Playing with light

My wife and her new hairdo, originally uploaded by Dave Romanis.

Ever since I found the Strobist web site, I've been hooked on flash photography, especially off-camera, multiple-flash photography.

This shot is part of a photoshoot I did today (June 5, 2010) with my obliging wife as the subject.

I used both flashes with a couple of modifiers I have collected over the years. Most recently, I bought a Strobella mini umbrella from www.strobella.com which is a comical bit of kit - I'm sure I'd be sniggered at in professional circles for having this overgrown cocktail umbrella sticking out of my flash, but I didn't care.

The umbrella came with its own velcro strap which is used to attach the umbrella to the front of the flash. I was hand-holding the flash so the highly mobile umbrella is very useful.

The second flash - the Canon 430EX - was sitting on a chair to the right of Lou with a Lumiquest mini softbox attached to spread the light a bit more (and soften it as well). I chose to shoot it through a makeshift 'cookie' to produce the effect on the wall behind Lou and with the wider spread it also provided a little bit of hairlight.

I handheld the umbrella'd Pentax flash high and left of Lou and around 2 feet away to make the light as soft as possible. The umbrella is nothing to be scoffed at; it really spreads the light nicely and in this shot, it provided a lovely soft light on Lou's hair, shoulder and neck.

I applied the sepia and vignette effects in Lightroom and cropped it to put Lou vaguely in the centre, but no sharpening was needed as I'd used the Live View mode on the 5D (using a tripod) to fine tune the focus at f/16. My F-Stop iPhone app (very useful) told me that the depth of field at f/16 was going to be around 40cm at 55mm focal distance - the 5D on the tripod was only 1m to 1.5m away from Lou.

I was happy with the result and this is one of my favourites from the shoot. I REALLY need some light stands though!