This was completed for “Games”. I wanted to get macro-shots of all the tokens in a monopoly set. As colour is an import part of the Monopoly board, I wanted to incorporate all the colours too. As part of the digital manipulation requirement I used Photoshop to build the final image.
In case you weren’t sure which version of Monopoly this is from, it is the “Stoke-on-Trent” version.
This photo started off with me testing coloured gels over my flash. This was against my grey background. I’m getting some great colours, so I think I’m going to end up with a versatile set-up.
This was the result. I then went a bit overboard in Lightroom with one of the pictures, but I kind of like the effect.
I finally got the chance to take photos of a local band, “The Huss” during a practice evening.
I finished out with a nice portfolio of pictures, which I’m deciding what to do with, but here’s one of them for now.
Whenever you see a picture of a bottle of beer, it tends to be full… or maybe half drunk. Why? Surely because the beer is so delicious it should be a photo of an empty bottle.
So here’s one I drank earlier. No, not this morning!
I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of some Vivitar flashes. Two 285s and one 283. I bought them off a guy from work. They also come with a couple of optical sensors, which means I can now trigger four flashes using my two Phottix Strato II triggers. The other flash is my Nikon SB-900.
The Vivitar flashes are pretty basic, with 4 stop difference in flash power. However they are supposedly robust, so I will use them for outdoor shoots and see how they get on. Here’s a picture of them with one of the optical triggers.
As we’ve been attempting portrait photography on my course I thought I should have a go with some of the bits and bobs I’ve been collecting. For the pictures below the basic setup was a single Nikon SB-900 flash triggered with some cactus remote triggers (which are very good… except sometimes it looks like the sync speed is completely out, as I get banding) positioned front, right and above and a grey background I recently bought.
The top two photos use an umbrella as a diffuser, and the bottom two are with a bare flash. For each set,the picture on the right has a reflector positioned bottom left.
I reckon, based on this set of pictures, the flash without the umbrella, and the the reflector are the way to go.
They we go. Practise run over….
I bought these egg cups today in a local charity shop. I thought the different colours would make them interesting to photograph. This was taken with a 50mm Nikon lens, at f1.8 and 1/250. I used two off camera flashes.
