Time Flys

Wow did I ever get busy, Wednesday through Friday just flew by and now here I am leaving town again. It started Tuesday night when I was putting together an equipment line-up for a shoot I was doing on Wednesday. I had just… I mean just received an Alien Bees B800 Monolight and the 64” Bees parabolic umbrella so I had to work with that for a while.

Using a combination of the Pocket Wizzard Flex and Plus 2 triggers I went to work. Mixing the two trigger systems meant having to shoot all flashes in manual. Not having a light meter made it a hit or miss proposition.

Using a Westcott Charcoal Gray background, I was able to put a speedlite on a stand with a red gel to  pop the background. The B800 and umbrella was to the left and a reflector for fill to the right. That worked pretty good for a portrait shot as it gave some nice shadow on the face. The only problem was that would be shooting more of a corporate head shot and the light needed to be a bit more balanced. Out comes the Lastolite EzBox to the rescue. With speedlite mounted and the Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 to trigger that light. As I said earlier, E-TTL was out the door as with the mix of triggers as well as the B800 is a manual flash head.

Anyhow I had planned on an hour and a half for the shoot. I had seven individuals to shoot so I might have been a little optimistic. Well with set-up, shooting, and tear-down it was more like two and a half hours. The lighting specs ended up with the following.

Background light was set at 1/16 power with a light blue gel and zoom set at 28 mm to spread the flash wash on the background. The main being the B800 was set at 9/16 power and the fill was a 580EXII in the EzBox which was set at 1/2 power and 35 mm zoom.

So why no images? They are sitting on the Drobo back at home as I did not have time to get them transfered to the laptop to take on the road. Maybe next week I will post some of the images. Tomorrow I will make up for it as I have a really cool and tekkie device to share with you.

Cya then... Doug