Natalie has her photo taken
Natalie 5, originally uploaded by Christopher Preece.
Natalie is a work colleague who I have taken a few casual photos of in the office. However I have been lucky enough to set up a temporary studio up in an adjacent office. So after a little gentle persuasion she agreed to sit (and stand) for a short session.
She was quite nervous at first but ended the session all smiles having enjoyed it. Luckily my wife, Hilary was on hand to provide some inspiration and confidence building.
I used a white paper roll background and four Canon Speedlites, two bounced off umbrellas on the background and two in soft boxes. I used a wireless transmitter as a master and set them to manual.
I have been following various blogs such as www.strobist.blogspot.com and www.joemcnally.com/blog recently to get an insight into wireless flash using speedlights or flashguns, and to follow this ‘strobist‘ movement that is popping up everywhere from Flickr to Ebay.
Well it works quite well, providing you give them a bit of time to recycle and have some good batteries in them. I think that on location they are fantastic, in terms of lugging smaller amounts of kit about and avoiding power cables. However they don’t have as much ‘guts’ as my Elinchrome D-Lites and sometimes one or other of them does not fire. Also I notcied that sitters tend to blink more, possible due to there being not modelling lamps to acclimatise their eyes.