a cool orbis™ portrait in three steps… anywhere, every time

One of the things I love about the orbis™ is the way you can get insanely cool photos with it, wherever you are. We coined the phrase “anywhere, every time”.  I’m going to explain how true it is… and along the way I’ll feature a little “before and after” fun.

Picture the scene, I’m in the basement of a really cool camera store in Rome, demo’ing the orbis™ for some sales staff. I don’t have a funky black backdrop and I don’t have a model with me. So I’m gonna have to make do with one of the salespeople there. I’m killing myself trying to remember his name, but it escapes me.

So I shoot a standard, off camera flash shot. This is the before. This is what you get if you’re outta luck and don’t have your orbis™ to hand. Despite his winning Roman smile, it’s a pretty harsh shot. Even on flash white balance and his tanned skin, it looks over-flashed.

As per usual for me, I’m using a Nikon D90, an old SB800 and syncing them using the good ol’ CLS system (check this Youtube vid out for a rundown on setup). The results are pretty grim. My camera is set to M, 1/250 F5.6 ISO200 with the flash set to TTL.

So let’s throw the orbis™ onto the flash and, leaving all the settings untouched, go again.

Now bearing in mind that at the time I wasn’t expecting to publish these photos, they were more so that the guys could see the orbis™ in action, that’s a pretty passable portrait. If you ignore the photo on the wall in the background bissecting his head. But you can see the lovely, shadowless lighting effect you get from the orbis™.

With no need to mess around with camera settings and no fancy setup hassle. And to top it off, a lovely small round catchlight in his eyes.

So let’s step it up a notch and take the orbis™ off camera, holding it out to my left….

See the effect ? Directional light, but without the hard edged shadows from the first photo, thanks to the orbis™. The orbis™ is unique in the way it reshapes the light from your flash, but what it also does is change the size of the lightsource too. To one about the same size and shape as the face. So when you hold it out at arm’s length as close to a portrait subject’s face as you can, you’ll find it gives you this lovely directional, moody but still flattering effect. And now that I’ve actually bothered to frame the guy properly, with no distracting background elements, it’s a really cool shot.

But let’s go one step further and get something even cooler. Same off-camera effect, but this time I ask the dude to turn so that he’s looking across me at 90 degrees, off to my left. Then I hold the orbis™ directly in front of his face and WHAM!

Cool huh ? Now consider what we’ve just done. In a little under 60 seconds, we’ve got THREE very different but independent looks from an average looking guy in a basement thanks to the orbis™. No other lighting tool can do that. I invented it, and even I get excited by this kinda thing.

These are just some ideas you can get with your orbis™. Have a play. Move it around.. on camera, off camera, close up, far away, subject near the wall, away from the wall, you get the idea. And when you like the results, throw your pics up onto the orbis™ ring flash flickr group.