Posts Tagged ‘430EX II’
Playing with strobes – el cheapo style
I’ve been reading the Strobist blog lately and going through the heaps of strobist groups on flickr. The quality and creativity of some of these images is pretty astounding.
So I decided to play around with off-camera flash. Lack of equipment was an issue to start off with. I had to get the speedlite off the camera. There are many ways to do that, and I won’t go into that here (the Strobist blog is where to look that up). I  decided to go with the el-cheapo solution (hotshoe adapter and pc cable) since I’m still learning, I’ll eventually upgrade to radio triggers. For about 300SEK/30€ I managed to get an adapter and 5m of  cable… yeah…that’s a lot of cable when you’re trying to work and not tripping over it was a bit of a challenge. Right there I began to see the advantages of radio triggers. You can run multiple strobes with this setup using splitter-cables but that involves even more mess.
The flash was run in manual mode and correct exposure was achieved through a now pretty much standard trial and error method. To go with the whole water theme used a blue gel. I tried several positions for the strobe. What worked best for the shots of drops was to lay the flash down almost parallel to the table but point it up just a little bit to give more light to the contours of the glass. The fill light was provided by the on-camera flash dialed 2 stops down. I’ve also tried reflecting the light off the sheet of glass that my subject was on with some pretty decent results. The wine glass was shot with the strobe dialed down to 1/32 and placed right of the glass, directly under it and looking up.  The setup is in the video. On a sidenote, I really need a better video camera, the LG Viewty, even though it shoots 120fps video just isn’t enough.
Here are some images:
Things to think about:
A smooth non-reflective background is key. The cardboard I used had too much of a texture and I had to pull the blacks all the way town in LR for the black background to look smooth and black. Next time I’m gonna try a black sheet, sure it has a texture but I don’t think it’ll reflect as much.
Timing, at least for water drops, is everything. Maybe I’m just  uncoordinated but using a straw as a way to drip water into a glass is tedious and inaccurate. Next time I’ll try a pipette.
This is a trivial one…wash the glass properly. The clone/heal tools work wonders but not using them saves time.
As I was failing to time my shots properly I began to think about some kind of sound trigger, where the camera would be left in complete darkness with the shutter open and the flash would only trigger when say a drop hit the water. That however is  a story for another post, when I’ve had time to figure out how to build one of these triggers.
New flashy toy…. (see the funny in it?)
Ever since I started reading the strobist blog I’ve been amazed at what cool effects you can achieve with strobes. The latest addition to my gear is a Canon Speedlite 430EX II flash, again from Japanfoto in Stockholm. They seem to be offering decent prices and a great customer experience (again…not getting paid to say this). I’m pretty new to using strobes creatively, I’ve mostly been using them as head-on fill light so far, so I have loads to learn. The plan is to get a Speedlite 580EX II when I become more familiar with strobes and to use the 580 as a master and the 430 as a slave.  I think I’m gonna stop at 2 strobes, since most things really don’t require more than that. I had a look around for wireless triggers too and I think this is the way to go, sync cables are fine but wireless just seems to provide so many more possibilities. Pocketwizards are way out of my budget so I’m probably gonna go with no-name radio triggers that have both a hotshoe and pc connector. This enables me to get whatever strobe as long as it has a  hotshoe connection. There’s really no end to getting photo gear is there??
I’ve only tested this strobe for one afternoon, but it’s proven to be pretty neat. The fully flexible head gives room for creativity and the foot construction makes it easy to just attach it to the hotshoe and shoot. I’ll post some results from todays  photowalk later on.
Here’s what the 430EX II looks like:
