Thursday 1 April 2010

Inspiration? The Shower...

Not what you think.  I was wondering what could be done with a shower, a bath, a wireless slave flash and a camera.  As it happens, you can make a very wet flash, but luckily that didn't happen until I'd nearly finished (and don't worry, no flashes were harmed in the making of this... well, post)...
(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

So, I guess the setup is fairly obvious for this.  A shower, upturned in the bath, held in place with various childrens toys that I found around the bathroom.  I took advantage of the 7D's master control of flashes here, and used my 430EX as a slave.  Initially, this was put in the bath, but then I held it in my other hand and took shots with it in various places.

(5D2, 24-70L at 51mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

Initially, I started with the on-camera and external flash firing, but eventually switched to just the external as it gave me a bit more control of the light, especially as the 24-70L with a lens hood it a pretty massive lump casting a great big shadow for a camera mounted flash.


(5D2, 24-70L at 70mm, f2.8, 1/30s, ISO100)

Above and below - I was playing with DuoTone in lightroom.  All images are not natural colours - I converted to greyscale to remove dodgy colour casts from the lights outside the (dark) bathroom.


(5D2, 24-70L at 67mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)


I switched to manual focus, and moved the camera about and selected shots with the most interest:

(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)


My new technique in Lightroom is to whack the exposure up and the Black level up too - this is the sort of results you get if you go to extremes...

(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

I'm not in a particularly sensible mood so I'm not going to extensively analyse my attempt to drown a flash, but the one technical thing I can say is that the 7D focussed perfectly (using the flash as an assist lamp) consistently every time.  I realise that the flash as an assist lamp is quite a help, but subjectively I would say it's better than my 40D ever way.

Goodnight and thank you.

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