Selective lighting

A few minutes ago I took this photo:

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Fairy figurine on stage

I had something like stage lighting in mind, which I tried to set up here. On stage, actors are often illuminated by a single spot light, so this is what I took:

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Fairy setup shot

This is my Yongnuo YN-460II compact flash with a Honl grid added to its front, in a position – relative to the small figure – which would resemble a spot light in theater. The flash ist set to its lowest possible power output, so I could get it close to the figure without having to stop down my lens too much, here it was 1/64th power of the flash and f/7.1 on the Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8 lens.

As you can see, the “stage” is our dining room table, but with the gridded flash at this position the light pretty much ended less than 10 centimeters behind my object – so the white wall over our wooden bench went black. No backdrops needed at all, and the room light you see was even switched on while I took the photo – with a 1/160th of a second and f/7.1 at ISO 200, that room light is gone as well, and for the setup shot with the same lens on my E-PL5 camera, I needed 1/13th of a second at f/4 and ISO 800 (about 7 stops more or so).

It’s fun playing around with these “one strobe pony” setups. And with cheap Chinese stuff used like here, it’s not even too expensive. So if you haven’t done so yet, get some of these compact flashes and start – you’ll learn tons of new tricks, and you’ll also get good colours and sharp photos of your family.

Thanks for reading.