Today I had a day off, so the day started with getting my motorcycle through its biyearly technical surveillance. And my now 16-year-old Honda passed like a charm.
Then later Mitchie and me went shopping, and I got some additional rechargeable batteries for my flash. Thinking of that later on today, I did some more experiments with using off-camera flash.
Like always, I started without flash at all. Sat myself on the couch, put the Olympus E-520 with the Digital Zuiko 40-150mm onto the tripod some 2 and a half meters in front of myself, set the lens to 79mm and f=5.6 and the camera to ISO200, which resulted in an exposure time of about 3.2 seconds, and fired it with the remote trigger. Voila:
As you can see, there’s a light source at almost 270 degrees of me (so it’s to my left), which is a dimmed halogen light, pointed to the ceiling. In my eyes you see the reflection of another light source, that’s the dining room energy-saving tube over the table. There’s another one at maybe 25-30 degrees (so it’s left behind the camera) which is an illuminated globe, but with its 5W bulb, that one is negligible. All in all, a very “warm” colour temperature. I set the white point to my t-shirt, and that resulted in some 2,400K.
This is an - ahem - nice image, but it isn’t really sharp. I really like available light photography, but even if I had set the camera to ISO400 instead of ISO200, that would have resulted in an exposure time of then 1.6 seconds - way too long for most people to really sit still (wonder how they did that during the early days, with exposure times well into the minutes? Yeah I know, they bound peoples’ heads and more or less glued them to the background. But that’s another story…).
From all I’ve read over at David Hobby’s Strobist blog and from the books of guys like Joe McNally and Kirk Tuck I knew that you can preserve some of the available light if you don’t go lower than - say - minus 2EV. Which means that with using ISO400 I could set an exposure time of about half a second, and still have some effect from that halogen, maybe even from the dining room light. The rest has to be done with using a flash then.
Ok - so I put the flash into our bookshelf, pointed it to bounce at me over the ceiling, and put some Rosco Sun 85 CTO (orange) gel in front of it (between flash and diffusor) to get it near the colour temperature of all that available light. With the flash effectively some 4.5-5m away from myself, and that CTO and the diffusor in front of it, I set it to 1/2 of its maximum power. Put the transceiver onto the camera, the receiver under the flash, and again fired the camera with its IR remote. Here we go:
This time setting the white balance point onto the top of my t-shirt gave me a little to blueish result, since seen from that flash, the t-shirt is almost in the shadow of my jacket and hand. So I manually adjusted it to around 2,700K, some 200K more than the measurement gave me. Still blueish, but that is because even with the full CTO, the flash is at some 3,000K, while the available light sources still are at around 2,400K. If you really want those to match, you have to add even more CTO, and power up the flash to full to adjust the loss of light.
The result? Well, colours don’t seem that “natural” anymore maybe, but the resulting image is lots sharper than the first one. You can compare them on the Picasa page, where they are 1920 pixels wide. Plus the bounced flash gave nice shadows on the wall from our bamboo tree, which is now as high as the ceiling. All in all I would say it’s a step into the direction of taking more “professional” looking portraits, even with using only one small flash for under 50$.
Of course, taking a better-looking model helps a lot:
This last one was taken hand-held yesterday, with the manual OM Zuiko 1.8 50mm lens at f=5.6, and the flash at 1/8 of its power (closer, and without any colour-correcting gels). An exposure time of 1/30s preserved some of the background from the kitchen light, which turned almost dark-brownish without correction.
I think I’m learning. Maybe I’ll turn into a photographer, should I ever grow up 
Anyway, it’s great fun, that is the main part of it.
Thanks for reading and viewing and/or even commenting…
Update:
I decided to set the colour temperature to the one of the brightest light source, which is the flash with the CTO in front of it, and all of a sudden the image is much nicer. The even warmer touch of the halogen doesn’t disturb it at minus 2 EV as it seems - like in the brown kitchen background from Zuleikha’s photo.
Update 2; one day later:
How do you get rid of colour casts, if you don’t want to turn everything to B&W? Just eliminate the weaker light sources by completely overriding them. So today I tried again, almost the same setup, but the focal length was now some 83mm, and with an exposure time of 1/160 of a second, the halogen light source was at lower than minus 5EV. Minus 5 f-stops means: it’s as good as invisible, since that calculates to 1/2^5, or 1/32 of a “correct” exposure light value.
I put the flash over to the other side this time, onto my computer desk. Its direct line to me was blocked by a translucent umbrella, but the flash itself was pointed almost straight up to the ceiling, from which it bounced back, giving the impression of not only one large and high light source, but actually two - a smaller part of its output was still coming through the umbrella very nice and soft, and so it didn’t produce any harsh and sharp shadows:
With the flash set to half of its power, and the camera to ISO400, I didn’t have to push up the exposure too much in post processing; even the jpg directly from the camera would have been usable just fine.
Of course, even with using “shoot-through-” umbrellas, photographing nicer looking models result in nicer looking images:
