accord euro-r

[EGD]

a few shots from last week, testing out the new batter pack.

i had heaps of trouble shooting in that location due to the colour cast of ambient light, but glad i did it tho, learnt quite a bit after the shoot.

just to give you an idea, this was what i was dealing with (manual exposure to the background with nikon d700's auto white balance and no flash):
http://dfimages.smugmug.com/photos/579185790_GnGeP-M.jpg

the whole place had shit loads of different light sources, colours, brightness, darkness etc, and the wrost thing was the car/camera/lighting were limited to that space as it was pissing down hard outside ( 5m to the right, 3m to the back of camera and left hand side was the wall)

so after about half an hour of playing around with flash and camera settings:
http://dfimages.smugmug.com/photos/579177127_R3SMa-M.jpg

http://dfimages.smugmug.com/photos/579162032_sxE6j-M.jpg

still not really happy with them but will leave the improvement for next time.

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gutted, should have done a vertical shot for the second one:
http://dfimages.smugmug.com/photos/579199872_MJRav-L.jpg

[Bigelboe]

Yeah not feeling these ones so much, a lot of distractions in each image, 1st one would be ok if the background was a stop or two underexposed, but probably would have been tricky to do, depending how much grunt you had left in your flashes.

In the 2nd one the line of the car and the balance of the composition points my eye straight to the sign on the fence, it woulda been better vertical as you say.

[thirdkid]

do you use long shutter speeds with a lot of flash bursts or the flash is on on wireless setup?always wondered what technique u use if you dont mind saying

[EGD]

Yeah not feeling these ones so much, a lot of distractions in each image, 1st one would be ok if the background was a stop or two underexposed, but probably would have been tricky to do, depending how much grunt you had left in your flashes.

In the 2nd one the line of the car and the balance of the composition points my eye straight to the sign on the fence, it woulda been better vertical as you say.

sweet as, 1st pics background was probably 2-3 stops underexposed already, but i might try lower it a bit more in layers and see how it goes. i could have cranked up the lighting output on that location as they were only around 1/4 of pwer, however, the more power you put in, the hashier the shadow, which was another difficult thing to balance in this particular location coz it was so closed to the side wall.

ya, i was really gutted about the sec pic once i saw it on screen, oh well, that reminds me to take more vertical shots next time.

do you use long shutter speeds with a lot of flash bursts or the flash is on on wireless setup?always wondered what technique u use if you dont mind saying

um, i hate using long shutter mainly becoz you can't really find a completely dark place, unless its indoor.

i used proper studio lights in this shoot coz i needed to test the new battery pack before goin down to south island. but techniques wise thats not too much of difference between normal speedlite.

this is how i normally do it;
first, u take a proper exposed pic of background and subject without flash, so you can see what sort of condition you will be dealing with. (like what i did in the first photo)

secondly, try to balance the background ambient light and colour on subject. so in this case, i put up the shutter speed and stick with same iso (remember in flash photography, shutter controls the ambient, aperture controls flash and iso controls both) so i can lower the background brightness a bit, and also see what sort of ambient light is getting onto the subject.

third, balance the white balance.

finally, bring in the lights, adjust the lighting outputs. setup the lighting location and power first, and adjust aperture for fine tune.

its just the basic explanation here, as different background, ambient, colour sources etc are vary from location to location so its just the past experience plus more trial and errors.

i have been using flash for a while now, and its really until recently that i have finally got really confident about them, just keep trying and read up on strobist :)