always doing something different or trying

Calina

Because of this:



which incidentally stctc printed onto canvas for me and although it's someone's birthday present I want to keep it it's so beautiful...anyway because of that, I bought a 580 Speedlite and since then it was raining all the time or the wind was the wrong direction or a thousand other problems.

Except tonight.





There are some more here.

Some technical detail:

Canon 40D/Speedlite 580 EX II/50mm prime.

In truth, the 50mm wouldn't be my first choice to do these but I am having some difficulty in the conversation between the flash and camera on the 10-20 at the moment and especially on athe 17-85. Also, because I have a cold I wasn't in the mood for getting too wet. It's working best with the 50mm for some reason.

Some of the set were done on a wish and a prayer because the infrared couldn't see enough to focus on any more; so manual focus and then I couldn't see anything either. I think that finding a balance between the black of the night and some of the white gear was rough; the DOF of the 1.8 shots made the focussing particularly difficult. What I wanted to do in post processing with the black slider was a write off because it made the wetsuit disappear. So all in all, we learned a massive amount from this exercise.

melekalikimaka

great stuff, seems like quite the challenge.

on a side note, how doe one get into this sport, not photoing as such, but surfing?

Calina

One gets lessons - for kitesurfing, it is borderline insanity not to. There's one kite school in Clontarf if you're interested.

kjt

Some cool shots in the set. Where you shooting on/off camera flash? Looks like alorra fun! I really like the b&w shot posted above, fav of the lot.

Nice shots,it goes to show that we must always be moving on with our photography,not to get stuck within certain parameters.We must try to be original and think outside the box and we will be rewarded

Borderfox

I see what you are trying to do but it doesnt work for me with the pitch black background, what iso are you using or what time of night was it. Around sunset would be my choice and shoot into the sun using the 580 for fill.

Calina

We got one or two shots into the sunset which is what I was aiming for...but the sunset here last night was kind of paltry. ISO was between 100 and 200. Time of night - I think between 7 and 8. It was really dark when we were finished; the autofocus had given up by then and I couldn't actually see anything through the viewfinder at that stage.

We will go again though, and hopefully with some class of a sunset the next time or with more extreme cloud shades. I didn't want a uniform sky unless it was black.

kjt, it was on camera flash. I want to get a lot more competent with that before I start playing with slaves and off camera stuff. I have been thinking about it though.

m_stan

Good stuff.

I also tried something new with my 580EXII at the weekend. I took some long exposures with the camera on a tripod, and used the flash off-camera to light the scene multiple times to create multiple versions of me. See below (one exposure, no processing).

A lot of fun doing this I have to say.

Would be interesting to see what you could do with your subject matter and this setup.

Calina

Actually,

I've a lot of things in mind for this.

1) the highspeed flash rep stuff is lined up to give it a try when I figure out how to make it happen
2) I'm interested in what you got done with the off camera flash
3) a NZ photographer has had a look at what I did and has recommended setting up two off camera flashes and running them using a pocket wizard. I think that's similar to something I wanted to do using a couple of slaves.

But I want to get the oncamera flash working the way I want it first though.

m_stan

the world of off-camera flash can get a bit tricky - esp when you introduce more than one flash into the picture (if you'll pardon the pun).

for the shot I took above, it was fired manually using the pilot light. no pocket wizard, no sync cable, nothing complex to worry about. press the flash pilot button when you want to capture a frame - about as simple as it gets.

Calina

Yeah, I wanted to do that too. I can't get the pilot light to respond though so I must be doing something wrong.