2 More Spaces Available For London Workshop

I want to reach out to my friends in the U.K. There are 2 spaces remaining for the London "Small Strobes, Big Results" workshop. Learn how to get Studio Quality Light on Location from Small Strobes! The workshop well be held downtown London at the Plaza Hotel Westminster Bridge.

The London workshop will be held on July 14th, if you would like to join us click HERE for more information, I look forward to seeing you there. DT

Chris

I had an opportunity to photograph my son Chris this evening. We stepped out into the field just outside the back gate of our backyard. I wanted to test out the new diffusion sock for my DIY beauty dish that my wife made for me. Chris wasn't particularly excited about modeling for me, I use him a lot and I'm sure he's bored with it.


The sun had not yet set but was behind large clouds to the west. I metered for the clouds behind Chris and underexposed them by perhaps 1 stop. I then turned on the strobe. I was using a single Nikon SB-800 at 1/2 power, 1/1600 @ f/2.8 for the photo at the top of the post.

Here are a few other images from this 10 minute shoot, when your only getting one look from your subject... There was a light breeze this evening, beauty dishes are idea if you have any sort of wind. An umbrella would have taken off across the field had I used it.

I really like the quality of light from this beauty dish, unfortunately it is so hard to travel with. I really only use the beauty dish when I'm in town shooting. When I'm on the road, I use a small softbox that produces a similar look.I have several up coming workshops, for a list of those click HERE.

Sujan With Chairs

During a recent Nikonian Lighting workshop in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay area I photographed Sujan in a variety of locations around the hotel. After photographing her standing inside this conference room, I wanted to use the repetitive pattern of the chairs as a design element for the above photo.

I moved the boom with the 43" umbrella over to area where I had Sujan seated for the photograph. I moved the row of chairs directly in front of her in order to place a bounce surface in front and below her. I then took the background light I was using in the previous shot and turned it around and used it as a rim light on our subject.

Just as a reminder, I'll be leading the Mentor Series Trek to Newport Rhode Island in July. If you would like to join me, check out there web site for more information.

The Joy of High Speed Sync

Earlier this year, back in February, I was teaching at the Santa Fe Workshops. My class wanted me to demonstrate high speed sync for them. We stepped outside in the snow and I photographed a student with the chapel on campus in the background.

Nikon has this wonderful function called high speed sync (FP) that allow us to use our Nikon flashes above our native sync speed of 1/250th of a second. This first photograph show our subject photographed using our normal sync speed of 1/250th at f/7.1

Shooting with an aperture of f/7.1 provide too much DOF for my taste. Using high speed sync allows me the choice to shoot this photograph using a much shallower DOF.

By opening my lens to f/1.4 and raising my shutter speed to 1/5000th of a second, I was able to produce a much different looking image.

One of the downfalls of using high speed sync is that your flash looses a tremendous amount of power. I believe the power setting on the flash for the photo above was set to about 1/4 power. I was using a Nikon SB-800 shot through a Lastolite Tri-Grip just outside of the right frame of this photo. When I moved to high speed sync, With the flash at the same position, the power needed to be increased to full power. Here is the resulting photo showing a much shallower DOF.
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