Nakean Photography

I ran outside and used my manual radio triggers to shoot this shot from outside the venue. I had my lights still inside but triggered them from outside. The result is nice bright lighting without the subjects knowing that a giant foot long lens was pointed directly at her.

There are so many different facets of photography, I can’t see how anyone could ever become tired of shooting.  I’ve done everything from landscape, to wedding, boudoir and senior portraits and sport photography.  I haven’t done enough of each to really know which ones I love the most, but I can tell you that there are pieces of each that I absolutely love.  If I had to pick, I’d say I’m leaning towards wanting to shoot portraits that really tell a story about that person.  I really hate not having ultimate control over every lumen of light that hits my subject.  More about that at a later time, but for now I’d like to talk about getting back the basics with the speedlites and TTL.

A couple weeks ago I was out to shoot a sweet 16 Birthday at the Clise Mansion in Redmond, WA.  I shot it all with a 7D, a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm 2.8 lens.  I could have used a wider lens as well, but my 10-22mm is on the fritz and needs some work!  I shot mostly the dance floor area with two lights, on stands, in opposite corners of the room.  I shot almost exclusively in TTL mode.

For those of you who don’t know TTL stands for Through The Lens.  This refers to how the camera decides how much light it needs from your flashes to get the correct exposure.  Generally, as I understand it, the flashes emit a short burst of light and the camera looks at the scene and decides how much more or less light it would need from that initial flash.  Computers have come a long way and inside our cameras are little processors that are probably more powerful than our computers 10 years ago, albeit,

Three speedlites here. One to the left of the camera and behind about 4 ft. My 430exII on top of the camera using TTL as well another behind the subjects(tried to add a little separation)

I turned up no real specs on these processors through a google search.  Let me know if you guys find anything showing mhz or ram.  There’s one caveat; it’s a computer doing the thinking for you! If you’re looking to had some backlighting or flare to your photographs TTL is not really up to the job.  At least, not without some serious fiddling around with.  The problem is, when you fire a camera off camera using TTL and that light shines into your lens, your camera says, “whoa buddy, that’s bright” and lessens the overall exposure to compensate for the flash coming into the lens.  One thing I might try(if I use ttl again) is to use spot metering instead so that no matter how much light is introduced into the scene, the camera meters only for that meting spot.  Unfortunately, Canon’s spot metering stays in the center of the frame which is exactly where I first learned not to put my subject.  If I remember correctly, Nikon’s spot metering follows the focus point(10 points Gryffindor{Harry Potter…don’t ask}).

This little puppy to the left here is Phottix’s new Odin Trigger and receiver.  As you can see it has three different groups of flashes it is controlling(A,B, and C).  This bad boy wirelessly transfers that TTL signal to the flashes so that you can use the system to control multiple flashes off camera!  They are competing with the industry standard Pocket Wizard TTL triggers.

Using Shallow Depth of Field here to make the BDay girl pop but still show her in the context of her friends. The Flash in the left hand corner and behind the girls adds a nice rim light to the hair.

here's that Magical Backlight I was talking about. I love the Lens flare here but I had to save the photo as the exposure was extremely low using TTL.

Was I using any of these awesome creative tools?  No…..I used Canon’s own Infrared optical triggers built in to their speedlites.  Overall, I wasn’t very impressed as I was running from room to room and didn’t always have line of site to my flashes, which were placed in the corners bounced off the ceiling.  Infrared triggers need to be able to “see” the other triggers for them all to work.  That along with my backlighting issues I was facing was really proving to be difficult.  Wide shots were out of the question as shots were coming up quite dark.  Next time I think I’ll go completely manual, except for the on camera speedlite, which I will use in TTL mode.  It is worth mentioning that you can use these triggers and ones alike to control your flashes in manual mode all from the camera!  This is something I think would have come in quite handy during the Birthday Party!