This was my first time to experiment with off-camera lighting triggered wirelessly with radio triggers (Long's set of Pocket Wizards and Alex's hotshoe adapter for Sony). I had previously done some experimentation with my own Sony flash in wireless mode (which works just like Nikon CLS technology), but I had never managed more than 1 flash and never anything mounted on a stand with an umbrella (both shoot through and reflected). I also had to juggle lighting position, camera metering, and setting the flashes manually to correctly balance the exposure. With Sony's wireless, I could just rely on TTL metering to do all the work.
One of the first things I quickly ran into, was the shutter sync speed. If it's set too high in this case 1/320, you see a shutter still in the frame. I found that I could use a maximum sync speed of about 1/120 of a second to avoid this problem.
Here is one where the exposure is more or less correctly balanced and I liked how it turned out. The first thing you will notice is that with a fast shutter speed, the background appears black. This is because the light only has time to hit the subject closest to the camera during the short exposure. Two lights were used for this shot. A speedlight on a stand with umbrella (shoot through I believe) was positioned to the camera right and a bare speedlight was triggered as optically behind the lego sculpture. It was conveniently hidden and out of sight to produce a cool glowing effect along the left edge.
The top image is putting it all together for portraiture. It was two speedlights. One, high camera right with a shoot through umbrella and one with a purple gel for some background fill light (not really noticeable).
1 comment:
Detailed post, I could understand what was going on with the equipment. The lack of purpleness could be due to ambient light level killing the flash; that flash was set at 1/8 I think. Cutting the ambient would bring the colored flash out more, if you wanted.
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