Shoot Location

Yesterday I was talking to a lady about doing a family portrait session with her and her two girls. This afternoon my wife and I went for a drive to check out some of the local parks, looking for a good location for the family portrait session. In Sartell (MN) we found a small neighborhood park at the corner of Pine Cone RD. N and 1^st St. N. Lion’s Park is very picturesque with green lawns, picnic benches, trees and flowers. It even has a small vine covered gazebo with flowers all around. I think it will make a great location for pictures.

Down by the Lake

We were up at the lake this weekend, visiting my wife’s sister and her family. I took some pictures down by the water, I have always had a problem with water pictures. There is a reflection off the water that messes up your exposure. For these photos, I bumped the exposure up one stop. Anyway, this is something I’ll have to work on.

Umbrella Softbox

Godox and Neewer make some very reasonably priced umbrella style soft boxes (https://www.amazon.com/Neewer-centimeters-Octagonal-Speedlight Photography/dp/B00PIM3I6I/ref=sr_1_24?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1500749277&sr=1-24&keywords=godox+softbox). The drawback is the way the flash and part of the light stand are inside the softbox. This arrangement limits the movement of the softbox. The pivot point for the softbox in inside the softbox.

There are several companies that make a boom arm that allow you to mount two or more flash units inside the softbox while keeping the flashes in the center and putting the pivot point outside of the softbox. This arrangement allows you to have full movement of the softbox.

I have the 32” version with two Godox V860II or two Godox V850 flashes inside. The V850’s are manual only, the V860II’s are full TTL and manual.

Roadside Wildflowers

Took these pictures alongside the road near my house.

The camera I used was a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 100mm macro lens and a Canon MR-14EX macro ring light.

Real Estate Photography

I did a quick Real Estate shoot for a company in Minneapolis this morning. They wanted 10 to 15 shoots of the exterior of the building. This was my second try at doing Real Estate photography. One of the tricks to Real Estate photography is to have the camera level. If the camera is level the vertical lines will appear straight. If the camera is not level the vertical lines will curve. I added a sky to these photos, not one of my best jobs.

New Speedlite

Just got a new speedlite that I’m very excited about. It’s a Godox V860-IIc with TTL & HSS (TTL=through the lens, HSS-high speed sync) and a guide number of 198. Rechargeable Li-ion battery pack and charger. What more could you ask for? Well how about a built-in radio trigger, TTL mode, Manual mode and multi-mode. All for $165 from Amazon. I also picked up a Godox X1T-c radio trigger transmitter that mounts on top of the camera. This unit allows you to control the speedlite from the camera.

Speedlite

I plan to use this speedlite with a couple of small soft-boxes I have. One is the SMDV diffuser SpeedBox-S50 (21”) and the other is the SMDV diffuser SpeedBox-S60 (24”). I hope to do some portrait work later this week or next. I will publish the results.

21" Softbox

24" Softbox

Backgrounds

I have five collapsible backgrounds. Not sure which one I like better. On one hand, I like the brown/yellow and Blue/white because they are brighter and make the photo pop. On the other hand, the black, white and the gray/white are more subdued and don’t draw your attention away from the subject. What do you think?

Brown/Yellow

Blue/White

Black

White

Gray/White

Biker

I did a shoot with a young biker and his two friends yesterday. The second time to use my Flashpoint XPLOR 600 strobe. First time using the light in TTL mode. I had trouble getting consistent results. Will have to look into that problem this week, hopefully get things worked out before next weekend.

Anyway, for the biker I put the camera in manual mode, flash in TTL mode. Set the exposure off the background and let the flash set itself. The biker and his two friends were easy enough to get along with, but I would not want to cross his two friends.

Dancers

Hi, I’m a 75-year-old retired sheet metal worker. I’ve been working at learning photography for the last two or three years. I found this blog today and thought I would give it a try.

I picked up a new light a couple of weeks ago. It’s the Flashpoint XPLOR 600 HSS TTL, long name but great strobe, it came with the R2 controller.

I’ve only used it once and then only in the manual mode. I do volunteer photography for a couple of origination here in town. One of those organizations wanted photos of some dancers to go on the cover of there in house magazine. Below is one of the photos and a lighting diagram. 

The two dancers didn’t want to pose, they wanted to dance freely and if I saw a pose that I liked I was to yell “FREEZE” and they would stop for a photo. But of course, by the time I yelled and they stopped it was too late for what I saw.

So, I set my lights and camera to f/8, my shutter speed to 1/200 (highest sync speed on my camera), my AF-mode to AL-Servo and drive-mode to single shooting. Set my auto focus to single point and moved the point to the left and up a little. I would hold the focus point on the male dancer and take a picture every two or three seconds. All of my lights were Godox with big fully charged batteries and were able to kept up with me and the camera. The flash was enough to freeze the action in most cases.

If anyone actually reads this I would welcome suggestions as to how I could have done it differently.