Studio Stuff
My recent interest in studio shooting came out of nowhere, but it's something that interests me which I know little about, so I felt that it was time to do some experimentation.
My first such shoot was a glamour/boudoir shoot, and I had taken tungsten-halogen hot lights. The shoot turned out to be in a tiny little space that became an oven when 1500 watts of lighting was turned on. I immediately binned the hot lights and decided that flash was where it's at. However, I'm not ready to be dropping thousands of dollars for studio strobes plus softboxes etc. So what to do?
I already had my Nikon SB-800 flash, which is a very capable unit, and can be wirelessly slaved right out of the box. I bought a Manfrotto umbrella stand to mount the flash on, and an umbrella for diffused reflection. I can use the on-camera flash of the D100 to fill shadows and trigger the main flash. Kind of tricky to balance, though, so I bought a flash meter as well. Along with a 43" reflector, I can do what I need to do at the moment. I'd like to have a set of White Lightning studio strobes for main, fill, hair and background lighting, but I just can't justify it right now.
The cost of a reflector-holding arm was positively frightening, considering what it is, so I just hang the reflector on an extra tripod. By adjusting the length of the back leg of the tripod I can adjust the angle within reason. I expect I'll make a proper arm one of these days.
It's somewhat ironic that now that I have this studio stuff I had to take this shot solely with the on-camera flash, and the shadows are just hideous. 8-)
I got a new addition to the flash family. I intend to use it for studio work, though it can be used on-camera as well. It's a Sunpak FP-38 flat-panel flash, and it's a fascinating bit of kit.
The flash is not terribly large; it's 130 x 95mm, which is about 5" x 3-3/4" for
the metric-challenged. It can be triggered with a sync cord or the
built-in photo-slave circuit, it only weighs 280 grams without batteries in it,
and it costs hardly anything compared to a 'real' flash. So what's the
catch? Two catches. Firstly, it's called an FP-38 because it has an
ISO 100 guide number of 38. Sound hideous? Not when you consider
what it's doing. It outputs very diffuse light. That whole front
panel is a diffuser, and the whole thing lights up. It's like having a
built-in softbox. The coverage is suitable for a 17mm lens on a 35mm film
body, so it's pretty darned wide. Put those together, and suddenly it
seems pretty beefy. My SB-800 flash, which cost five times more money,
when it has its diffusion dome and wide-angle plate down (for 17mm coverage) has
only a tiny bit more range than the FP-38. We're talking about a *tiny*
bit, here. So the first catch is hardly a catch at all. I can use it
for macro work and shoot at f/16 at a couple of feet. No worries there.
The second catch is much more important. This is a non-adjustable manual flash. Not only is there no TTL capability, but it has no strength adjustment at all; it fires full-out every time. This means you need to measure the distance and use a bit of rudimentary math, or use a flash meter, to get predictable results. Having said all that, I like it. 8-)