Guitarist…

Posted on October 18, 2009 by webmaster

This is the first time I’ve used my flash with the wide angle lens. I quite like the cutout effect. I took a couple of stabs at the first shot: I was trying something a little more sophisticated, with a reduced saturation, and an extra layer to mix the cut out effect with the unadjusted background. Not really worth the effort to be honest. The black and white looks better:

1/100 sec at F8, ISO 100 at 10mm

1/100 sec at F4, ISO 100 at 10mm

Water Droplet Macro

Posted on October 14, 2009 by webmaster

A few shots from the weekend, using the flash to freeze water droplets striking the surface of a mango. The use of the mango is purely for the textures. The background didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped: we have a composite work surface in the kitchen which is flecked with highly reflectively pieces of mineral, and I’m confident that my wife would shoot me if I coloured them in with a black marker :).

1/5 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

1/10 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

1/5 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

I think this is my favourite:

1/13 sec at F8, ISO 200 at 100mm

I may have another attempt at this: ideally I’d like to get full diameter of the splash pattern into focus, which means pushing the aperture a lot deeper. The main problem was that the ambient light was much too low, even at F8. Another problem I had in an earlier attempt was with the water leaving distorted trails on the image, as there was just enough light across the shutter setting to be exposed, above and beyond what the flash was freezing. I was going to try second curtain, to see if that would help and decided it wouldn’t, so went for the less technical solution of changing where the water droplet landed.