Impromptu

Trusty (well... not entirely) wireless triggers in hand, I was off and about in this world of ours. On todays agenda, helping "The Girlfriend(tm)" prepare for a move!

As we were rummaging about I came across this pretty snazzy full finger `ring' as it were and thought, "Hey! That's pretty snazzy!" Keeping tabs on it while we were working, it became the object of my attention the first break we took.

The initial setup was fairly simple. We had plenty of boxes laying around to use as a platform and a box lid for the back support. The background itself was simply a sheet of printer paper ramped up against the box lid, and a second sheet across the lid itself to give me a semi decent bounce surface from behind.

As for the lighting, the room lights were fairly low, so it wouldn't be too hard to over power them with the small strobe. I tried a couple of different angles and positions for the flash holding it in hand but all of them produced rather hard shadows, even the the diffusion plate down. So, I looked about and found an appropriate place to situate the flash for a bounce off the ceiling.

The one thing I didn't consider was how close the flash was to a the wall. It added an additional bounce surface but also a much smaller point of light. If you look closely, you can see a faint yet rather sharp shadow under the arch, caused by the offending wall.

In the end, it took me all of two minutes to set up, maybe 5 minutes to shoot, and another minute to break down. After a couple of test fires, I ended up shooting a 1/8th powered flash at f/11 and ISO100. In retrospect, I probably could have upped the power another notch or two and used an even narrower aperture as well as upped the ISO to 200 or 400.

Never the less! Practice practice practice! *hurls a chair*