On assignment with David Hobby – perfect background shot with flash
NOT a view from my window sadly
David “the original strobist” Hobby continues to inspire me to become a better photographer and this time I decided to start from the beginning with one of his early post about the perfect portrait background, the setting sun…
Read on to see how I did and to check out the “behind the scenes” setup shots…
wanting to challenge myself I decided to try and overcome one of my fears and go out in to the public domain and create a self portrait of myself using all the tricks of the trade.
As David describes in his post, you get the perfect background two times a day with the light the sunset- and sunrise creates each day. Wanting to utilize this I packed up all of the gear I would need in my car and set of to the location.
Before setting out I searched the web for a site with information about the time for sunrise and sunset in Denmark. a simple Google search did the trick
Using the info I had gotten from reading the before mentioned blog post I decided to head out to one of the towns highest point to get as clean a background as possible…
One word of caution, if you do decide to go trekking to find the perfect and highest spot anywhere, expect to get tired from walking up and down hills… In my case I made two trips up that hill, that evening.
(As it happens, I forgot my tripod in the car, which I only realized after hauling all my gear to the top, walking around for five-ten minutes to find the perfect spot, almost at the point of setting up my light stands, before realizing my huge mistake… what to do… gotta pack up everything, and haul everything down again, not wanting to leave something behind only to have it stolen by passers by. Then get the tripod from the trunk and carry everything up the damn hill again… Tired? you bet’ya.)
Soo…. finally reaching my destination a little late, I had sadly missed the sunset by ten minutes… (thanks alot Manfrotto 055PROB tripod). Feeling a little discouraged, I didn’t know If I even really wanted to go on with my project having lost the sunset, the main reason for being there in the first place… luckily this feeling faded again quickly and I started to set up my gear.
One thing to get used to when doing this is the staring from people walking the trails, but you gotta get that out of your head and shot anyway… I’ve promised my self to invite on of ‘em over next time to get their picture taken…. next time, I promise!…
As the wind was blowing a little bit, I used my DIY camera bag as a counterweight to keep the lightstand with the umbrella in place.
I’m fond of using wide focal lengths for portraits so I had allready planned to use my 18-55 EFs IS lens for the shot. Even though it’s only a kit lens, I really love using this with flash photography.
Before creating the actual shot, I dialed in the shutterspeed to get the exposure I wanted for the background. Like one of my fellow bloggers writes, do it step by step, background first, then add light.
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/4 - 1/200
I used two flashes for the shot, my 430 EXII Canon flash into a silver umbrella at manually at 1/1 power camera left and a Cactus KF36 manual flash as a rim light 1/16 power, without any modifiers other than a piece of cardboard as a GoBo mounted with velcro, to reduce the flare from the flash, camera right.
Both flashes were set of with my Cactus V4 triggers from China.
This was also the first time I got at chance to use the Phottix Plato C6 remote trigger (also from China), which, by the way, worked like a charm. The 2 second delay gave me enough time to press the shutter button on the remote and then let it fall down on the soft grass by my feet.
Cactus KF-36 with cardboard GoBo camera left, and Canon 430 EXII into an umbrella camera right
I used a full 1/1 CTO gel on the main light on full power attempting to reproduce the color of the sun which also helps with skintones, but I think I overdid it, next time I’ll use 1/8 CTO gel to cut down on the orange glow on my face.
Doing a quick test shot showed me what I was doing wrong enabling me to set up the lights the right distance and angle from the model aka, me.
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/4 - 1/200
With the sun setting quickly and wanting a slightly larger depth of field and changed the camera settings to f/5.6 and 160th of a second for the shutterspeed.
Checkout the final shot here.
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/5.6 - 1/160
The shot turned out as I wanted it to (with exception for the lens flare right smack in the middle of the frame, D’oh), with a nice rim light camera right hitting my left shoulder and arm, but again, too much orange glow on the face.
This is absolutely something I’ll do again over the summer, harnessing the power of the setting- and rising sun.
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