Monday, May 25, 2009

Studio Photography

Late March i attended a studio photography class, just to push myself outside my comfort zone. Studio photography has been something I have been interesting in doing for a long time, but never got around to do it. I've had some basic equipment for off camera flash photography, but always found excuses not to use it.

The class was initiated by Johnny Buchwald, from a Swedish Nikon photo club, and lead by John Hagby. We had two great models, Catarina and Mikael. John explained how to set up the light and then we were off shooting like crazy. It was super fun and I learned a lot. I only missed setting up the light myself, but the class schedule unfortunately didn't allow for that.











I recently bought a SB-900 flash, a stand and an umbrella, to further develop my skills. I'm also hoping to attend a upcoming class using off camera flash and learn how to set the light myself.

If you would like to get in touch with the models, please send me an email.

You can watch the complete set of images by clicking here. Please critique my images below or at my Flickr account, both negative and positive feedback is welcome. Until next time - make sure to pick up the camera often and happy shooting.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Spring photos

This blog post includes images from different occasions - kind of a summary of my spring photos. With a few exceptions the photos from these sessions have been taken during early morning or late night. It's getting difficult to get the early golden hours here during spring because it is sooooo early in the morning, sunrise right now is at 4:33 am. On the other hand, sun sets at 10:45 pm so it is plenty of time to do evening shots. I bought a new flash, the SB-900, which I have been playing with outdoors and indoors. Making outdoor late night phots with flash is fun. Playing with the balance between the flash and the ambient light is a challange, but very fun one you get the idea and how to take advantage of the manual camera and flash mode.

Here is an example of a late evening image where I decided to more or less let the background go completely dark. It was actually pretty light outside even though it was late (8:45 pm). With a short exposure time 1/125s, a fairly large apperture f/4.5 and ISO 400 the background turned dark and the object was correctly exposured.

Learning how to balance flash and ambient light really gives you tons of opprtunities to create images with a different touch. I would guess youwill see more daytime and evening flash photos here. The indoor flash images will have to wait a while until I feel more confident working in the studio. I still have to post the images from my studio shoot I did late March.

You can watch the complete set of images by clicking here. Please critique my images below or at my Flickr account, both negative and positive feedback is welcome. Until next time - make sure to pick up the camera often and happy shooting.