Early morning light

I wanted to create a picture that invokes the sense of early morning light. This can be a typical cold blue light.
To achieve this, I set my white balance to tungsten, which causes a blue color cast on the whole image. When you find the color too blue, you can compensate a bit by using white balance compensation. Reduce for less blue, increase for more blue color. In the case below I used a white balance compensation of -2.

I then used a flash to separate the foreground from the background. To achieve this, I underexposed the image with two stops. I then used a SB-800 (camera left) in wireless TTL mode to light the foreground. The flash is fully zoomed to 105mm, as this gives a more directed beam.

The flash was gelled with a CTO gel, to compensate for the tungsten white balance, so subjects in the foreground look natural.

The result is the image below.

If I had not used the tungsten white balance, the whole image would in various shades of green as this is what the park looked like at the moment I photographed it (about 11:30 in the morning). This would be a very dull picture. By setting the white balance to tungesten, I can make the green of the lillies pointing out of the water look really green by compensating with a CTO gel.

Back since a long time

It's been too long since I posted here. I thought I'd celebrate it by applying a new layout to this blog. Hope you like it.

I have been experimenting a bit with product photography. As I recently purchase a set of Altec Lansing speakers for my iPod, I thought it might be fun to create an image of this that could be used in an advert for the speakers: setting must be outdoors, as the speakers can work on batteries (11 hours lifetime!!). So, I decided to photograph the speakers out on the terrace.


This is the result.

I created the picture with the following tools:

• Nikon D80
• Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF
• SB-800 flash

The iPod speakers are in the shadow of a sun umbrella, the background is in the full sun. I first created a photograph without flash, underexposing with 2 stops, making sure the iPod speakers are too dark and the background is slightly underexposed.

I then added flash to the camera left. Flash was set to TTL, no modifications. I think the result is quite OK, maybe even useful for a magazine.

Let me know what you think!

Off-camera flash and white balance

I once saw a picture by Joe McNally where he photographed a pretty standard office, but played with off-camera flash and white balance. I think the picture was in his excellent book 'The Hot Shoe Diaries'. The woman in the picture was behind computer screen. McNally had played with off-camera flash and with white balance. I decided to create a similar photograph. The first step in the process can be seen below.

The image was created by setting the white balance to tungsten. This creates the blue color cast in the picture. The shutter is set to 1/250s, which almost kills the ambient light. My daughter's face is lit by an SB-800 Speedlight with a difffuser on, which is laying in front of her, hidden by her left arm. ISO is 100, f/4.0.
The image is taken around noon, but by almost killing the ambient light, it gives an atmosphere of the end of the day, with no indoor lights on.

Next step in the process is give my daughter's face a more pleasant tint than the pale blue. To achieve this, I put an orange gel on my on my SB-800, which neutralizes the tungsten white balance for her face. The result is the picture below. Again 1/250s, f/4.0 and ISO 100. Both pictures have been taken with a Nkon D80 and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF lens.

If you have comments, let me know.

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