt number 2 fixed some problems, but highlighted a few others that should probably have been expected.
1)Hide the legs of the light stand - Add more people or adjust position of the light stand.
2) The lighting in the kitchen needed to be worked on as well - added a 3rd strobe gelled yellow, triggered with another hotshoe photo receptor. Admittedly, I had huge reservations that there would not be enough light hitting the photo receptor to trigger it, but I was proved wrong.



When in doubt - overcorrect!
Way too many people in frame, and consequently the blue light was not hitting everyone.
Admittedly by this time our antics were drawing a little interest, which is always good for the guys who have never seen/worked with off camera flash.

Regardless, things were getting better, and the number of problems were dwindling with each shot.



Final shot!
Definately still in need of improvement, but admittedly we quit there to be kind to the fridge (And the bottles of wine which were meant to be chilling - quite a lot of food ended up outside of the fridge while we were shooting.)

The final image was taken through photoshop to tweak the colours a little and clone out the remnants of the light stand.



Below is a quick setup diagram.



Hope this helped.

Happy Flashing!
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