Still hanging in there... and a bunch of paper...

Hey there everyone.

Wow, two months since my last blog post huh. Seems like that long too actually, been so much happening. So much so that I almost forget all that has been happening. The highlights?

Well, we now have hired two new assistants, so welcome to Beck and Alanna. It was a much bigger process than I imagined trying to hire an assistant. We were literally inundated with applicants to our little advertisement. I interviewed over 20 applicants in the end. There was such a wealth of talented photographers applying to work with us, it was all a little humbling. But the tough decision had to be made and these guys kinda shone over the rest. Awesome to have you guys!

We also have a brand new website - finally. Check it out at www.timography.com.au. My wife, Dee who runs the office and does all the accounting, liasing, back-office stuff that I really can't stand to do organised it through Oliver and the guys and gals at Perth Web Design, and I think they have done a great job. It took us a little longer than expected to get it online as we were so busy with clients that it sort of took a back seat for a while but we finally managed to get all of the content uploaded and ready to go. I hope you like it.

Um, what else? There’s been lots of new gear that I will probably get around to talking about at some point in the near future. There’s been a few mishaps mid-shoot that really put me on the spot, but we came out on top in the end. Speaking of new gear, the topic of tonight’s blog post has come about by some of that new gear, or moreso the need to get rid of some old gear...

Last week saw the arrival of the long awaited PocketWizard Flex and Mini TTL radio triggers for Nikon products. These puppies are amazing! I got the opportunity to use them on a wedding shoot just yesterday and oh my God – they are brilliant. It is so nice to be able to get consistent flash exposure, wireless, in TTL. Have I said how fantastic it is? Turn up on a location, turn on the flashes and triggers, take a bunch of shots and move on. No more having to set everything on manual anymore (although it still definitely has its merits, more on that later too!).

Anyways, the new triggers meant that it was time to finally offload my old Pixel TTL radio triggers. These things never really worked that well anyways so they have been collecting dust in my office. I needed to get some images in a hurry for eBay but I couldn’t be bothered setting up my light tent and portable tabletop lighting rig. It was late in the evening and the wedding shoot earlier that day really took it out of me!

So I thought... I have a bunch of flashes that will work on wireless CLS mode. I thought some more. I remember reading on the Strobist blog where David had found himself in a similar situation and managed to fashion himself a temporary light box out of a bunch of A4 sheets of plain old white office paper. So I gave it a go.

As you can tell from the image above, there isn’t a lot to it – other than a bunch of flashes sitting on the floor! They were all set to the same channel and group so they would all put out equal power and distribute their light fairly evenly. So that’s three Nikon SB-900’s and one SB-600, all in remote mode. The whole lot was being triggered by using a SB-800 in commander mode sitting on top of my D700. I ended up dialling in -0.7EV for group A (the flashes on the floor) and I had the SB-800 set so that it was turned on to TTL and contributing to the exposure. It took a little bit of playing around but I ended up setting the SB-800 so that the flash head itself was upside down but parallel to the floor, with the flash head turned around so that I could use the built-in bounce card to push the light up to the roof and bounce back down on the subject. Oh, and I dialled in the SB-800 to be +0.3EV.

So yeah, as you can see, the end result turned out pretty well. I was really happy with how the images of the Pixel triggers and the PocketWizard triggers turned out. Look for yourself. If I hadn’t spend the last 5 minutes explaining the whole process you would be hard pressed to tell that the images had been taken on the floor with a bunch of A4 paper and 5 flashes.

So why did I do it this way? Because I could. Do I need another reason? Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.