australia roundup… pics, tips and more

The distributors of the orbis™ ringflash in Australia, Kayell, recently invited me over to Australia to run a series of lighting seminars, meet some of the stores selling the orbis™ and generally hang out with my orbis™ in tow. Tough break you might think, but it turned out it was five non stop days of full-on touring, on my feet from 7am until sometimes as late as 2am before crashing briefly then getting my ring flash on the next morning. OK, so there were some fun times too, like a spectacular dinner at Melbourne’s Brisc restaurant.

And one magic moment when a silly idea turns into a photo you really really like. The final orbis™ lighting workshop was held at Glow Studios in Melbourne. For the shooting section, where everyone got to borrow some gear from Canon and Nikon who had kindly come along, we headed out behind the studio into a gritty, almost pitch-dark alleyway.

Having spent a few years working as a newspaper photographer, finding great background to use to find a photo quickly, almost anywhere, is a skill I had to learn fast. I’d been teaching all evening how to balance the ambient light and the flash exposure in a photo. In the case of the alleyway, this meant a shutter speed as much as 1 1/2 seconds long. But all evening I’d been walking past this cool painted warning sign. After shooting with Natasha for a while, I got the impression she was a ballsy girl who’d have no problem putting on a good window-shattering scream for the camera. A quick explanation and my orbis™, used as a ring flash with a Canon 580EX II and a 5D Mark II, and I had an unexpected photo I really like. The great shadowless orbis™ effect really makes it pop too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Earlier in the week, teaching a workshop based at Canon Sydney, I’d been using the sun to backlight my model Louise, filling in the foreground detail (her beautiful face), with an orbis™ both on the lens axis as a ring flash and off-camera as a beauty dish. As the sun is so bright, I’d started at ISO100 and gradually increased my shutter speed until it was at 1/250 at f8. You can see the results in the photo below on the left… very under-exposed except for the rim light, or hair light in this case. Then I plugged my flash into my orbis™, brought it up and fired the shutter, with the flash on the TTL setting. The photo on the right is the result; a nicely exposed portait that looks like I had two full-size studio lights set up.

Note that in the photo on the left, I’d explained that I was just shooting to get a good light reading and that she didn’t need to pose. Spot the difference ? Instant transformation when the flash comes up from relaxed to posing.

Then I put the lens through the orbis™ to get a very plain, simple shot. Pretty isn’t she. Shadowless light with a hair light thrown in for free by the good ol’ sunshine.

You can see another example of getting this balancing act right with the shots of Natasha in the alleyway. Now remember, you use shutter speed to control the ambient light and the aperture to control the amount of flash. That’s why I like to leave my camera on manual and my flash on TTL. That way I can dial in the right shutter speed for the ambient light (1/250 in the bright sunlight and the other extreme of more than a second in the dark alleyway) and my aperture at a reasonable starting point around f5.6 – f8. The flash generally stays on TTL or ETTL mode so I don’t have too much to think about. If my flash is on a lightstand, either with an orbis™ or without, I switch the flash to manual too, so once you’ve set it you know nothing will change.

As you can see, the alleyway gives the spectacular Natasha a sense of context and place that is important, and the orbis™ high camera left lights her with some softer but still directional light. The fact that she was dressed in a crazy, sexy, strong Sin City kinda way was a total coincidence.

Inside Glow we had a great selection of gear for everyone to try and, of course, a heap (clutch ? herd ? pod ?) of orbis™ ring flashes.

If you’ve got any ideas for the collective noun for your orbis™ ringflash, let me know your thoughts on the flickr group.

For a fun look at the inside of the Glow set up for my workshop, Aussie-based Gigapan shooter John Warkentin shot a great panorama. Check it out by clicking HERE and to get the most out of it, zoom into some stuff.

Right then, that’s it from me for now…. I’ll be making an exciting product announcement in a few weeks time, so look out for it here!