Completed for “Games”, I had originally intended this to be black and white and then colour pop one of the counters. It never looked right though, so I left it in colour and I think it works really well. It took a while to do though as many adjustments were needed to account for the perspective. I nearly got it. I look at it now, and see some minor adjustments that could have been made.
flash
BTEC – ‘Multi-Monopoly’
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.
Coloured Gels
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.
The Huss
Why is the beer bottle always full?
Strobist…..Vivitar
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.
Putting it all together
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….