Title • the light fantastic

One of the things I think I'm reasonably good at is shooting in natural light. What I'm less good at though is shooting using artificial light. Sure, I can bounce a flash of the ceiling (or wall, or floor), I can use ETTL fill-flash to good effect, and I can use additional strobes to add more light to a scene when it needs it. But it's not something I'm especially comfortable with and I don't feel as though I have any real creative control over the process. In short, lighting is a bit of a dark art as far as I'm concerned.

My reason for mentioning that is that I've been feeling a bit under the weather over the last few days so, rather than dragging myself around taking crap photographs, I've taken the opportunity to catch up with one of my favourite blogs – Strobist, produced by David Hobby. If you haven't seen Strobist, and you're at all interested in lighting, you should check it out – it's extremely well written, and very informative.

Anyway, having read through quite a few of his tutorials today I thought I'd try something a bit more adventurous than usual; i.e. switching my flash to manual.

The set up for this shot was as follows:

The flash was set to 1/4 power about two feet below a glass table: snooted with a cardboard tube and triggered with a Pocket Wizard. The item on the table is a crystal ball, resting on a crystal stand, and my model for today was Camilla (who made her last appearance back in August). The end result is probably more interesting than worthy, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. As always, let me know what you think, and don't forget to check out Strobist if you haven't already done so.