Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Photoshoot Post Mortem

I had my first opportunity to do a proper portrait shoot last night and it went pretty well. It was for a friend’s business website, and he left pretty happy with the result. He’s a legal-type, so the mood we were shooting for was confidence, competence, authority, all that kind of thing.

From a photography point of view, I had the following kit on hand: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L, Canon Speedlite 580 EXII and a borrowed Sigma slave flash. The 580 was off-camera on a PC-sync cord and the Sigma flash (not used above) was being triggered as a slave.

We were doing this in a room about 12 feet wide and one of the problems I found it hard to get away from was casting shadows. Those were hard to avoid because I couldn’t get the main flash further away from the camera than the length of my arm. Now I understand the reason why David Hobby’s Lighting 101 series brings up wireless triggers within the first five articles.

The second problem, related to the first, was a lack of repeatability. When your light stand (er, arm) moves from shot to shot, and then starts to get tired pretty quickly, it’s really hard to make incremental improvements to a shot that turned out OK but could have been a little better. Additionally, when one hand is your light stand, that only leaves one more to handle the camera. The combination of 30D, plus grip, plus the 24-105L is not a lightweight camera. To say my arms were tired by the end would be something of an understatement.

Have you looked at the Strobist lighting kits from Midwest Photo Exchange? They’re in the US, but it looks like a nice starter kit for studio lighting.

I’ve gone for two slightly different tacks with this sort of thing (though the results were nowhere near as good!):

* Stick the camera on a tripod and concentrate on holding the flash. That works reasonably well with still life because you can set up the shot, then wander around with the flash & remote trigger as far as cables will stretch.

* Put the flash on a tripod. That gets you the repeatability for making incremental changes because at least the light stays in the right place and, if your sync cable is long enough, you’ve got more freedom to move around.

Adding to Graeme’s comments; owning an inexpensive tripod to hold a flash and having a tripod for the camera will help. The 24-105 doesn’t have IS, so stabilising it will help a great lens perform even better.