SB-800 R&D with Creative Lighting System

Saturday morning was a bit of an R&D morning. As I still have Ali's SB-800 and a fresh set of AA's I thought I'd rig up a portrait session to work on some light positions.

The background is my 1.5m x 2m foldy-upy thing (it's more like wrestling a wireframe but once you get the technique it's okay), a piece of white card to the "model's" left (camera right) and an SB-800 as a remote flash on 1/64th power (controlled from the camera) camera left pointing 45 degrees. Fire test shots weren't too bad. The S5 was on 80th second @ f4.

Not a bad start but it's a bit dark.

Better. I kept with the flash at 1/32nd power and put a muslin square in front to act as a diffuser. You'll notice the the hair is reflecting back a little, I want to reduce that... so bring on the muslin squares (once used on infant duties a few years ago but duely washed since, it now stays in my case of bits: snoots, clamps, Fong Lightsphere, Lee Filters, notebook and puke cloth).

Quality wise a much better result, if I were truely not bothered I'd take the CF card and bring the image up in Photoshop/Lightroom and dial another stop of light in there. Personally I like o get things right in camera to reduce post production.

As I was expecting the muslin ate about a stop of light, no problems, just dial in some more flash power from the camera. To compensate I dialled the flash to 1/16th power and put the diffuser up again (via a knitting needle and two plastic A clamps).

To get a starting point this took all of five minutes to sort out. Now I can concentrate on the session of while the model didn't utter a word all day.....