Whew, what a weekend! We had a family portrait session for Sunday that was planned, and two other impromptu shoots as well.  Lot’s of opportunities to practice with light, in both a controlled environment (the basement/studio-in-a-pinch) and out at Red Rocks.  Today’s post is some pictures taken Saturday of our friend Sam, who was kind enough to pose for me – Jenn’s at about 38 weeks and didn’t really want the camera aimed anywhere near her… ) so I could practice some different lighting techniques and work with some new lighting equipment (more on that below).

While I played around with different lighting configurations, I tended to favor a simple, 3-light setup – key light to camera-left in a homemade beauty dish, hair light back, camera-right , and backgrund light on a stand right behind Sam with a blue gel firing at the white basement wall.  There’s also a large white reflector on a boom just below the lens, to kick some fill light up under the chin and keep her neck and cheek from going too dark.  Here’s a few more from the session with a similar lighting setup:

For the next one, I moved the key light around more to the side for a more dramatic side/profile light.  This really made the reflector important, as I didn’t want the camera-right side of her face to go completely dark:

For this last one, I broke out another homemade lighting modifier – a foamcore ringlight.  Just to work on the ‘high glamour’ look:

Remember above where I said there’d be more below on a new piece of photo gear?  If so, I bet you thought it was the beauty dish or the ring light, huh?  Not so!  Actually,  we recently purchased a MiniTT1 wireless transmitter from PocketWizard.  We were already using PocketWizard PlusII transceivers, so this trigger fits in nicely with our existing system.  The real benefit though, is their “HyperSync” feature, that tells the flash to trigger just a little bit early to allow the camera to sync at a higher speed than it would otherwise do natively.  All of the above shots were done using my Canon 5D, which normally has a max sync speed of 1/200th of a second.  (For my non-camera geek readers, this means that if you are trying to use flashes at shutter speeds faster than 1/200th of a second, you will see black bars or stripes on either the top of the bottom of the frame, which are caused by the shutter not moving fast enough to completely clear the sensor before the exposure is taken).  Using the Hypersync feature and playing a little bit with the settings, I shot all of the above shots at 1/320th of a second!  There was a slight black band at the top each frame at this setting, which I have cropped out, but that’s it.  Well worth the investment after these tests, that’s for sure!  Also, I’m starting to see some other settings show up online from other folks with similar camera/flash combinations as I have that indicate that I have a lot more experimenting to do, and should be able to comfortably dial in the settings and acheive fully-synced shutter speeds at 1/440 or 1/500th of a second.  I’ll report back here when/if I get there…