Saturday, January 3, 2009

Something New for 2009

I'm starting off the New Year trying something new. Not only have I started a Blog, but I got a set of wireless trigger/receivers to use with some of my very old light stands, umbrellas and slave flash units.

Shortly after my daughter was born my wife bought me a set of used lighting equipment for Christmas. The Idea was to be able to take portraits of my daughter as she grew up. I used it for a while, but never quite mastered it. At the time (1994) I was still using film and was struggling to get the kind of results that I had hoped for. I was also losing something while scanning and my PP skills left a lot to be desired, although my tools (Adobe Photoshop 3.0) were among the best of the era.


After a couple of years of less than satisfactory results, the kit made it's way to the attic and was soon forgotten.

In 2006 my father (RIP 9/11/2006) asked me to take pictures of his crafts that me was making for the craft shows. Again, I dragged out the lighting kit and snapped away. This time I was using a Pentax *istDL digital camera and the results were a bit better, but still not up to my expectations.



Even so, Dad was happy with the results and I proceeded to make a catalog of his wares.


After this, the kit went back into the attic for another 2 years. In March of 2008 I got the bug again to try the lighting kit and, once again, up to the attic I went and set up the kit. By now, the old Honeywell slave flash units were dropping like flies, but I still had two that were operational so I decided to try again on my daughter, who by this time had turned 15. Even though being a teen, she cooperated with me and we did another sitting. I should add that I had recently received my new FA77 1:1.8 Limited lens and was itching to try out this lens. It was supposed to be one of the premier Pentax portrait lenses, so it was worth the effort to once again set up the lighting kit.

I did a little research on the web looking for placement of lights, etc. to try to get a more professional result, but I was still stuck with triggering the slave flash units off of my camera mounted dedicated flash. The results were again better than any of my previous attempts.





So here I am, nine months later with wireless triggers, three flash units, wireless trigger/receivers and ready to try again. I once again did a web search and looked for information on portrait lighting set-ups as a refresher. To get ready, I set everything up and played with a single silk rose. Here are a couple of my test shots.





That's it for now. I hope to convince my favorite model to sit for me later today or tomorrow to, once again, try my hand at portrait photography. Until then...

1 comment:

  1. Welcome to the world of blogging!! Hope this is a good New Year for you!

    Lloyd

    ReplyDelete