When are you coming back?

Same settings as the previous post. Only thing different is that I used a 50mm lens.

How to light: Join the army, it´s worth it!

This time it took about one hour just to get to the spot we were going to shoot at. Hammers and tape for the win! Me and Coffe.dk spent some time trying to find an abandoned building but I tell ya, it’s not easy in our city. But we managed to do it and even managed to get inside it. And the place was perfect, more perfect then we ever dreamed about. It was a three story building with about 3.5m to each ceiling. And each floor was like a photostudio itself so we will definately come back to this place and use it to the max.

After some preparations and figuring out what spot we were going to use we went back to the car to get our model. So we went over to the always funny and gorgeous CherryCheek. She packed the car to the max with bags and on the drive to the location we prepared her that this place is rough and kind of creepy. But as a female gaming nerd that wasn´t any problem at all, lol! The only problem was the tiny bridge that was built over this tiny tiny pool of water, she hates, and I mean it, she hates bridges.

We started to place the equipment at the spot meanwhile she was getting herself ready. Since the light outside the window still was kind of bright I hoped that it would make a great window light. But man how wrong I was about that. When shooting flashes towards the window and the model the picture looked so awful that I immediately deleted it from the camera haha! So, how do we solve that problem? No worries, just place a flash mounted to a flashstand with a shoot through umbrella outside the window. Use more power on it then the sun itself, go all in, full power, that will say 1/1 power. It was triggered by a Cactus reciever. Take a test picture and notice that it looked awesome, be happy and go home. Well don´t go home but make the two other flashes ready.

One flash to create a nice back light effect and one flash for some light in front of her. Make her feel secure and then pow pow POW! Done! And did I say that she was dressed in this sexy army dress? Ohh, sorry, but she was.

Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: Nikkor 35mm f1,8
Shutter speed: 1/200
Aperture:  f5,6
ISO: 100

Click the image to view the full gallery. And don´t forget to view the behind the scene pictures below!

How to light: Smash with a backlight

So here we go. This was actually just a test shoot. We wanted to know how fluorescent lamps exploded when you smashed it into something (or someone) so get a bunch of lamps and wait for the night. I wanted to shoot at the night because when it´s dark in the surroundings I don´t need to worry about any ambient light and can focus on the speedlights and how they light up the subject. And a pitch black background is cool!

I knew that when you are trying to light smoke/explosions and so on the best way to do it (in my opinion) is to try to light it from the back. But since we only got two speedlights this time I needed to combine both the back light to the smash and some fill light to the two persons in the picture. So the first flash was placed  to the left of the subjects, just a little bit behind them. If I had the opportunity, I would’ve use one more flash, so I could use two of the flashes to light the subjects and the third one right behind them to create a really cool explosion effect. But that was not the case so let´s move on.

The second flash was used to light up the subjects from the right side, in front of them. Since I wanted a hard light I didn’t use any softboxes or umbrellas. But the flashes was zoomed in a bit, maybe 50 or 85mm to create a more concentrated beam, just to create a harder light. Both flashes fired at 1/8 power and were triggered by a cheap Cactus transmitter/reciever. Actually, the cactus works great if you want a wireless solution to fire your flashes and cant afford buying Pocket Wizards for an example.

This is the configuration I shot the image with:
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: Nikkor 35mm f1.8
Shutter speed: 1/200
Aperture: f4,0
ISO: 200

Kind of cool picture done with a really easy setup. If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment!

How to light: Intro

I thought it would be nice to share some of my thoughts and ideas when it comes to lighting and photography. First of all, I live by the Strobist.com philosophy. You don´t need big studio flashes to accomplish good light. You can do the same thing only using small speedlights. And as a Nikon user I´m using a Sb-800 and it´s a very powerful little fellow! Since I´m not the guy with the golden pants I only have one flash at the moment. But when I need to use more than one flash (usually everytime I shoot something) I give my good friend Coffe.dk a call and he lends me a Canon 430 ex. And if a need more than that I call another friend, CherryCheek haha! to get one more ex 430.

Good stuff, the only bad thing is that I can´t use TTL with the canon flashes. If I only use my SB-800, I can control it wireless from my Nikon D80 and that is a time saver. Not only because I´m lazy and don´t need to run back and forth to the flash but also because the camera and the flash is doing all the math and light calculations for me. The only thing I usually need to think of are if I want to use shutter or aperture priority. I usually use aperture priority so I can decide what kind of depth of field I like to use. So, say that I prefer working at an aperture of f2.8 and I´m in aperture priority, then the camera calculates what shutter speed I need. And here comes the good stuff, with the SB-800 in TTL mode triggered wireless from my camera the flash now calculates how much power it needs to make a good picture. Awesome!

So what if it´s a kind of difficult scene i´d like to take a photo of, and the flash believes that it needs more (or less) light from the flash than it actually needs? Simple! I leave the shutter speed and aperture alone and go into the menu of my D80. Navigate to the built in flash menu (since it´s the camera flash that triggers the SB-800) and change the exposure compensation to a negative or positive value. The value depends of course of the scene you are taking a photo of.

I don´t think that the text above made any sense at all so that´s why I will make some practical examples with pictures and sketches. Stay tuned!

Wroooooom!

Relaxing day. Just watching my brother, his biatch and another friend of his when they restored an old dirtbike track.

Click the image to check out the full gallery.

Piderman!

I was cleaning out my basement and found this little fellow companion. Awesome!

Shot with a 50mm F1,8 Nikkor lens.

Some self portraits and a book review

Just completed the book ”The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes” by Joe McNally. I really recommend this book!  If you are in to photography and escpecially lightning it´s a must have for you! It´s full of amazing photos and a background story of each one and of course how he did the shoot, with all from preparing the location to shutterspeeds, apertures and how to make the model relaxed. If you are a Nikon user like myself you will recognize yourself in the book because he is really into Nikon´s hot shoe flashes SB-800 and SB-900. And I agree with him, they are totally awesome! So go get the book right ahead!

And some self portraits:

Shutterspeed: 1/60 Aperture: 6,3 ISO: 100
Just one Nikon SB-800 shot through an umbrella that is just a little bit higher than my head and it´s positioned around ten o clock if the camera is positioned at six and i´m in center of the clock. The flash i i-TTL and has an exposure value of +1.0 and a +1 CTO gel filter attached to get a warmer feeling (didn’t really matter when I converted them to black & white though).

Exactly the same configuration as above.

LOST

Went for a bicycle ride and got lost. Damn.

Click image to view full gallery…

Just like the alps!

It´s like 25c but you can still do some jumps at the half-pipe. Friggin awesome! It´s just like in Italy at the alps.

Go shred people! Click the image to go to the gallery!