Finally, I want to give you guys a chance to glance behind the scenes of that birthday shoot i did for my brother. My goal was to create rather dramatic shots (as opposed to creating perfectly-smooth lit images), so in most shots I opted for my newly built DIY beauty dish. This decision was rather spontaneous, so I actually ended up building the dish the night before and the paint on it was still wet – literally! Basically, the beauty dish is a big salad bowl (you wouldn’t believe how many stores I had screened to find the right shape!) and a flower pot saucer lined with aluminum foil on the inside acting as a reflector. The light it makes is somewhere in between soft and hard – seemed like a a good match for a “manly” shoot.

As you can see, I used the dish on the shots on the bridge from up high and left. Why the oblique angle, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: a) He’s wearing glasses, so any light source at the standard 45° angle would show up as a reflection on his glasses and b) my goal for this shoot was to try different things and go away from the same old. I thought it looked rather interesting. In fact, it looked a little too interesting (in terms of dramatic), so I decided to fill in some light from below and right with a silver reflector. The reflector is being held by my lovely assistant of the day. This lighting technique is basically what I used on almost all the shots – dish from above, sometimes fill in a little with a reflector. Really easy. And the light was really smooth enough so I didn’t have to touch it up a lot in Photoshop – in fact, I think I never went above 1/4 power which allowed for fast recycle times and still gave me apertures around 4 which was enough (or little enough) depth of field for me. As a matter of fact, being a “strobist” I do take some pride in trying to exposing somewhat correctly – I always try to hit the correct exposure by chimping on the little screen since I don’t want to have to bump up the exposure by 8 stops afterwards in the raw converter.

This shot in the cafe was done in no more than two minutes including set-up. As David Hobby once wrote, pretty soon you get the kinda-scary ability to guesstimate the settings on the camera and the strobe: I ended up at something like f/2.2, iso 400 and a sixtieth of a second. As you might have guessed, little reflector on the side. Oh, and cloudy white balance to warm it up. This is the out of cam exposure (as are all images in this post), so comparing to the processed images below you get the idea what the on-set lighting already gave me without a whole lot of photoshop editing.

In this shot, you can see the spotlight character of the dish and the nice shadow it creates. Without the fill-in reflector it’s definitely a relatively harsh light (since I had to place it at a certain distance to the subject due to the framing), but I like it that way. The exposure on his face is a little too high on the neutral setting, so for the final image (see posts below) I went with two different raw exposures that I merged into one image (which is something that I end up doing quite frequently whenever I want to darken the background).

I hope you enjoyed this short explanation – if you have any questions, shoot me a comment!

Word-of-mouth marketing works! This nice guy here is a friend of a friend. He was planning to send out applications starting next week, so he needed a nice portrait – pronto, por favor! He wasn’t too happy with the portrait that a professional photographer had taken of him the day before. Following the advice of that friend he stumbled upon this blog and really liked what I did for those guys. Fortunately, I had all my equipment at the university that day (I’ll tell you why very soon), so we arranged a spontaneous shooting at the nearby university building.

For this shoot, I was going to try different setups. As you know, I like to add a little structure or a pattern to the background to spice things up a little. Yet, due to the comments I received about the last pictures, I decided to do one shot with a more classic background. For that, I had the model stand in front of a plain dark gray wall (actually, a door), aimed one flash on the background to add a little gradient and lit him with my selfmade umbrella softbox from top left and bounced some light back with a reflector from the right. Again, I added a cardboard-gridded flash on camera right, from behind his face to add a little highlight on his jawline. This is the picture that he liked the most and that he will use to send out his applications.

The other shot is more like my “classic” style – a nice pattern of some stairs, softbox top right, reflector from the left. Even if he’s not going to use it, it’s great to have a variety to chose from. And that’s what makes me different to most professional photographers: Even though the whole shoot took about 30 minutes, I had about 90 pictures in the can, meaning that at least a few of them had the right expression – it’s just a matter of statistics.

Well, buying an old strobe alone wouldn’t be cool enough for a guy with a soldering gun, right? So after having read another ton of material on different blogs, I decided to “hack” the strobe just a little. Many people found the lack of the possibility to dial down the power disturbing (The CT-4 can be dialled down to 1/2 and 1/4 power), so they came up with a smart idea. Basically, the hack exploits the automatic mode. For those, who don’t remember how that worked: What the strobe does is measuring the light that is reflected from the object, then it compares that reading to the preset aperture. When the amount of reflected light has reached the desired aperture, the flash is shut down early. The light is measured with a photo diode, which basically changes its resistance depending on the light.

Now by replacing this diode with a potentiometer, you can manually set the resistance, thus trick the flash into “seeing” a certain amount of light and respond to that measurement accordingly. Normally, this potentiometer is put into some kind of external case. My approach is even simpler: I measured the resistance necessary to make the strobe flash at half power (which turned out to be around 300K), soldered it in – and now I can just dial down the power on the big wheel which has all the nice preset apertures on it. No external case needed and I can dial down to 1/64, which is good enough. After all, it’s not an exact science anyway: The charge times at the capacitor (thus, depending on the power supply) have a great impact on the overall power, and moreover the distance from strobe to object plays its part.

Still reading? Well, there’s even more! Being naturally averse to AA alkaline batteries I came up with a solution to power the strobe with my RC battery pack. It was a bit tricky to get that plug into the battery holder, but now I can plug in my accu pack whenever I need it. The good part: It slashes the recharge times down to 2s.

And finally: A device to support laziness! Instead of having to take out every single Nimh-cell (should I be using the normal battery holder without the external battery) and put it into the charger, with this device (it’s more like an adapter) I just need to plug in the whole battery holder and connect it to my charger. Sweet, huh?

One sidenote to you googlers: I don’t elaborate on all the details here – but if you have any questions about the specs, I’d be glad to help. Just shoot me a comment or an email (see “About”).

This is not a tech blog, I know – and yet, since (seriously, can you believe it?) I am still waiting for my new camera shutter so I can finally get back to shooting something (or someone), I got some exciting new things going on, which are more or less technical.

As you may or may not know, by now I defined myself mostly as a

• low budget photographer
• and hence, mostly an available light photographer
• … the latter for the most part due to my lack of technical interest (“avoiding to get off the couch and teach yourself something completely new and potentially complex”) in strobes

Well, some of that is going to change: I spent the last weeks reading an old book on photography and expanded my theoretical knowledge especially in the field of the physical lighting theory and the usage of strobes. For the latter, I found the greatest knowledge base there is, which is The Strobist. Thus, I finally buried my aversion against strobes and I decided to dive right into it – strobists, here I come!

Having read tons of material on different forums and blogs I found that I like the idea of the off-camera-lighting while keeping the flexibility of small strobes (and in addition: don’t get broke when buying the equipment) – which pretty much summarizes the idea of strobism. So I got myself an old Metz 45 CT-4 for the cheap. Old, analog torch flash with decent power – more than what many modern flashes offer. It also sports a low-voltage trigger circuit, so it doesn’t damage your camera. Potentially, the earlier model CT-1 does that. The flash is powered with six AA batteries. I’m excited to start using it!