Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve finally taken the plunge into off-camera lighting. This past week, I bought a nice manual flash, the LumoPro 120, a light stand, umbrella, and Cactus radio triggers. Why did I do these crazy things? Because I think it will improve shots like family portraits, (most especially like this), and other fun an interesting stuff. I’m also committed to taking pictures of Emily’s volleyball team in a professional style in order to hone my skills. So here are some results, playing with my gear.

First, dinner and homework, with the flash behind the umbrella, camera right.

Second, Nathan holding the new flash, triggering in optical slave mode-the built-in flash fired, causing the flash he was holding to fire.

Next is a still life with flash behind the umbrella, camera left, medium height.

By the way, I’ve intentionally not cropped any of the back ground material out of the still life shots so that I can see the effects shutter (none) and aperture (smaller = darker background) have.

Now the still life without the umbrella.

Next I put the light up high, around 7 feet, no umbrella, and pulled the zoom out all the way (85mm)

And for comparison, flash at wide angle (28mm).

Finally, just to see what it would look like, flash high but toward the back left.

It was trigger with the built-in flash, manually set to 1/32 power.

I didn’t make anything particularly great. These are just some experiments with the off camera flash angles to help me understand the impact.