Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh
what else could we do on a gloomy day like this??..... there's a depression over the Bay of Bengal; the resultant rain creating swimming pools everywhere around Dhaka..... even the Bangladesh-New Zealand cricket match got washed away...... we also planned some photowalk in the afternoon, but that would be difficult without boats and raincoats, I guess.... fortunately, we have couple of lively models at home..... and they came to the rescue..... Lamisa and Tabassum got dressed pretty quickly.... and called their small kitty party at home...... I volunteered to become their official photographer.....
now the tech details...... I needed a big light source; enough power, but soft....... I knew I would have to rely on a 4'x4' diffusion panel; after all, thats the largest light source I can muster (other than white walls, of course)...... I opted for the silver reflector umbrella to be the light amplifier for one SB-900.... I actually bought the silver umbrellas for that specific purpose.... this was the first time I got to use this setup..... the silver umbrella's shaft doesn't match with the Simpex Prolite strobe, which I had first planned to use.... anyway, I could still use the Simpex with the opened-up softbox to do a similar job, but I stuck to the SB-900, just to see how it performs.....
my first impression was, the SB-900 was a bit underpowered for a job like this.... at full power the SB-900 did exceed the needed exposure, but I didn't want to shoot at such high power settings.... I wanted faster recycling..... I was shooting at f7.1 first, then moved to f8..... still wanted to move to f9-11, but had to go back to f8, just because @1/2 power the SB-900 was struggling..... I needed enough depth for the image as I was shooting two moving subjects with a fair bit of distance between them..... ideal aperture would still have been f11 or below..... perhaps a couple of SB-900s could do the job better, if not the Simpex Prolite itself... after some quick shooting, the SB-900 activated its temperature control and would not budge!!...... damn!!..... then I switched to another SB-900 to finish the job..... I used the Elinchrom Skyport triggers to trigger the light....
