15th
Photo shoot - Fake Spring Photo
(Sorry for the lack of updates lately, have been busy with various other projects, so the plan to do weekly update has quite failed. Let’s aim for monthly now :) )
Another quick shot I did at home as a lighting exercise. Yeah, it’s not shot outside in a sunny afternoon against a blue sky, but in a evening dark living room, with two strobes and few light modifiers applied. Let’s see how it’s done.
We’ve got this pot of daffodils in the supermarket, and after they were placed in the living room, I decided to try if I can shoot them in some interesting way. As it was late in the evening already (means dark), I picked up my speedlights, and started playing around.
Used SB-600 on a stand with shoot-through umbrella first (top-right from the flowers), and shot few pictures of the whole pot - to discover the result is far from flattering, mostly because the background was revealing the truth about the flowers - they just looked like they came in a pot, in the living room, from the supermarket.
So I went closer, to try some macro shots, which also meant i went lower. And while doing so, I discovered this interesting angle evoking shot you would take outside in the garden - the flowers against a blue sky. So hooray, I got my angle, but with almost black background, it was still not quite convincing/appealing one.
Time to grab second flash - I placed SB-900 on the small foot it came with, left to the pot, lighting the background up. Dialed the zoom to 200mm, so that the light had proper punch, and it started to come together, missing like you know.. proper colors.
Gels to the rescue - I learned this cool trick to use tungsten white balance settings on the camera to bring normal colors to blue, so I thought it’s good opportunity to leverage the trick again.
Here goes the trick (Kudos to Joe McNally of course): Set the camera to tungsten WB, and the flash lights will suddenly appear as blue. So did the flowers though - you need to compensate for the WB change by gelling the foreground flash to warm color too. So I placed 1/2 CTO (half density Color Temperature Orange) gel on the SB-600, and they turned back to natural colors.
The blue caused by WB shift in camera didn’t look as vivid as I wanted though, so I also placed blue gel on the SB-900, to make it reealy blue, like on a hot spring afternoon.
Now just some final tuning - light ratios for proper contrast in the scene. It was actually quite quick and easy, as both flashes were commanded from the body via the small pop-up flash - CLS is the way for a lazy guy.
In a sunny day, the light would be quite hard, so I dialed the SB-600 in the umbrella up to +2EV (which required the CTO gel to be replaced by more dense 3/4 version). To make the blue background more saturated, I dialed the SB-900 down about -2EV.
Ta-da - there goes the completely fake spring evoking shot of the daffodils in the garden.
