Last week I volunteered to help out the gym at work and take some headshots for the intranet. They wanted something a bit better than you’d get with a point-and-shoot, and I wanted some practice taking pictures of people other than myself and Tessa.
Since the shots may need to be used in a variety of situations, including small thumbnails on the website, I opted for low-contrast lighting, using a ring flash to kill the shadows and side-lights to add highlights. I had the ABR800 ring-flash on camera without a tripod, so after the hour-and-a-half session my right-arm was pretty tired.
In the end 22 people flowed through, which only gave me a few minutes per person. Some of them were only on a quick break in between training sessions, others uncomfortable and not wanting to be there.
Overall, I think the results came out pretty well, considering. Hopefully they like them.
Like the lighting Dan.
Are you enjoying the ringflash? I kinda find it hard to use mine. Always looks overdone…
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Perhaps ironically, I've mostly used it off camera as a more powerful light than my speedlights; the 56" moon unit is pretty amazing. Apart from the iris shots a while ago and last week's lighting test with Tessa post-run, this was the first on camera usage.
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I agree – I've used mine off camera more than on. I actually prefer the off camera with the beauty dish though and its easier to carry around and mount too.
Really like your last few strobist shots though. Keep it up.
We were in SF today just along the road from you guys near the building with the furniture stuck onto the walls. Was 30 degrees cooler than the south bay. Urggh…
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Thanks Michael. I've been interested in getting a beauty dish, the light it produces looks really nice. But I should probably hold-off getting anymore gear for a while.
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You know why I like the dish so much? The light is 'nearly' as good as a large (~3-4ft) soft box but the dish is much more portable and less prone to getting blown over in the wind. I've seen many people make them on strobist.com – of course you might need to raid the kitchen for a salad bowl and some sticky back plastic (are you old enough to remember Blue Peter???). Lol.
:)
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Those look great! Now they need to retake all the terrible exec headshots we have :-)
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