Hot on the heels (sorry for the pun :-)) of the fashion show at the Funky Buddha club came the second leg (not sorry for that on :-)) of the tour. This time at the Embassy Club and featuring two different designers, Cushh Clothing and Bianca Bast.
This time I was significantly better prepared and I was working on the assumption that come the time of the show, the club would turn off all their lights again. Sure enough, they did. One of the lessons I’d learned at the previous show was a single speedlite was definitely not going to do the job for me whether on camera or off. I’m really glad I made that assumption too because this place was like a cave. A very trendy, fashionable and up market cave, but a cave nevertheless.
This time I was determined not to be beaten and only walk away with a handful of images. The goal was at least one image, suitable for submission of each outfit.
So, what did I do differently?
This time I used three speedlites and lit the centre line of the dance floor where the models woud be walking to f/4 along it’s entire length using two slaves, one to camera left to light the right and one to camera right to ight the left. Meanwhile I had one 580exII on the hot shoe complete with it’s diffuser cup but dialed down by about a stop to act as a fill. This light also acted as the master and allowed me to remotely control the power output of each of the slaves independently from it’s lcd and thumbwheel. This is a really great feature of the 580exII speedlites when coupled with the PocketWizard Mini/Flex triggers. It should also work over IR too but I suspect it wouldn’t have worked in this scenario owing to the positioning of my lights.
So there I was with an ambient exposure of 8s at f/4, ISO 1600 but able to light the entire dance floor to 125th at f/4, ISO 400. The two slaves were set to about 1/8 power each so I could have dropped the ISO to 200 or even 100 but I wanted the batteries to last as long as possible with a fast recycle time. As it was I must have had between 300 and 400 shots from each set of AAs.
The background of the club does disappear to black very quickly but I’m not too worried about that and without adding more lights or dragging the shutter it would have been difficult to correct for.
One of the biggest problems I did face on the evening though was with the mirrors that the club had placed everywhere. In a lot of the shots I’ve either caught my own flash or that of one of the other photographers.
One the whole I felt a lot happier with this show and the resulting images are testament to this. They could be better though. For me the background is just too dark.
Cushh…
Bianca Bast…
