one hour's strobist meet........

09 October 2010
Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh

we decided this just a couple of days back, and stuck to the plan..... three participants.... Rumi Bhai, Gazi Bhai and me..... time was almost squeezed.... but still enough was there for a decent shootout.... after all, how does a picture take to expose... less than a second? :P

anyway, we picked a less busy area of Mohammadpur and began to do our thing..... the idea was to shoot strobist.... so, we set up our lights from the start.... I was shooting Nikon and those two were shooting Canon.... as they both were relying on TTL trigger, I kept my trigger separate..... we loved the background lights produced by neon signs and aimed to include those in the frame..... I took my tripod with me to mix ambient with strobe..... and used the 85mm f1.8 lens that I haven't used in a while.... just got a knock from others on the web and thought I better be getting along with it....





I started with adjusting ambient light and then adjusted the light..... my aim from the start was to give just a wee bit of light, which can be considered as part of the ambiance on the street...... no sudden unnatural wash of light...... just the bit of fill light was missing in the shot...... focusing the lens in that extreme low light condition was a challenge..... we used mobile phone, torch and lighter to help focus..... it worked anyway..... :).... we all became subjects for each other until Abdur Rahim came up..... well, he turned out to be the most interesting subject of the evening..... the people in the street stared for a while at us, every now and then...... and then walked away.... a bit puzzled..... we just went about our way..... it was a short, but nice effort..... already thinking of the next one... :)



under all that glitter .......
Abdur Rahim is one of those shy fellas who don't wanna waste too much time in front of a camera.... shaken by the camera and lights, he took some time to remember his own name.... he's one of those simple people who make their living on the streets, not touched by the glittering lights of the mega-city.....

Abdur Rahman is a street vendor selling ground nuts....



Camera info:
Nikon D700 @ ISO 200; 1/4sec; on tripod + Nikkor AF 85mm f1.8D @f2 + Elinchrom Skyport radio trigger.
Strobist info:
One SB-900 on camera left, almost behind subject; @1/32 power; shooting through a white shoot-through umbrella; on a tripod; triggered by Elinchrom Skyport radio trigger

brightening up a gloomy day!!

08 October 2010
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....

Lamisa's playhouse......

30 September 2010
Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh

it was an idea waiting to be implemented for quite some time..... my wife had been pushing me to take the initiative..... but my work pressure in recent times was not leaving me with a lot of energy at the end of the day.... so, I needed that big push to move my lazy butt....

my wife gave the main impetus.... she brought out all the toys of Lamisa despite knowing the fact that she is the one who would have to pack those up once again..... we had been looking for the day when Lamisa would start to understand the significance of toys.... up till now she was too young to understand this.... but this time, when she got all the toys in front of her, she got really excited and didn't really know what to do with all of that...... quite ironically, her interests took a nosedive quite quickly..... she became more interested in watching the outputs of my photography on the camera LCD...... and then, she became too interested in her newly-found passion, her toothbrush..... she wrestled it from her mum and started to chew on to it..... we put her amongst the toys once again, but this time, with her toothbrush......











the session was quite short, but we more-or-less got the results...... but still, waited for the time when Lamisa would go to sleep...... and there came another opportunity.... we created her own playhouse around her..... and she was too much in her dreamworld to be able to wake up to the bursts from my flashes....



now the geeky stuff..... I took a leaf from Joe McNally's book "The Moment it Clicks" and started with one light...... I didn't want harsh shadows on the background, which was really close to the subject..... so, I decided to set up light in an overhead position...... I used my recently made 4'x4' aluminium panel with white diffusion materials and put that on top of two improvised booms.... the panel was illuminated with one SB-900 running at 1/8th power.... this gave an overhead illumination...... I made the stage with white cloth on the bed..... it lessened distraction and also, added to the exposure and helped remove shadows.... I expected quite a bit o shadows because of this one light..... I used a small reflector on camera right to fill the shadows.... it didn't prove to be enough because of the distance and size of reflector.... I then switched to another SB-900 on camera right, shooting through a white shoot-through umbrella.... 1/32nd power was enough to fill in all the shadows and create sort of a high-key light..... the white walls on the background and on the right also added to the exposure.... I used a relatively larger aperture (f5) which helped to shoot with much lower power on the flashes..... the lower power on the flashes helped to recycle quicker and I was able to capture more moments and more frames....

for the last shot of Lamisa sleeping, I used one SB-900 on camera in TTL mode, bounced from the white ceiling.... used f2.8 to create a shallow DoF for a more dreamy feel.....

this was the set-up.......