The shot above was actually my second shot, and it’s not the one I ended up submitting for the assignment, so we’ll hold off on talking about that one for now.  The first shot I did is much more…refreshing:

It was 4th of July weekend, so there was plenty of beer around, plus with a name like Bud Light and a food assignment for a lighting blog it was a perfect match.  I got the basic idea from Strobist a while back when David did a post of food lighting.  My goal was to take a clear bowl and fill it with ice/water and light it from below to create some nice, glowing light, and then also light beer to make it look extra refreshing.  I don’t know about you, but it makes me thirsty.  In fact, I think I might go grab one right now…

*runs to the kitchen*

… ok.  I’m back.  Miss me?  I knew you would.  So let’s talk technical.  This was a 3-light setup.  I had originally only planned on using 2, but couldn’t pull off the look that I wanted with 2, so I had to add my 3rd flash. But before we get into the specifics for the lighting setup, let’s talk about the camera for a few minutes.

Most food/drink photography is done with a pretty shallow depth-of-field, and that was my plan for this shot.  So I set my camera to f/2.8 and 1/125 (because to use my Cactus triggers reliably I can’t sync at my max of 1/200) to kill all the ambient.  I usually shoot at ISO 200 because that’s what my Nikon D90 is optimized for, but I dropped all the way down to ISO 100 for this shot since I knew working so close at f/2.8 I wouldn’t need much flash power.

Well, that wasn’t enough.  All my lights at their lowest settings were STILL too bright.  Time to improvise.  Back to the details.

I started by getting the lighting on the ice right, which took two lights.  The main light for the ice was my Vivitar 285HV at 1/16 power about a foot away away.  I also stuck 2 sheets of printer paper in front of it to knock it down some more.  This worked pretty well to light up the front of the bowl and the ice.

Time for the back.  I used the Nikon SB-800 at 1/64 power and also with 2 sheets of paper to diffuse and drop it down more.  It was much closer to the bowl and also angled up a lot more to not only light the bowl, but also provide the backlight for the beer to help lighten it up and separate it from the background.  Worked out pretty well.

All that’s left is to provide some front fill.  For that it was the Nikon SB-24 at 1/16 power through the Lumiquest SBIII and once again with the 2 sheets of paper to knock it down some more.  Josi was a great help by acting as a V.A.L. for this light leaving me to lay at weird angles on the floor trying to get the right composition.  One last little thing I want to mention about this shot is the use of a water bottle to spray some water drops onto the bottles to give them just a little bit more of that refreshing look and feel.  Mmmm, might be time for another beer…

Here is the setup shot for the Bud (Light)^3 (as I’m calling it) shot:

Ok, time for the Cookie Monster.  God that thing is delicious.  It’s one of the desserts you can get from Cheddar’s and I highly recommend it. Josi and I went in for dinner and with plans to shoot this bad boy.  They bring this freshly baked cookie out with ice cream on it, so it’s melting fast, so we wouldn’t have time to mess with lights, we had to have it right ahead of time.  I asked the waitress if she could bring me an empty skillet to experiment with ahead of time and she was kind enough to help.

Now, if you’ve never taken your camera and lighting gear into a busy restaurant, get ready for some stares and questions.  Everyone was looking at me and I had several people ask what I was doing.  Kinda made me feel important hehe.  Anyway, the setup for this one was much simpler, mostly because I didn’t want to bring all my lighting gear into the restaurant and I wanted to work light and quick.

This one was just one flash, the SB-800 and the pop-up on my D90 as a Commander and fill. I dropped to ISO 100 again and had both flashes on their lowest setting (1/128 power) and with f/5.6 this gave me pretty close to the right exposure.  Once again the SB-800 was in the SBIII which works great close up like this.  The D90 pop-up provided a nice little fill and helped highlight the orange-ness of the table.  I snapped a few shots and then Josi and I devoured this thing.  Sooooo good.  Both the shot and eating it…

Samantha

Samantha is the step-mom of my photog friend Jason‘s kids’ classmate.  Tough to follow?  Yeah, it’s hard for me to explain too.  But anyway, he met her, she’s modeled before, so we setup a time for Jason and I to go out and shoot her one afternoon.  Jason wanted to head downtown and do some comparisons of my lighting gear to his, so that’s what we did.

The first stop was these cool blue doors in one of the alleyways here in Springfield.  I’ve shot on these before and they work great, so it was pretty easy to knock out some shots there.

Great smile, nice breeze.  Easy shot.  Shot with my Nikon SB-800 in my Westcott Apollo 28″ Softbox.  We were using Cactus triggers since Jason shoots Olympus (for now…I think he wants to switch to Nikon, mwahahaha).  It would have been just as easy, if not easier with CLS.

