Equipment news and reviews
On Friday evening one of my friends asked an interesting question…
“I want to upgrade to a full frame body but will my lenses work?”
By way of answering I thought I’d write this post to explain the differences but the general rule of thumb is very simple…
EF lenses can be used with both full frame bodies and crop bodies.
EF-S lenses can only be used with crop bodies
Continue reading Why won’t EF-S lenses work on a Full Frame body? »
The owner of my London studio handed me a pack of goodies from Lumiquest and Lastolite yesterday to play with as he knows I do a lot of strobist work on location. It’s one of their sample sets and contains a couple of pop-up soft boxes, a pocket bouncer modifier and a snoot.
The flash batteries are charging as I type and I can’t wait to get out in the field to try them out and see what I can do with them.
First impressions are that the soft boxes, the Lumiquest Softbox and the Lastolite Micro Apollo light modifier will be ideal for a lot of the close up work I do where I don’t have the luxury of using the Westcott Apollo softbox, and a naked speedlite is way too hard to be flattering for many of my subjects.
The Lumiquest Promax Snoot is really cool and I have big ideas about what to do with a pencil thin beam of light. No idea if they’ll work or not though but I won’t know until I try. I like using grids on speedlites so it will be interesting to compare the results.
Not overly sure what to do with the Lumiquest Pocket Bouncer yet but I have a little project coming up in a couple of weeks where it might be just the right tool for the job.
Watch this space, I’ll be reviewing each item in a separate post shortly. Need to get some images first though.
Back in the studio tomorrow for an all day shoot. To be honest, I should really be prepping and packing rather than writing this but I thought it might be good to explain what I take and why.
I’m a great believer in packing for the occasion, in this case the studio, but it needs a little thought and planning. You need to take the right stuff and if you’re not careful you’ll end up taking far too much. Even worse, you may end up not taking something essential.
Here’s what I take Continue reading What’s in the bag? Packing for a shoot is more than gear in a bag »
I have a couple of questions about how I did the battey shot in this post so thought I’d post the lighting setup in the form of the sketch above. It’s a very simple technique and took about 5 minutes to do.
The foundation for the set was a sheet of black corrugated plastic upon which I sat my camera bag to act as a black background. I then roughly positioned two 580EX II speedlites, the one to camera left standing up on its penguin feet and the one to camera right laying down on its side. Both were fitted with Pocket Wizard triggers. I’d originally planned to use the window light to light the set with the speedlites just adding a cool effect to represent the concept of power. In the end I elected to use the ambient just as fill with the main illumination coming from the speedlites bouncing into a silver reflector.
I’ve repeated the final image after the jump for those that are interested. Continue reading Technique: How it was done… Battery Shot »
I do a lot of strobist work out on location and really enjoy it. One thing that is a real bind is battery management and how to pack them in your kit bag so you know which ones are which when it comes to using them. This quick tip explains how I go about it.
The image above is, for me, part of the solution. I simply use an old, plastic business card box with dividers made from some of the old cards. It’ll comfortably hold 24 AA batterie, enough for 2 spare sets with 3 speedlites or 3 spare sets with 2 speedlites. This is more than enough for me as I’ve never depleted more than two sets per flash gun and only then because I was in a dark nighclub.
The dividers keep them together in their sets of 4 and depending on which way up I put them I can immediately tell if they’re charged (positive end up) or depleted (negative end up). They’re only used in my speedlites so its really easy to maintain the grouping – they’re either in the box, in the speedlite or in the charger but just in case I do also number them as I mentioned in this post on Battery Management I wrote a while back.
There are commercial solutions to keep batteries together but I like this quick tip. It’ a nil cost solution made from something I already had lying around the house.
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