jessa

85mm 1/250s @ f1.8, ISO 1250

This is Jessa, from the Strobist get together in Austin. We found what probably looked like the least appealing end of the corridor that we had been shooting in, for this shot. I think Kirk wanted us to see what you can make, from essentially nothing. There was no interesting light - other than the tungsten light fittings in the hall. No ambient light in the corner we'd picked either. We sat down in the middle of the corridor and I put my canon 580EX flash on the floor, pointing to the wall on my right. Tried a few shots like that. Then we put a large silver reflector on the floor, that you can see in the catchlights in her eyes. The flash was aimed up towards the corner of the wall/ ceiling and fired in TTL mode. I composed the shot to use some of the lighting elements in the background to provide a frame and just fired a few shots. This was my favourite. I had originally planned to take it to black and white, but after doing that, I partially resaturated it to bring it up to this muted, half colour half black and white palette. I've used this technique quite often when I try black and white images. Often I like the feel that you get - a uniquely digital palette, but not overly obvious or too saturated. Subtle colour, turned down but still part of the composition. It seems to work particularly well for high ISO shots so that the noise in the image adds a subtle grain, particularly in the out of focus regions. Holly asked How are you using your flash off camera? I got a Canon ST-E2 infrared flash controller for Christmas, so I've been playing around with that. It means I can use TTL flash triggering, which seems to be a mixed blessing. Easy to get good exposures, but it seems you can't use it to manually trigger the flash at a given, repeatable power output. I've also got pocket wizards, which have a much longer range but no TTL capability. I'm working on learning how to use both more effectively.

vivian

100mm 1/640 sec @f3.5 ISO 640

Visited some friends yesterday and we spent an enjoyable afternoon chasing their not-quite one-year old around the house to get some pictures. Kids are such a challenging photographic subject but so much fun. Get down low, play around, shoot tons and hope. Going for shallow depth of field with such a fast moving subject makes it even more of a challenge to get some with just the right focus. I did get a few okay shots out of the 400+ that I took.

This one here is my favourite. I used some almost out-of-focus palm fronds as a bit of a framing element behind her head and I really like the way the leaves mirror the shapes of her eyelashes and also mirror the way her hair is falling over her forehead. She is looking upwards towards a bright, cloudy sky that has filled her face and eyes with bright, even, beautiful light. Also got to play with a new toy that Amanda got me for Christmas. I was lucky enough to get a Canon ST-E2 flash trigger. This way I can set up a strobe and have the camera communicate and control it, using through the lens exposure metering to control the flash power level. Quite different from the manual control of a pocket wizard and really helped out shooting indoors with such a fast moving subject. I just pointed the flash towards a white wall and used it as a room-sized softbox for all the shooting I did. The ST-E2 did well, triggering the flash every time, even when the camera and sensors were nowhere near pointing towards each other. Very happy with it. Here's an example of one mostly lit by the flash, mixing well with the window light behind her.

100mm 1/160sec @ f2.8 ISO 400

In the comments, Holly asked That flash device sounds intriguing...what did you do with the flash while you were shooting? Was it on a light stand or something? (how did you get it to bounce where you wanted?) I had the flash on the small stand that it comes with. This is basically a foot that lets the unit stand on a table or the floor. All I did then was swivel the head to point at a wall, with the IR sensor turned to face roughly towards the room/camera. The biggest problem was stopping Vivian crawling straight towards the flash to find out what it was.