We walked around and did some more shooting until we finally ended at this awesome blue building down by Jordan Valley Park.  I’d seen it before but never really thought about shooting there.  Now it’s going to be one of my go-to locations for nice, contrasty shots (as you’ll see later).  The blue garage door works great with someone wearing yellow.

Unfortunately Samantha wasn’t wearing yellow, but the purple work nice with the door none-the-less.  This was another one light shot, either with my Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox or with Jason’s Alzo 15″ softbox; I can’t remember.  It was in close, right out of frame on camera left.  Either one would produce that nice soft light with the specular behind the model at that distance.  That’s a trick I picked up from, yup, you guessed it, David Hobby over at Strobist.  Nice little trick for using speculars to your advantage when shooting against a reflective surface.

Kristen

This one is easier to follow: she’s the friend of Aaron, one of my co-workers.  He’s mentioned that she’s also modeled before and she’s also pretty cute, which works great for my summer/cute theme we are going with in the post, so I texted her and set up this shoot.  Being super excited about my new blue building location, I wanted to go back there with someone with a yellow dress and sure enough, Kristen was happy to help.

The yellow and the blue really create a nice look.  Kristen’s great smile and pose help a lot too.  I left the specular of to the side of this one, just because I could.  Lit with the Apollo softbox and my SB-800.  Triggered via CLS this time, though.

Ok, so we’ve done a lot of blue.  3 shots in one post on blue.  I’m tired of blue, for now, so let’s move on to the last shot I want to share.  This one is much different from the 3 above – more dark/edgy/urban.  I’ve been looking (unsuccessfully) for an abandon warehouse setting around here that I could use for a photo shoot, but I found something close enough that with the right lighting could fake it pretty well.

In the corner of the parking garage right by the park we were shooting at there is this little cluster of controls, pipes, etc. that I figured with the right light could really create the look I was going for.  So that’s what I set out to do.

This one was slightly more difficult to pull off, but I think it was well worth the effort.  For the backlight I used a Vivitar 285HV on 1/16 power through a bright red gel to create that red, factory-like look on the background.  I wanted Kristen to look warmer, like there might be some kind of boiler or something close by, so I gelled the SB-800 with either 1/4 or 1/2 cut of CTO and stuck it back inside the Apollo softbox and feathered it away from here slightly to keep the light soft, yet edgy, while controlling the spill on the background.  I think it turned out well.  I hope to do many more shots like this in the future.

That’s it for now.  Stay tuned for more summer shots, plus I’m also working on the 2nd assignment for Strobist Boot Camp 2, so there will be a post for that soon.

First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that I ordered Joe McNally‘s new book, The Hot Shoe Diaries, which came in a few weeks ago.  This book rocks!  I read through all of it in a matter of days and I’m re-reading it now.  Joe is really a genius and I would give just about anything to be able to work with him, but since that is probably never going to happen, this book is the next best thing.  You get some great insight to how Joe thinks and works and his approach to taking great pictures.

I’ve also been enjoying Joe’s training videos over at Kelby Training.  He has some great videos that go along with some of the photos from The Hot Shoe Diaries, which is nice.  I signed up for a one-month membership and I’m trying to get through as much training as I can.  Lots of great stuff there.  Speaking of Kelby Training – Scott Kelby, along with Matt Kloskowski, have been doing a weekly web series for Nikon shooters called D-Town TV.  There are some great tips there and a good watch every week.

Ok, on to the shoots.

Back in the middle of March I headed to the park to do some nice casual portraits of my friend Mandy.  I was out shooting with my SB-800 and triggering via CLS (which is awesome).  I’m really trying to fully master a single light source, so this is my go-to light (until I can afford an SB-900).  I got several good shots from that shoot, but I wanted to share one of my favorites:

This was shot with the SB-800 through a white umbrella on camera right at 1/4 power at 1/200 at f/5.6.  Very nice, saturated background and a great exposure on Mandy.  The look and the wind really add some flavor.  Speaking of wind, that shit is dangerous (as you’ll find out later).  Knocked my stand over many times and messed up my umbrella and stand a little.  I really need to get me some sand bags.

