Think I Can Do It?

So cousin-in-law Emily tells me November is blogging month (never heard of it, but hey– who needs an excuse to be more diligent at blogging, right?) So, I’ve already slacked a few days since I learned this. But hey… maybe I could make it through 2/3 of the month with *some* semblance of a post every day? Good excuse to take a few minutes a day to take and / or process a photo. (I see that, at 11:33pm, Emily doesn’t have a blog post up yet for today. Doh! Haha. Edit: 10 minutes later and I see a post. Whew.)

Here’s one from a series that I did back on October 15 (you’ve probably seen hints of these on twitter or facebook): amazing what you can do with a prime lens (85mm), a flash (off camera), and an umbrella. What’s amazing about this series of self portraits is that they came out in focus (I mean really… how do you focus on yourself without using some other devices? I had none but a little infrared remote that pressing the button would trigger autofocus the same as pressing the shutter button on the main camera would), and that the compositions ended up being so interesting. I mean I had no way to tell how the frame was composed, I was just kneeling on the ground taking pictures via remote control, no one helped me with these. Just plain dumb luck– they’re probably framed better than I would have if I’d been behind the camera. Weird that I can learn a thing or 2 about composition from blind shooting!

I started back into SLR photography a year and a half ago, and I always prized the idea of using only natural / available light. Like I was going to make that part of my “style” or something. Ooh look at me, I don’t use a flash. Hah. I wonder if it’s not a pretty common thing. I think the truth was that I had NO CLUE how to use a flash. I’d spent the time and effort getting the basics of exposure down with a camera– aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc. I’m still learning exposure. But FLASH… I still don’t know what I’m doing. What it boils down to is that I didn’t want to learn off camera lighting because I was intimidated, it was out of my comfort zone / knowledge-base, and also I just had no idea how cool of photos you could create.

But basically I was able to emulate someone else’s setup with regards to use of the silver umbrella and the manual settings on the flash. (It only looks like I had a jet black background– in reality I just shot such that almost no ambient light would be picked up by the camera indoors. ISO 100 (low sensitivity), 1/160 of a second (fairly fast), f/8 (relatively small aperture). Effectively kept any ambient light from showing up in the picture, so all you see is flash. Cool, eh? So much nicer than having a messy living room in the background 😀

So yeah. I finally decided to start playing flash / off camera lighting, and it’s a blast– just check out how much detail you can capture when the shutter speed is that fast and the camera on a tripod. Turns out you don’t need a $2000 lens to get super sharp images.