May Strobist "Newbie" Meetup

A couple of weeks ago a bunch of folks from the Vancouver Strobist group on Flickr got together to teach the newbies how to do strobist stuff, the art off off-camera lighting. The idea was to get a few experience folks as mentors, give them a small group of us green newbies, and teach what they could. The models model in exchange for pictures for the portfolios, which the photographers give them in exchange for models to create pictures for their portfolios. TFP is what it's called, Time For Pictures, Trade For Portfolio, etc.

Anyway, as one of the newbies, I had a great time and I just yesterday finally got around to processing a bunch of images, and after getting approval from the models, am ready to post a few here.

The first model we worked with was Jessti, with Glen (or Glenn?) as the mentor. His method was very exacting and precise, using a light meter, etc, and getting great results. I'll update with a pic from the session when the model gets back to me with approval to post them though.

This is actually the second model we worked with, Maggie. To light her we set up a flash on tree in the background, a bare flash as key light hanging from a tree to her right, and shoot through umbrella to camera right (manned by a V.A.L.). This second setup was even a bit nicer as it was with Steve who lives not far from me and who does some awesome and funky shoots. The setup wasn't as extreme as some of his other portfolio, but it was a different way of doing things that was cool to see.




This one is from the end of the shoot, when everyone retired to the grass there was one group still going, and I jumped in and got a few shots of Cindy. Lighting her there are flashes behind on left and right and homemade straw grid spot to camera right.

End result was a great day, meeting lots of new people, and learning a lot from the group. Well, that and a sunburnt head :) The only disadvantage with these types of strobist meetups is that there are so many people who want to learn this stuff that the setups are more done by committee in a way, and there's not a lot of one-on-one work with just you and the gear and playing around. Could also be that I was just too scared to start messing with things with 3 other guys waiting to take pictures and a model who is sitting there all made up and waiting :)

Hardware wise there were a couple of things that were a bit off for me. The K20D has a max sync speed of 180th (vs the 250th that the newer Nikons have) which meant that when things were set up and people figured out the right settings, I had to adjust things to compensate. Also even when I did my exposure settings seemed way different than everyone elses, not even just moving an f-stop or two to compensate for the 180 vs 250, but some completely different stuff. Though time alone with equipment might show that it was more me than the Pentax gear that had the problem.

The last thing was this again cemented my desire for a 70-200/2.8 equivelant portrait lens like the big boys have. The DA* 50-135/2.8 would be perfect for those long shots with shallow depth of field. The 16-45 I use most of the time gives the wrong perspective if it's used in anything but the most zoomed position (67mm equiv) and the 70-300 I have is a) slow and b) too zoomy a lot of the time (150mm equiv at the most un-zoomiest).

The Vancouver Strobist Beginner's Meetup

Saturday I was out with a bunch of other fine folks from the Vancouver Strobist group for the "Beginner meetup". This was organized by Rod, who got us use of the Life Sciences building out at UBC (and the building itself is gorgeous BTW).


The format of the meet was fairly loose. There were a couple of "pros" (not pro photogs, just people who know stuff about off camera lighting) who helped out the 12 or 13 newbies. Rod (who put the whole thing together, many thanks to him for this) gave a quick and dirty demo and then we newbies went to it.

The previous meet up I went to was more about the picture taking than the lighting itself, this one was way more focused on the lighting aspect and the equipment hands on. The hardest part for me was figuring out what I wanted to do. There were more than enough flash units, pocket wizards, radio poppers, umbrellas and stands for everyone there, but if you don't know what to do with them... I've seen great portraits, and I've seen pictures that have moved me, but under the gun I couldn't think of a single thing to do! Luckily there were a bunch of other people around who did have ideas, and eventually everyone fed off of everyone else.

Folks split off into a few groups of 3 or 4 people, rotating between acting as models (as the plan was for this not to be about the models, but about the lighting) and tweaking lighting, and taking shots. The group I was in was working on doing a "single umbrella giving a round halo behind the model" shot, some cross lighting, and some other setup. Everything from umbrellas to gels were played with, and I learned that if you set white balance for tungsten, and use a CTO (Color Temperature Orange I believe) gel on a flash, you get a super-blue environment and a properly colored skintone (as the CTO gel counteracts the blue tinge you get from the white balance). Another group working down in the hallway created some very cool images such as this one.

