Photography News issue 26

Technique 32

Photography News Issue 26 absolutephoto.com

Tabletop photography is fun and I’m regularly pick up some flowers to keep my shutter finger exercised during the long winter nights. You don’t needmuch kit either and I often shoot blooms with natural daylight. Of course at this time of year daylight timeislimitedsoit’stimetogetoutthe flashgun. It is surprising what can be achieved with one or two flashguns and a few extra accessories. Obviously, much depends onwhat kit you have at your disposal but if you only have a single flashgun you can still get shooting. You can use the flashgun on the camera but the results won’t be too special and you have much more creative flexibility if you get the flash off the camera. Triggering the flashgun can be done, depending on the model, with a cable or by using a radio trigger. Should you not have either option, you can even fire the flash using its test button with the shutter open on the B setting. This means setting up, focusing and so on with the lights on, and then making the actual exposure in the dark, so while it is possible it’s bit more of a fiddle and not especially convenient. With accessories like the Hähnel Captur flash trigger and remote camera release selling for £60, if you don’t have a radio trigger right now, they are not expensive. The camera used for these pictures was a Fujifilm X-T1 with, mostly, the 60mm f/2.4 macro and a few with the Fujifilm 56mm f/1.2 for really shallow depth-of-field. To enable close focusing one or two Fujifilm extension tubes were used, the MCEX-11 and the MCEX-16. Floral delight I started to shoot in earnest and spent a couple of hours shooting through the bouquet I picked up at the local supermarket Right This was shot with the 56mm f/1.2 with an extension tube to let me get really close. An aperture of f/2.8 was set to give a very shallow depth-of-field. Far right top Taken with the Fuji 60mmmacro lens set to f/16 for good depth-of-field with the flash and brolly over the subject. Far right bottom A second flash fitted with a blue gel was aimed at the background, a pale blue shirt. On this occasion, the main light was moved round to be at almost 90° to the subject for a strong side-lighting effect. All shots processed through Google Nik Color Efex Pro.

Shadow-free lighting

The camera was fixed onto a Gitzo GT2532 tripod and a Benro G2 ball head. Two flashguns, a Phottix Mitros+ and a Nikon SB-900 were used mounted on Phottix Varos Pro Flash Shoe Umbrella holders and these were placed on lighting stands. A shoot through white brolly on the Mitros+ was the main light and the Nikon was fitted with a Honl grid and blue filter gel was the secondary unit. The flash units were triggered using PocketWizard Plus III units. Both flashguns were set tomanual output. I didn’t use a flash meter and just tested output by taking pictures and then adjusting output to get what looked good on the camera monitor. Getting the effect of one light right at a time is a good way of working before using both lights and doing any final fine-tuning. The Mitros+, the main light, is a powerful GN58 (IS0 100/metres) flashgun and fitted with the supplied diffuser and shooting through a white brolly full power was needed, even though the light was three feet or less from the subject. Using extension tubes meant light loss of 1EV or so. I was shooting mostly at f/11 or f/16 with the camera set to ISO 200 and when the 56mm was fitted, I opened up to f/2 and f/2.8 for very selective focus. For the wide aperture shots, less power was needed and the main light was set to 1/64th output. The second flashgun, the Nikon was set to ¼ power and with or without the blue filter, that seemed about right. A sheet of white board was used as the background for most of the images, but for the blue

Fashion Ringflash is widely used in subjects as diverse as fashion and portraiture to medical and record photography for shadowless lighting. A device like the RayFlash turns a flashgun into a

very effective low cost ringflash that is also very portable. It sells for £89 and two versions are available, Short Neck or Long Neck, depending on the height of the DSLR/flashgun combination you’re using. See the Flaghead website for more details on which one you need. The Universal adapter means the RayFlash will fit any speedlight-type flashgun. It doesn’t have any electronics inside and no cables are needed. You just mount the unit into the flashgun and the RayFlash’s internal arrangement of prisms and reflectors distributes the output evenly and efficiently around unit from the flashgun to give the ringflash effect. Because the RayFlash is attached to a dedicated hot- shoe mounted flashgun, you can take advantage of the TTL flash metering system and use flash exposure compensation to fine- tune shots. Or switch to manual for full control. The choice is yours because you have full dedication.

background shots, I used a plain pale-blue shirt stretched out across the board. A white backdrop is not effective for colouringwith a filter gel and something like amid-greywould have been better but my wardrobe doesn’t have such an item. After an hour or so getting kit together, setting up and experimenting, I started to shoot in earnest and spent a couple of hours shooting through the bouquet I pickedupfromthelocalsupermarket. Main light position was varied, moving it to one side formore texture and then held above the bloom for a softer effect. The second light was varied from providing a blue background and then fitted with just the Honl grid aimed at the subject acting as a fill-in.

The results were uploaded into Lightroom and put through a film emulation plug-in – in this case Google Nik’s Color Efex Pro – to give the results shown here. I suppose if I was clever I could have connected the camera to a laptopandshot tetheredso I couldsee the image on a larger screen seconds after taking the shot. I found the X-T1 needs a $27 plug-in for Lightroom so I didn’t bother on this occasion. One of the joys of tabletop like this is that you can revisit the subject immediately if you don’t like the result and re-shoot. Indeed, if you have the space the set-up can be left up for the winter so whenever the urge arises, you can go shoot immediately. It’s a great way to help those long winter nights zip by. WC

flaghead.co.uk

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