My bag of tricks (mostly) updated

I want to share with you all my lighting techniques. Some I use more than others but these are the ones I can consistently wield on the field with ease. It's important to setup your lighting quickly and nail down the settings before your model loses interest, or gets bored. It's also important to move from one setup to the next so your model stays actively engaged. So I want you readers to learn from my controlled, studio setup and see for yourself how you can use these tricks for your own photography. Some of you will be using my equipment; I want you to take advantage of that. Note the effects of these different lighting schemes and achieve similar results on the field.

Photos taken on tripod. I use flash white balance on all of these. Yes, my room is Fiesta Orange.

Bare/Naked lighting @ 1/8th power. 1/60 and f8.

Flash position raised, pointing down.

Below Camera level, pointing up.

Two point lighting for fill. Flash on camera left @ 1/16th power. 1/60 and f8.
Flash on camera right @ 1/4th power.

Back to one point lighting. Flagged on both sides of the flash head.
It creates a narrow beam of light. Useful for creating patterns.

Flash shooting into a reflective umbrella @ 1/2 power.

Flash firing into a shoot-through umbrella @ 1/2 power. Softer shadows than the reflective.
With light being diffused, compensate by letting more light into your sensor.
Usually, I think to open up the aperture first b/c it is closest to me.

Gridded flash @ 1/4th power. What's a gridspot?

Moved in closer.

Gelled flash to a color of your choice. I have lots...

... Flash @ 1/16th power, at camera left pointing onto a white backdrop ...

... Flash at camera right @ 1/4th power, flagged on its right side to prevent spill on the BG.

Or maybe you'll want a silhouette.
When coloring a backdrop, I usually shoot with a flash there first.
Having the other flashes turned off allows you to focus on the settings for the BG.
Then add on other lights for the subject, etc.

Rim light @ 1/8th power, flagged on both sides of the flash...

... Shoot through @ 1/2 power for fill on subject's left ...

Nude flash @ 1/8th taking a bath on subject's right.
Kevin could have been groomed better, you should groom your model too.
I broke some sweat trying to control the rim lighting on this one.
One of my weaker techniques. Look at the strobist flickr pool for inspiration.

No photoshop.
Hopefully what you get away from this post are the possibilities of using my equipment. There are a lot of other light modifiers out there such as a mini softbox which some of our members own. There are also forbidden jutsu (techniques that go against ethics) that could be performed but I stay away from those. Given what you see here, you can vary it a little: a flash position can be altered slightly for great effect on shadows, play with longer exposure, multiple gelled lighting, etc.

What I Learned at Our First Meet

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).