Pinup Shoot on a Destroyer

No, I’m not joking. Earlier in the month I had gotten in touch with Dave Cross and RC Concepcion about taking a tour of the ship and doing some shooting while they were in town for the Adobe CS4 Unleashed Seminar that they taught last Friday. Dave asked me if it would be okay to bring a model on board and shoot a 40s-style pinup shoot. I thought, “Why not?!”

So I cleared the shoot with the powers that be and made sure no one would get upset. We weren’t going to take too long and we tried to be as unobtrusive as we could, but we drew a lot of attention from folks walking down the pier, other ships, etc.

The day was bright and sunny and it was about 2:30 in the afternoon, so we were going to be competing with the sun. Luckily, RC brought an SB900 with him. Those little flashes are VERY powerful and we were able to shoot mostly with just that one flash. We did have to bring in an SB800 for this shot though, because we were at f 22… yikes!

RC – VAL’ing for Dave while he shoots.

When all was said and done, everyone had a great time and we were able to capture some great images. Hope you enjoy ‘em and let me know what you think in the comments!

Here’s to a short work week! Have a great Monday!

Using Nikon Creative Lighting System: a.k.a “McNally-style”

If you have read my blog for any length of time you’ll know that I’m a big manual lighting kind of guy and I’m not much of the TTL, Creative Lighting System (CLS) type of Nikon shooter. I like the control I get with manual. Sure, it has it’s annoyances and may add a little extra time to your shoot but it puts the photographer in 100% control.

I’ve been reading Joe McNally’s new book “The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light From Small Flashes” and he talks an awful lot about CLS. And I mean an AWEFUL lot. So after reading it again and again, I decided to play around with it a bit.

CLS is great if you need to work fast and are running and gunning on a shoot. Why? Because you can shoot in Aperture Priority and the camera will meter the scene and tell your flashes what they need to output to get a proper exposure. You can further control your foreground to background ratio using exposure compensation. It’s also really convenient because if you’ve got a D70, D80, D90, D300, or D700 you don’t need to have a hot shoe flash as a Commander as you can use your pop-up flash.

CLS also has it’s limitations. The one that bothers me the most is the fact that the signal is line-of-sight (LOS) so your Commander unit has to be able to see your Remote flashes. Now, if you’re in a room with white walls the signal will bounce around a little, but not all that much. This is where radio triggers really shine because RF isn’t limited so much by LOS as infrared is.

In the shot above I put my SB800 on a lightstand with only the diffusion dome on. It was still pretty bright outside, so I beat down the California sun and got some saturation back in the sky my dialing in -1 EV (Exposure Compensation) and changing my camera’s white balance to Tungsten. This gave me a deep blue sky, but it makes EVERYTHING blue. So I put a full cut of CTO gel on my SB800 so it would warm up the light hitting my subject. Skin tones are nice and warm and my problem is solved. This was shot with my D90 at f8 1/100th ISO 200 @ 50mm with a Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens.

I call working this way “McNally Style” because it’s how he works with speedlights. It’s on a very rare occasion that he will shoot in Manual. He puts a lot of faith in Nikon CLS and rightfully so because he gets great results.

You can read more about Nikon CLS right here.