Wedding DIY

Got married recently. Decided to do a bit of our own photography, and just use a pro for the ceremony, and some shots afterwards.

That meant things like the make-up, bouquet, all those 'behind the scenes' sort of shots were up to me.

We got married in Hawaii, which meant, I had to use the gear I could carry on a plane. No worries, if anything, strobist has taught us to pack light (not that I usually do), and use what's available.


Enter, the DIY studio...

A fairly simple setup, with a double 580EXII through a brolley, using a reflector for fill, and a cool DIY glass+coffee cup bouquet holder.

Why a double 580EXII? Because I had them already set up on the stand that way, and it seems to give a slightly better light spread.

Why the umbrella slightly collapsed? Because of where I needed to put the camera. At that sort of distance, the light source is still big enough to be soft.

The real gem here was using the towels.

By getting the camera to bouquet to towel distances right, to match the aperture... the towels blur out nicely, so you don't pick up the rough detail on them, and they become a nice, draped background, reminiscent of a wedding dress, without having to try and work out how to hang the wedding dress above a TV!

Oh yeah, and that's a light stand under the tall towel...

AlienBees abduction!

I just had a trip to Hawaii to get married (yay!), and it gave me an opportunity, thanks to Hawaii Photo Rental, to try out some of the AlienBees range.

I knew I wanted to fight daylight, so I thought an AB1600 would be a good place to start. Added to that was a 47" Octabox, to get nice soft light, and a Vagabond II since I knew I was going to be out on the beaches.

What follows, are some comments from the experience.

First, the Octabox is dead easy to set up, and quick. Likewise to tear down and put it back in the bag. But, the carry bag could do with a carry handle.

Setup-wise, the Octabox's internal baffle was very hard to remove (despite having those snap-on button things), and as I was time pressured, I didn't remove it.

The second internal baffle meant I wasn't getting as much light as I needed... so the light needed to be fairly close, even at full power!

By close, I mean, front of the octabox about 1m away I could beat sunlight by a stop or two. If the light was further away (say 2-3m) I could about equal it.

Getting the light close made things hard, since I wanted to use the wide end of my 10-22, so juggling keeping the light just out of frame while it was being blown around in the wind... definitely required an assistant. Thanks to Amanda's mum for that.


Now, I haven't managed to get reliable flash sync when I use my radio remote camera triggers AND the Cactus V4s, so we needed a 'trigger man' to shoot most of the shots... that made things tricky for some of the action shots, but we got a couple of good ones anyway, thanks to Amanda's dad for that.

That brings me to my final comment for now... he got a bit trigger happy, and ended up popping off shots every second or so. The gear was _almost_ up to the task, 1 shot would be fine, the next a little under, and the next one would be fine again! At full power, using the Fast recycle on the Vagabond II, I was very impressed!

So this was our first 'fight' as a married couple, hopefully all our other fights will be about as serious as this one :P

Canon and Rear Curtain Sync

A few nights ago, I was taking shots of a friend, using a slow shutter speed to try and capture some nice night lighting. But (of course!) we had a sword, and hoodies galore, so fast action martial arts was the call of the day. What to do?

Use flash to 'freeze' the action. No biggy. But what about the ambient exposure blur during the frame? Well, everyone knows, you just use 2nd (rear) curtain sync, so the movement happens during the early part of the exposure, and then the flash goes at the end, giving a nice sharp final image. Easy!

The problem is, Canon (in their wisdom?!) decided that the only way you can do 2nd curtain sync is if you have a flash on the camera, and NO other flashes.

I'll let that sink(sync?) in for a moment. WTF? Seriously.


As soon as you add a second flash, and have the on-camera flash acting as master, you just lost 2nd curtain sync capability. WTF?

As soon as you put an unrecognized flash, or a remote trigger on the camera, you lose 2nd curtain sync.

Obviously unacceptable to any strobists.

The solution? Use an optical trigger. Thanks goes to Rαfα on flickr.

Now I've tested this, and a few things I've worked out:

• It works with Cactus V4 triggers.


• If you go faster than 1/25th, the 40D (and I'm going to assume others) switch back to 1st curtain sync anyway.


• If you plug a PC sync cable into the side (with a flash on top) you get 1st curtain on the PC sync port, and 2nd curtain on the flash.


• It works with an OC-E3 cable. Get a long one and half your problems are solved.


