Off-camera flash adventure
September 23, 2009
We’ve been so impressed with some of the shots we’ve seen, from one of our past Off camera flash / strobist course students, that we asked her to write a blog post for us.
Juliet Greig came on our FLASH: Improve your lighting course back in June and has just done an amazing shoot. Here’s what she wrote:
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“In the last few weeks I’ve been working with Charlotte, who is looking to build up a modeling portfolio. We had already done a few shoots of Charlotte with my photographer friend Katariina, who has bowens lights at her studio in Newhaven. This time we wanted to give off-camera flash a go, and take advantage of the natural surroundings of Brighton beach rather than a neutral studio environment. I wanted to re-create the atmosphere of the 1950s style beach photographs of the girls sitting on the railings, as Brighton is the perfect location.
Having recently done Garage Studio’s off-camera flash course, I was able to get things set up without too many problems. I put the nikon SB600 flash on a lighting stand and attached an umbrella to diffuse the light. Unfortunately the wind was blowing so strongly that the umbrella crumpled and broke within the first 5 minutes. That was an important lesson, umbrellas and wind don’t go together very well! Anyhow, I used a plastic stofen diffuser on the flash for the rest of the shoot.
As the sun began to set, the golden glow was visible through the glass of the promenade shelters. Katariina had the idea of asking Charlotte to pose in front of the shelters, which turned out to be the best idea of the day. The golden light in the photographs behind Charlotte is exactly what we saw. The settings for the camera for these shots was 1-200 sec shutter speed, f 6.3, ISO 100 with the flash off-camera on a stand at 1/8th power.
This shoot was the first time I had used off-camera flash outside and it was a valuable learning experience. Charlotte, Katariina and myself are very pleased with the shots and we will definitely be trying this kind of photography again!
Juliet”
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We’ve just set the new dates for the FLASH: Improve your lighting course and they are Sunday 22nd November & Sunday 17th January. If you’d like to find out more or to book a place CLICK HERE.
You can see more of Juliet’s photography on her Flickr stream here and you can see some more past students work here in an old blog post
In the mean time have a look at Juliet’s amazing photos:
If you’d like to find out more or to book a place on the flash course CLICK HERE.
