Bad old dad

Yet another entry in my Photo Diary:

I had a little chat with a friend at work today (hebedesign here on Flickr). We had both read a couple of Joe McNally's books recently, and agreed that it'd be cool to try some of his techniques. Mastering light was something that could bring us, photographically, from being snappers to perhaps, someday, becoming... well, photographers or something like it.

Anyway, I think we both live hectic lifes, because we both agreed that what was missing in our lifes were time and patience. I.e. time to practice the strobist techniques and given time: patience from our spouses and families for us to actually practice.

But when I got home I thought that I could at least try a few frames on my son. He were out cycling on his bicycle, and I thought he was dressed to kill. I imagined the perfect "off road" portrait of him behind our house, and if I was lucky I could convince both myself and hebedesign that this actually wasn't as time consuming as we'd thought.

Boy was I wrong! I had set up the flashes before recruting my model son, but when I fired off the first frame I discovered that I had to adjust them a little bit. So I rigged the flashes again, fiddled with exposure levels both on camera and on the flash, fired off another shot, discovered I had to adjust a little more, and...

I think you can guess the rest: By the time I was beginning to approach what could be an OK setup, the boy was impatient beyond belief. He'd been waiting on his bicycle believing we were supposed to take a single snap of him to send to his grandmothers, and there I was -- twisting wheels, clicking buttons and snapping away like a madman. And before allowing me to take this final shot, he backed his bike back up from the little edge he had stood on, kind of ruining the cool "mountain biker on the edge" shot I was going for.

So a lesson for next time is that I'll set up the lights using an object of similar size (or myself) first, and only when I'm satisfied bring in my children or wife or whatever I'm supposed to photograph.

Because the only thing this portrait tells anyone is: "Bad old dad, can I go inside and watch TV now?"

Not quite the story I wanted to tell, but hey -- at least I got to try a couple of techniques. Hebedesign: You're hereby challenged to go out and do the same :-)

What I did here was this:

Ambient light underexposed 1 stop
Camera set to tungsten white balance
Flash on tripod, camera left,
Flash head covered with CTO gel
Flash zoomed to 50mm to narrow the light beam
Flash set to E-TTL and 1 2/3 underexposure