The lighting setups we used were pretty simple I'm sure, and the results no doubt laughable for an experienced Strobist or Joe McNally type, but for me it was pretty exciting to actually get my hands on the gear. Sure you can read about how you move an umbrella closer to get a softer light, or how to use fill flash or a reflector, but I find that when I actually do it is when I really get it (at least a little).

You can check out the Vancouver Strobist group on Flickr, and here's the thread of impressions and sample images from others. Thanks again to Rod and Victor for setting it up and helping us out.

Looking forward to the next meetup! Check out some of my shots below (clickable to Flickr where there's more setup info).


Dan who was a model for me a bunch, done in black and white to keep with the contrasty lighting.


Music man (never got his name :( ) playing with cross lighting, using one flash and the sun setting behind him.


Dan again, more "normal" portrait, soft lighting.

My First "Sweet 16" Portrait Shoot

A while back an ex-coworker from a job ago emailed me to ask if I'd take portraits of her daughter's "Sweet 16" party. The description was fairly vauge.... "fun shots of the kids dressed up". Since this was a friend of mine, and because my experience with portraiture is practically nil, I of course immediately said "let me get back to you" :) After a while I of course agreed, and this afternoon I went out to their country home to "shoot the kids".

First the good stuff. The kids were awesome, patient and willing to go along with this weird guy taking pictures of them, and I'm glad that their mom was there as she was able to corral everyone nicely and move from place to place... lets just say she knew what she wanted and dammit her daughter's sweet 16 was going to be perfect! The environment was great as well, their yard is beautiful, and being spring had flowers and blooms everywhere.

However, for lighting, the conditions couldn't have been worse, especially for a newbie like me. First of all it was overcast, and as I chose to shoot with a flash this meant that these shots had a dark background. The kids were nicely exposed, but they were sitting in a pool of light with bladk behind them.

Speaking of kids, they were about as contrasty as you can get, 4 white kids in black tuxes and dresses... also one of them didn't have a tux jacket so he just had a white shirt on.... about the same challenge that a wedding photographer has with a black tux next to a white wedding dress.

My flash (the AF360FGZ) did it's best, but either it or it's operator seemed to manage to underexpose about every image by about 2.2 stops :( Maybe it was the black tuxes, operator error.... It just seemed that the shots were all really dark, or they had white blobs of overexposed faces on top of darkness. I'm really glad I shot in RAW, as that combined with Lightroom's excellent exposure controls has allowed me to recover most of the shots, it seems the dark ones respond fairly nicely to exposure of +1.8-2.2 and a hit of fill light around +19 to bring out some of the background and the details in the suites.

Not a huge loss after all thank goodness :) The first pass on the images I've been making shows that most are recoverable, and some are actually not bad.

Things to remember for next time.

• Consider not using a flash. Better yet, remember how to set it to only do fill flash mode, instead of just on P-TTL or the high speed sync mode.
• Take test shots first to get the lighting and exposure right. The LCD will not give you the full story. Luckily I had the over/under exposure warning set, so I could see when the really-dark turned into pure-black, but the rest of the images were for the most part, still too dark.
  
• Taking the time to zoom in and check the histogram would have avoided some stress.
• Scope out the area ahead of time if possible. They have a gorgeous yard that I wasn't able to take full advantage of.
• Get closer, get closer, get closer! Then get a bit closer. I'm so glad I have 14mp to work with!
  
• I have to learn to know what looks good and how to get people to do it for me. Again, thank goodness that her mom was there and had an idea of what she wanted.
• Remember to look for / fix the oven mitt hands.
• Details, details, details.... I avoided trees growing out of heads for the most part, but little things like one person having their feet or hands pointed in a different direction than everyone else can take a picture down a notch.
• Get more lines to get people to relax.... I think I used "pretend you like each other" about 30 times. First time good, 30th probably just annoying. I'll have to get a set of billy bob teeth to get a laugh.
• Will HDR work to fix the white shirt / black dress issue? Hmm....
  

Will update when all the post-processing is done and will post some results when/if I get permission from parents in the form of a model release.