Do you have a letter box at your house? You do? Have you noticed the people who stalk the streets and fill it with advertising flyers? They are unstoppable - no matter how many signs you put up they will still stuff your letter box with paper.Apart from the ecological question of all that paper and ink, and the moral question of being able to defend your letter box...
Regular readers of the blog will remember the ones about Honl - the accessory company for strobists. We've been selling their softboxes, grids, gels, and camera wraps for some time now.Time has come to declare a 20% off sale for these - to continue until the current stock is exhausted. This is a good opportunity for all users of portable flash - Nikon, Canon, Nissan, Promaster, etc. - to take control of that flash out there in the real ( dark) world and do some professional portraits.Note for users of off-camers flash systems that depend upon IR to control the flash:The Honl softboxes that fit on the front of the flash do so in such a way that they do not obscure the IR receptors on the flash units. This is a problem for some other brands and you get misfires if the IR port is shielded. Honl can be used with the SB 700 with confidence....
Look it up, look it up...
I cannot deny that I like certain things - Manhattan cocktails, pretty girls, hot rods, and colourful pictures. Not for me the desaturated masterwork images with every tone filtered through an old teabag - while I can still see I want to see colour.One exception - I like to see monochrome images made with Woodburytype toning. The rich brown is much preferable to weak sepia.But back to colour, and particularly colour in the. If you are a strobist - a person who strives to use small portable flashes to make studio-quality images out in the wider world - you undoubtedly knwo about the various wireless control systems - they let you use one or more speed lights off camera with a varying level of control between the lights. In my case I use the Nikon D300 cameras and they can control Nikon's Sb 600, 700, and 910 flashes very well.My new passion, and big thrill, is to use these flashes with gel modification. I selected the Honl range of gels from our shop and equipped my fill and hair light...
The philosophy of " What will be, will be " has been useful for centuries as an excuse for not planning properly, not behaving properly, and not taking responsibility for what has actually occurred. Didn't work out so well for the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 but was a real money-spinner for Doris Day in the 1950's...
Please note the dome in the heading photograph. This is not the targeting guidance system for an Atlas E missile - though they are nice as well. It is a Gary Fong Lightsphere - in this case one of the collapsible ones. Beside it is a packet of gel filters made by Honl. They are the absolute bullet for event and wedding photographers.Those of you who reel back in horror at the thought of a flash at a wedding - like M. Cartier-Bresson - are welcome to move further down the car. By all means ramp your ISO up and clap a 2.8 zoom to the front of your DSLR and hover over there in the shadows. I'm sure your photographs will be all the better for your artistic decision. I should de-saturate a few of them and tilt a horizon to provide variety. Remember to browse the salad bar at the reception...
How many of you out there watch YouTube? I mean for detailed instructions on the use of professional photographic equipment as well as the videos of kittens falling in toilets? If you restrict yourself to the latter you may be missing out on a real training resource.I thought of this when I was rigging out the studio for a shoot this last Sunday. I wanted to achieve a deliberate lighting effect of a pool of light falling on the models' shoulders. I went searching. Sure enough someone wanted to do the same thing and showed how.It was simple. If I shot an Elinchrom mono block straight down it would work but it would splash far too much on the floor - and it would have been far too powerful even at the lowest setting. But the simple addition of a honeycomb grid in the reflector narrowed the beam and attenuated the light - and the model looked fabulous.I use the 18cm general purpose reflectors - Elinchrom make a set of three round grids to fit. They are progressively restrictive (...
It is often tempting to colour a backdrop with our lighting systems - whether it is flash or steady , we have all been fascinated by the business of shining the light through something translucent and seeing what happens on the backdrop. If you pop a piece of coloured glass or cellophane in there you can get amazing tints. Tempts you to just keep one roll of paper on the back and change the appearance from the flash.Well, if you are using a roll of backdrop paper that is white or very light grey, you may be disappointed with what you get. You can generally see a strong colour when you are setting up the shot but when full power goes through the gel and records on the sensor surface, it can be nearly a complete washout. You see a little colour round edges or where there is some shadow, but very little else.What you need is a mid neutral grey or even a black. These give some "tooth" for the gel to bite on and depending upon the level...
Well, it's that time of the week, folks. The icebox is full of leftovers and the only decent thing to do with them is put them all in the pot and heat it up.1. Lens Bling - I kid you not. Thats the name of the product and you won't forget it as it will be staring you in the face every time you open your camera bag.If you've got bunch of lenses for your DSLR that sit face-down in the bag, all you see when you open it up is a line of similar back caps - you can be hard pressed to know which lens is which and you end up pulling each one out and staring at it before you find the right one. By then the HINDENBURG has settled to the ground and they are toasting marshmallows on the remains...
For all you strobist's out there: Without a doubt you've used or heard of David Honls sets of filters & flash modifiers for speedlight flashes...