Thursday, January 21, 2010

New toys! Woohoo

This past christmas was a tight one.  Money being tight and kids presents get more expensive as they get older, my wife and I decided to forego christmas for each other this year.  It was still a really good year for gifts though!  For Valentines she got a house, later a new car.  I got my dream camera body, a Nikon D700 and the most awesome Sigma 70-200 f2.8 EX II.

I've been researching wireless flash triggers a lot lately as the ones I have are really unreliable.  I finally came to the conclusion that the CyberSyncs from Paul C. Buff gave me the best reliability for the price.  I had been talking about it a lot around my wife.  Today, I had the pleasure of receiving a package from UPS.  It was a set of cybersyncs!  I love my wife!  To go along with it, my new reflective umbrella arrived that I scored from a gent on Ebay for $10 after shipping.  To my surprise, it's not a cheapie chinese one either.  It's a Calumet 40 reflective that's the heaviest duty I've ever seen, it even included a leather case.

Of course I just had to take some pictures to try everything out :)

Before I blast you all with the pictures, I want to tell you about a friend of mine...

Stacy Pearsall

Stacy is an acclaimed photographer that got her start in the U.S. Air Force as a Combat Camera photographer.  She now owns and operates the Charleston Center for Photography which is a non profit studio and center dedicated to the low country photography and art community.  Her dedication to arts and community shows that even though she has left the AF, she has not left their core values!

I had a chance last August to attend a workshop at CCforP on Model Coaching (by the most awesome Diana Deaver) and I must say that the center and courses/instructors are all top notch!

She and her husband, also a talent photog, are working on a 365 which they are documenting on their blog at http://www.f8pj.blogspot.com/.  Please check it out.

Now on with the pics!!!!

These are just some simple fun shots trying out my new cybersyncs and reflective umbrella, nothing serious.

My wife was showing me someones wedding album an asked me what this effect was, so I had to show her how to do it.  Of course, I was rather familiar with it but never really tried it myself before.  It's called shutter dragging, basically long handheld exposure with flash to freeze the subject.

For this one I used a 2 second exposure and a bare SB-800.  During the exposure I rotated the camera 90 degrees to get the effect from the blinds in the background.

D700, 2 secs, f11, iso100, 1/8th power




Same method as above, but instead of rotating the camera I used rear sync flash (slow sync for the canon crowd), starting out 70mm and zoomed in during the exposure.

D700, 2 secs, f11, iso100, 1/8th power w/ rear curtain sync.




I shot this with a bare flash pointing up at the ceiling to light the whole area, direct bare flash is the DEVIL!!!

D700, 1/125th, f2.8, iso100, can't remember flash power setting.




reflective umbrella with SB-800 camera left.

D700, 1/125th, f4, iso100, 1/8th power if I remember corretly.







She was asleep in the chair and just starting to wake up as I was finishing with my son.  I quickly sat my lighting up by her to grab this shot real quick!

D700, 1/80th, f8, iso400, can't remember flash power though.




Of course, this is what happened when my 7 year old got ahold of ahold of my  D700!  An eye for composition but I may need to get him a VR lens :)



Keep shooting!

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