Today, after I was finished with work, I started to experiment with some of the new lighting equipment I recently purchased. The nice UPS people brought me some new toys the other day, including two more SB900 speedlights to add to the one I already had, an SB700 speedlight for Jenny’s camera and as a sometimes-additional for me, a Lumiquest SoftBox III, a pair of Nikon SD-9 battery packs for the SB900′s, and a bunch of other bits and baubles. I wanted a chance to play with the SoftBox III (SBIII) so that I could get some experience with it. Today, I noticed the candelabra above looking lonely on its little sheet music cabinet, so I decided to light it up.
I wish I had remembered to pull back and shoot the setups, but I wasn’t thinking along those lines at the time. You, friendly readers, will have to get by with some diagrams and descriptions.
First up, Diagram #1:
It was a pretty simple setup. I put a 1/4 CTO gel on an SB900, added the standard diffusion cap, and then put on the SBIII. I mounted it on an umbrella swivel and put that on a stand slightly in front of the candelabra, pointing almost 90° at the subject, coming down from about a foot and a half above. That got me something that looked like this:
This was nicer than a standard flash with just a diffusion cap on it, but it wasn’t all that flattering to the candelabra. It was also cold, so I flipped from auto to “cloudy” white balance:
OK, that’s a little warmer. The character still isn’t quite right, though. This is probably positioning at this point. So, I lowered the light to just a little bit above, but still at about the same angle:
Hmm. This is more interesting. But, now I have an ugly shadow line on the wall in the upper left corner, and candle shadows on the right. Also, I’m not holding much detail in those shadows, so blah. Let’s move the light again to shooting almost fully profile from almost the height of the candelabra:
OK, not fabulous. I’m liking this a little bit better, but it still has some issues. The shadows are even deeper now that I’ve moved the light closer to the subject (thanks, inverse square law). The shadow line in the upper left is even more pronounced. Getting there. It also still doesn’t feel right to me color-wise, so I go into manual white balance and crank it to 10k. I move the light so that it is now slightly behind the candelabra and shooting towards the camera just a little bit (essentially, I’ve put the light in profile shooting position and then went just a little bit further back). We get this:
So, at this point, I notice that what I really want is a little bit of fill light. And I really want the corner of that picture frame out of the shot. So I move the whole stand a bit to the left. I set up another SB900 with no gel on a table stand with the diffusion dome. In regular bounce mode, it had some trouble keeping up at f/16 (I really wanted my depth of field as clean as possible, and our ceilings in this room are high and a little dark, so I can’t fault it too much). So I angled it a little further down, which let some direct light hit the candelabra. Guess what happened? Evil shadows of doom:
Blah. This will not do. So I pull out the TriGrip “difflector” and put that in front of the SB900 fill flash. Now our diagram looks a little more like this:
And a resulting photo from this setup looks a little like this:
Now the hotspot on the wall is bothering me, so I turn the light a little more toward the camera. This causes an additional problem, as now it’s hitting the TriGrip, too, and providing additional fill for itself:
Ergh. Too much fill now, so let’s resposition the TriGrip and the key light in the SBIII a little to try to deal with this. The result is something that I will call “done” for the day. I’ll have to play with these some more in the future, but it was good to run everything through its paces and get some experience with the SBIII. Final product for tonight:
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