My First Off-Camera Flash Photoshoot

Ok, so I finally picked up the equipment that I needed to get my flash gear off my camera. A couple of PC cables, three PC to HotShoe adapters and two sliver umbrellas (dollar store specials, no fancy photographic gear here) are what I had to purchase in order to sync my two legacy Sunpak flashes off my camera (put on the two tripods that I have). Being that this is New Years weekend and all, it's the ideal situation for a little family photoshoot.

My photoshoot started last night (before I had the umbrellas) with us playing around in my girlfriend's kitchen. This first photo is a shot of Mark, my girlfriend's father. Here I was using only one tripod and had the other flash laying on the counter. As you can see here, the lighting was a little harsh and overpowering, but the end result was still pretty good, and the two direct flashes washed out any shadow behind Mark pretty well. This was a fluke. For the majority of the photos I took last night, I wasn't able to eliminate the wall shadows behind my subjects by using direct flash.

These next two show my sweetheart Bethany and her little sister Emily, respectively. Here you can see more of the wall shadows that plagued me. I was able to get rid of some of it in my post-processing (I was using Picasa) but it's still clear from these that a direct flash just wasn't going to cut it.

So this morning I was off to get some equipment. First, we scrounged around the house for some umbrellas. The closest that I could find to white studio umbrellas was a single silver umbrella (used for catching rain, not flash photography). Much to my suprise, the silver umbrella actually reflected the flashed light pretty well, and it didn't cast an ugly color! So, I ran out to the dollar store and picked up another silver umbrella to match the one I already had.

From this photo of Emily, you can clearly see that the umbrellas made all of the difference in the world. This shot (and the others below) were set up with one flash on the subject's left (the right hand side of the photo) and another in front of the subject, on her right (so coming from the left of the photo). The main advantage here is that the face is illuminated by the front flash, while the area behind Emily is exposed by the back flash. You can still see just a hint of a shadow behind the xmas tree in the background, but that tree is sitting right against the wall, so eliminating all of the shadows would be nearly impossible.

This second shot of Emily, a mug, shows more of the advantage of the two-flash system. I really like this photo, except that Em's hair is casting a shadow over her right eye. I didn't even think about hair when I took the shot, but it's clearly something that I missed.

The final photos that I have to show you today are similar poses of Bethany. Here I got lucky with the hair issue, as Bethany's hair tends not to cover her eyes naturally. In both of these shots, you can definately tell that there are two light sources, as the one on the photograph's right shines brightly against Bethany's blonde hair, while the front/left strobe light's most of her face.

One of the biggest suprises of all these umbrella/soft strobe shots is the color balance. I was really suprised at how even the flash-color was coming off of a silver $4 umbrella. It kind of makes me wonder why the pro guys spend big bucks on their studio umbrellas.

That's all I have for this post. I'm sure that there will be much more of this to come (I'm absolutely loving this portrait thing), but short of analyzing every one of the 60 photos that I saved (many more were taken and deleted), I don't have anything more to share tonight.