Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh
it was a sad tale on the night of 14h of April, Pahela Baishakh.... my family was ready, while I wasn't..... it was some weird technical trouble that prevented me from recording those happy moments of my family..... what good are your equipment if they fail to impress your dearest ones??.....
I was preparing for the Jessore Safari of TTL before we were to visit a relative's for a Pahela Baishakh party.... and it was a small window of opportunity to shoot some colourful picture..... and then it happened.... the D700 stopped syncing with off-camera flashes.... the flashes were going off, but the light wasn't featuring in the exposure at all!!...... checked the shutter speed.... went down to 1/30sec.... no change.... changed radio trigger batteries..... no change.... switched to SU-800..... no change in any mode.... cleaned the hot shoe.... no change.... then switched to built-in flash as commander.... no change!!..... this is the time I realised that the problem lies with the camera body..... something happened that prevented the camera from syncing with off-camera flashes..... now I switched to manual mode for the built-in flash..... 1/128th power and kept the flashes in optical trigger mode..... whoooosh!!!.... it worked!!!...... that convinced me that it was sort of a software problem..... all this took long enough to force me to abandon plans for any shoot..... my heart sank!!.... it wasn't just a disappointment not being able to snap my little angel in lovely attire, I was also leaving for the safari with a specific aim to shoot people..... it was a bad evening.... really bad!!.... what happened to the safari?..... well, hope to share those in a separate blog post..... had been too busy of late to post all the experiences from the tour.....
now, lets come back to the present..... since that Pahela Baishakh disaster, I was looking for the opportunity to recreate those moments in my makeshift studio..... couple of weeks passed without being able to do that..... but I didn't give up..... the patience paid off.... and here we go..... I had to clean off most of my equipments as they have collected bit of dust over the last three weeks.... looked for a simple big light setup, but also wanted to put a light behind the white backdrop..... used a second light behind the backdrop for couple of shots, but abandoned that in favour of one light, as the second light had to be set up on the ground, making the light direction bad.... one light was struggling to recycle at full power as I was shooting at f10..... with the second light idea shelved, I reduced the power of the backdrop light.... the main light was simple..... used a big white cloth as a 4.5'x4.5' diffusion panel and used the Simpex 25"x25" softbox bare on Elinchrom Ranger A-head to control light spill....
it was never easy to shoot Lamisa..... she loses interest quite quickly.... and not to mention that she always wants to see the output on camera LCD before the next shot.... a total of 14 minutes was more than enough to complete the whole shoot, which also included a long wardrobe break!!..... anyway, I was happy.... and thought I've at least closed one chapter from that disappointment..... oh, forgot to tell.... that weird problem..... is gone now!! :)
set-up....
