It's a Ring Thing

At least for the time being we are not wedding photographers, not that that may not be a direction we take in the future. But for now we will work in the periphery of wedding photography.

Some friend of ours just got engaged and wanted some nice pictures of the engagement ring. Not having taken thee images before I spent some time earlier in the day experimenting with different lighting to see what worked the best. I tried a pair 580 EX2 Speedlites in Lastolite EZ-Box's. As those are soft boxes they did not provide a hard enough light for the sparkle of the diamonds. The flashes by themselves being hard but created double shadows and just was not doing the trick.

Enter the AlienBees™ ABR800 Ringflash. This jewel worked as well as those that were being shot. No shadows and with a 20° grid mounted the light was not going every where. The hand shot was done in somewhat of a duotone fashion to isolate the ring. Lets face it... Even nice petit hands such as Aly's still look harsh under a flash. So in addition to the duotone effect, using Lightroom's adjustment brush I dropped the clarity and sharpness down and painted the hand. The detail that helps here was in the nails. The duotone effect made the nails look flat so I brushed in a little increased exposure to bring the tips back.

We took the ring and slid it though some white nit fabric to just get the ring itself. I had the ringflash dials way down and the aperture at f/16 so the flash would not overpower the ring with the closeness of the lens. If I recall I had the EF 24-105 f/4 IS lens all the way out and moved into the ring until it would not focus then backed off about an inch to catch the focus. It was about 10 to 12 inches from the ring if I remember.

I think Aly enjoyed the process as after the shoot I let the images download to Lightroom while we all had desert. We finished by going through the 60 or so images until we came up with 15 or so that I would further process. While there I did finish off one image so I could e-mail it to her so she could get it up on facebook. The left the house about 11:oo and I noticed on Facebook that at 11:53 she had posted the picture. Guess she was happy with it. Thanks for letting us be a part of your experience Aly.

Time to blast!

Cya... Doug