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category: resources view all recent posts |
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SAFFRON - SESHU'S DOCUMENTARY WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY & PORTRAITS BLOG
Using A Beauty Dish For A Portrait Session |
05.22.09 |
An Impromptu Senior Session In Avon, Connecticut |
| I photographed Jay before for his high-school yearbook's senior portraits. He and his parents visited us recently and being family (he is my wife's brother!), I gently nudged him outdoors for a quick photo session. I wanted to photograph him with my new toy – a beauty dish.
The set up took all of 5 minutes. Can you beat that Mr. Umbrella or Mr. Softbox? No way! The Equipment I UsedAlienBees B800 AlienBees 22-inch Pan Reflector (aka. the beauty dish) Vagabond II Portable Power System Calumet 10' Light Stand 2 Pocket Wizard Transceivers Nikon D300 DX 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera 
Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor Lens 
Setting Up The Beauty DishAlien Bees' beauty dish was clearly designed to work seamlessly with the B800 strobe. Simply compress the prongs that would usually hold a small reflector and engage it with the beauty dish. That's about 10 seconds of work. The fit is snug and the beauty dish does not rotate or slip off at all. Win! Powering It UpI love the Vagabond II made by the Paul C. Buff Company power my Alien Bees light. I can hook up another Alien Bees if I wanted to and split the power output. Yes, the unit has to be constantly charging when not in use, but with the wedding season here, I expect to be taking this out quite a bit for my formal wedding portraits. For this photo shoot, I simply connected the included power cord, from the power unit to the light and was ready to go. Positioning The LightThis is where one has to experiment a bit. The position of the light and its relative distance to the subject can make all the difference in what you get in the end. There is really no right or wrong way to do this. I chose to hoist the light and beauty dish well above Jay and to camera left. I also slightly angled the light source down. Powering It DownI set the ISO to 200. My initial aperture setting was f/4 and my shutter speed was 1/60. These are starting numbers and as my friend Zack Arias would say, "you've gotta start somewhere." Well, what I saw on the back of my camera didn't really please me. The strobe units own setting was at full-power and the resulting image was a blow out. Yuck! So, I dropped the output of the flash to 1/4 (Alien Bees units have a cool slider), and dropped my ISO to 100 and opened my aperture to f/2.8. I wanted the bokeh in the final image. Post ProcessingI brought the entire shoot into PhotoMechanic and chose five images out of the 40 or so that I shot. (Yeah, I am pretty critical of what qualifies as "good") Since I shoot all my images in the RAW format, I imported the .NEF files (the proprietary Nikon RAW files) into Adobe Lightroom. I quickly adjusted the white balance (not as off as I had thought so my D300s are pretty much on the money). The exposures were dead-on. Since Lightroom uses Presets and I have a slew of Photoshop Actions to play with, I exported the images into Photoshop. My favorite, keepin'-it-real Photoshop Actions are by Randy Kepple. I also use Doug Boutwell's Totally Rad Actions to an extent. Check them both out! Resources For Learning To LightIn a previous blog post, I mentioned the 20 Giants of Off-Camera Lighting. That might be well-worth your while to check out and bookmark. In that same post, down in the bottom, I have mentioned some terrific books that will help you learn. But there is really nothing better than getting a small group of photographers in your community to go out and test these lighting scenarios. These gatherings can also be a terrific way to network among your peers and may lead to real paying jobs for you. Will you be using a beauty dish on your next photo shoot? If you do, come back here and post a link to your images. I would love to see how you go about using one and other readers of this blog may be intrigued as well. I am definitely looking to share the how and why of the things I do. If you have any burning photography topics you want me to cover, please let me know. If you liked this post or have a comment, please post one down below. I also welcome you sharing this post with your friends. |
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| category: Resources tags: Senior Portraits, Photography Equipment, Beauty Dish |
| 7 comments |     |
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Bring Some Levity Into Your Wedding Plans |
05.11.09 |
Opt For A Caricature Of You & Your Spouse |
| Planning for a wedding can be nerve wracking. Way too many choices. Way too many voices ... telling you which way to turn for wedding planners, florists, caterers, decorators, videographers, DJ's, venues and of course wedding photographers.
Well, take a break from it all by injecting a little humor into it. I ran into Victor of MyCaricature.com at a recent Connecticut TweetUp (that's a MeetUp for Twitter users). Checking out his website and portfolio, I came away very impressed. Think about how you could distinguish yourselves and bring some levity into your wedding day if your wedding invitations (sure you are going to have to convince your mom), save-the-date cards, thank-you cards or seating cards all had the same caricature of the two of you on them. Right now and through the end of May, Victor is offering $20 off his regular price to create truly unique artwork that will keep your guests talking about it for years to come. After all, don't you want to do something different for your wedding? |
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| category: Resources tags: Caricature, Wedding Plans, invitations, save-the-date cards |
| 0 comments | |
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