• Nikon SB-26 slave mode also works a treat!

In this final picture, I used a 5 second exposure (to get nice burn in of the ambient tungsten lights), and had a 580EXII on OC-E3 (left) triggering via the Cactus the 580EXII at rear, and the Nikon SB-26 (right) triggering via its optical slave mode. All fired on the second curtain, at the end of the 5 seconds.

Problem solved.

Strobist - SYD-SA7.5 and the Ray Flash

Today saw me attending the 7th and a halfth (latest, whatever) installment of the Sydney Strobist meet, SYD-SA7.5.


Every chance I got - mostly while the other guys in my group were setting up lights (sorry guys) - I'd take out the Ray flash and snap off a few shots... giving the models something to do rather than just stand around while photographers talked softboxes and lighting ratios.

With the gorgeous models we had, I loved the ease of getting a nice looking shot, with an absolute minimum of thought/effort on the lighting, throwing the flash in either ETTL or manual mode, and sticking the Ray flash on.

Adding a voice activated wind machine (a.k.a. a group member waving a reflector around) to the mix, just added that extra something, and worked wonders with the Rayflash.

Of course, headshots against a wall get pretty boring pretty quickly, so I tried something different when I could...


It seems that this kind of on-axis fill is where the Ray flash seems to really excel - just get your directional key light set up, then dial the Ray flash up or down to fill the shadows to taste. Easy!

Rayflash Ring flash adapter review...

So the other day I had to drive past the infmaous DD on the way to a studio to play around with some lighting. I'd heard the day before that DD had some cheap Rayflash ring flash adapters, so I just couldn't resist stopping in and getting one to play with.

I'd heard rumour that it only lost one stop of light compared to bare flash, but I wasn't sure what that actually meant, so I did some testing to see what kind of light I could get, and this is what I found...

There's plenty enough light belting out of the Rayflash for a head-shot @ 50mm on a crop sensor (ISO100, f/5)

... or even 70mm (ISO100, f/2.8)

For more idea on the power, I set a 580EXII to 1/128th power, camera on manual. For about the same crop as the mannequin shot (a little tighter) I could shoot at f/2.8, ISO100 and still be in the top section on the histogram (f/1.8 was probably a better exposure).

1/128th power, ISO800 @ about 2m at f/1.8 was blowing out foreground white paper, maybe slightly overexposed in the mid-ground (model), which gives you about another 7 stops to play with (without touching the ISO!). Much higher than my expectations.

The only thing(s) that bug me about it so far are that the actual ring is a little small - it'll fit over a 77mm sized lens, but, maybe not if its got a lenshood, and the actual ring of light (the thickness of the ring) itself is fairly small.

From what I've seen the 'pro' alternatives have both a larger and a thicker ring, so you get a bigger apparent light source, which (though I haven't done a comparison) probably gives you a softer light as well as the ringlight effect!

Click here for David Hobby's full review, with usage suggestions

Strobist - SYD-SA6

Sunday saw me attending the latest (6th) installment of the Sydney Strobist events, SYD-SA6.

For those that aren't in the know, many moons ago a guy called David Hobby aka Strobist started a blog called Strobist. This was a place where people could learn to use inexpensive flashes ("strobes") to acheive studio-like lighting results.

Little did David know, this blog would spiral ever and ever bigger, gathering dust along the way, pulling in people from all continents. Groups all over the world now organize events where budding "strobists" can meet, greet, practice their lighting and share their knowledge with others.

From my experience with these, you can't go there expecting to take a killer shot. Even if you do, you'll probably end up with at least 5 other people who have exactly the same killer shot (I've heard plenty of comments like "can you do that pose you were doing before for him" and "how were the other guys lighting you?").

As a photographer, what you CAN expect is to be able to chat with like-minded individuals... have a beer at the pub afterwards, learn something, get a chance to practice, and maybe get to play with extra gear you'd have to rent otherwise.


As a model, you can expect to spend a lot of time waiting for people to set up lights around you, but at the end of it, you can expect a lot of good shots of you... many almost the same, but on a proper shoot, you'll end up with tons of shots almost the same, just from one photographer instead of 30.

On both sides, you might just find that person who's perfect for an idea you've got in mind, and you can arrange another shoot afterwards... and who knows, you might just end up with that killer shot!