Last weekend I drove down to Joplin, Missouri for a little photog/model group shoot which was pretty fun.  The day went pretty well – got some great shots, got some exercise climbing all over rocks and trees, got some sun (a little too much), met some new people.  Almost too good to be true.  The wind was pretty strong that day, so my lighting stuff took a few tumbles, but for the most part it did well, especially when I was shooting with no modifiers, just zoomed flash, like this shot:

That was just a single SB-800 zoomed to 105mm with a full CTO gel plus and extra 1/2 CTO gel.  The camera was set to Tungsten white balance to get the cool feel.  The sun was pretty bright most of the day so I was pretty much at max sync speed (or higher with Auto-FP) and smaller apertures.  This shot was done at 1/200 at f/8.  Working close these little flashes work great, even with the bright sun.

After everyone shot at the park for a few hours we headed over to The Falls in Joplin to do some bikini shoots with the weather being nice and all.  Unfortunately this is when things start to take a turn for the worse.  We got to the falls around 2:00 or 3:00pm, so the sun was straight overhead with no cloud coverage whatsoever, which means I’m shooting at 1/200 at f/16 on IS 100 (usually I shoot 200 since that’s what most Nikons are optimized for) to get anywhere close to a proper exposure.  Forget about Auto-FP sync at f/16 – it’s not going to happen with just one Speedlight (maybe if I had a tree of Speedlights like Joe McNally did in the desert (p.259 in Hot Shoe Diaries)).

So, I’ve got one of the models out on a rock in the water and I’m several feet back trying to shoot some full body shots, hoping my SB-800 at 105mm on full power can get out there and through a little fill into my subject.  Not happening.  And just to make sure it wasn’t going to happen, the wind picks up and pushes my light stand over – right into the water!  Granted it wasn’t very deep, but still, my SB-800 went face first right into the water…not good.  So, I run over and pull it out and immediately turn it off and take the batteries out.  While maintaining a calm exterior but screaming “Oh my god, my flash!” on the inside I went over and finished that series with the model.  The whole time I was being nice and calm on the outside and freaking out on the inside.

I take my flash up the car and let it start drying out, but I wasn’t done.  There were still models I wanted to work with and shots I wanted to try, so I had to keep going.  I pulled out the trusty old Nikon SB-24 and some Cactus triggers and went back down to the falls to finish up.  Glad I came back because I managed to get this shot:

This was done with the SB-24 zoomed to its max of 85mm at full power and my camera set to 1/200 at f/13.  I wish I could have gotten the background slightly underexposed, but with the sun like that I was happy to just get some decent pictures.  Always have a backup handy.

So, I got some good shots but I might have lost my SB-800, and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to shelling out $450 for an SB-900 (even though I really want one…that’s a lot of cash).  On Monday I went to the local camera shop and got like 50 silica gel packets and packed my SB-800 with them and through it in a ziploc bag hoping they would pull all of the moisture out.  I fired it up today and everything appears to be working fine.  I tried it on the hot shoe, as a remote, manual power, TTL, no hiccups.  Bullet dodged…for now.  Hopefully it doesn’t slowly deteriorate.

Long story short, flashes and water don’t mix!  Be careful with your equipment when working around water…

First thing, I sold my camera and bought a new (well, different) one.  I was using a Canon Digitel Rebel XTI, which was good, but I realized some shortcomings I couldn’t let go by.  Mostly it was the inability for any Canon body to do rear-curtain sync with a manual, off-camera flash.  Not a huge deal, but I’ve got some long exposure shots that I’d like to do and need that ability.  The second reason for the switch was flashes; Nikon is clearly ahead of Canon when it comes to flashes.  And that Nikon CLS is awesome.  So, I grabbed a slightly used Nikon D70s off of eBay for a decent price.  It came with the Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, which is a good lens, so I’m just out my 50mm f/1.8 that I had with my Canon.  The Nikon equivalent is only about $100 at Amazon, so it’ll be mine down the road (probably after Christmas).  I lost 4 megapixels and some quality at higher ISOs, but I gained a 1/500 flash sync, access to CLS, built-in Commander mode for Nikon strobes, better camera controls, and I can now start investing in Nikon lenses and flashes and just upgrade bodies down the line, likely to a D200 or D300.

As far as projects going on, here are some things I’ve done in the past month.  I did a senior portrait session for one of my bosses’ daughter; I shot a wedding for one of my friends with the help of one of my other photography friends; and I shot some maternity portraits along with two of my photography buddies to get some exposure to that.  I bolded each of those because each one should be expanded upon in it’s own post soon.  I also want to do a post about messing around at work.  So, there are four posts I’d like to make in the near future, so watch for those.

I’ll have a little over a week off from work for Christmas; I’ll be going home to Colorado so that should give me time to shoot, write, and relax.  It’ll be a nice break.  And who knows what Santa is going to bring me (I’m pretty sure it’s a Nikon SB-800 though, yay!).

That’s it for now!