Upde Designs

My vacation is going by at blink speed.  While most normal people would be bored out of their mind it has been a wonderful experience from my view-point.  We had our carpets cleaned Tuesday so we have furniture piled everywhere.  If  I wanted something or just want to move from one end of the house to the other it is a chore.

I’ve been working on some projects that I never seem to have time for during the normal work week.  One of those projects was to set up my Elinchrom BX 500 RI multivoltage strobes that I got way back in March.   So today I decided since there was no furniture to mess with I’d set them up in the living room and see if I could figure out how to make them work.  🙂

They are really neat lights.  They have 500 watts of power that is adjustable in 1/10th level increments.  I have a 39″ x  39″ soft box on one and a 52″ Octa hooded diffuser on the other as my main portrait light.

They are way more light then I should have but it worked out for me to buy them at a very reasonable price with proceeds from a design job I did.  I want to get more into studio portraiture type work so I think it was a good investment.  I normally shoot with a green screen but was able to pick up a couple of muslin photography backgrounds for $20 each.

From the time I started setting the lights up to when I was ready to shoot was a little over an hour.  I assume that time would get quicker the more times I do it.  So now that I have everything set up I have to take some images right?

That’s what I said to Jeanne but she was not happy about standing in front of the background to have her picture taken.  We had been working on projects all day and she was not in the mood to have her picture taken.  I assured her that I would not post it.  🙂

It’s funny all the mistakes a person makes when they are doing something that they normally don’t do.  For example, once I got the lights set up I took a meter reading and it told me that I could shoot the image at 1/200 sec at f8.0.

When I took the image it was completely blown out.  Then I looked at the meter and it was set to ISO 100, which is the native ISO for the D800.  The D3S has a native ISO of 200.  Making that adjustment gave me an f-stop of f11.  Still blown out.  Then I look at the ISO setting on the D3S and it is at ISO 800 because of some images I shot at dusk Tuesday evening.  Once I made those adjustments f11 @ ISO 200 was indeed the correct setting.

Even after all the missteps once I got it dialed in the lights were great.  I didn’t pay much attention to the posing of my subject and I took a straight on head shot, which is not a great way to shoot a portraiture.  I also didn’t have the lights set up the right way but it was more of an experiment with the lights than a serious portrait photo shoot.  Besides that she kept moving on me and I had to beg her to come back each time.

I hope I didn’t bore you with all the light talk.  Fun stuff for me but I suspect most of you would rather see something else.  Assuming Jeanne doesn’t hurt me after posting the shot above, I’ll be back tomorrow with some more images.

Only 4 more days left of my vacation.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.