Grey day in Norway

About a month ago, I went to Oslo for a training course for web development and met some new friends. Gunleik and his girlfriend Vivi has proposed that we should go hiking in the forest on my last day in the city. What's cool in Oslo is that you can just take the underground train from the city center and get down in the forest. Yeah... the train is taking you right in the middle of the forest up the mountain! That is just awesome! Unluckily for me, it was very cloudy on that day and it even rained at the end... We got down from the train and entered the forest. There was still some snow or should I say ice on the ground making it very slippery and not suitable for a hike with my urban shoes... So we took a safe path down the mountain. On some part of the path, you could see the city and the Fjord. I could tell the great view that I could have had if the weather was better, what a shame. But we then found a good spot and I started to unpack my gears and take some shots of the couple.

Cloudy days are great for headshots because the clouds are acting as a huge softbox casting nearly now shadow. But for this pictures we wanted to include the environment and give to Gunleik and Vivi a nice souvenir of one of their favorite weekend locations. And as you can see in the first picture, cloudy day in the wood is a bit flat and you need a fast lens or slow down the shutter speed which is not really great for stability. That first picture was actually a test shot I've taken to set my ambiance exposure to prepare a base for my second photograph where I've added a flash. It was underexposed but I've saved it in post-processing. Here was the process for assessing the exposure of the ambiance and the subject:

• set the ISO to 400 to help with the low light condition
• take a shot in aperture priority then switch to manual mode and set the aperture/shutter speed to what the camera has calculated in aperture priority mode
• underexpose by changing the shutter speed or the aperture. I've changed the aperture to f/5.6 for the depth of field and to help the flash output (I did not want to use too much flash power) and continue to up the shutter speed till I got what I think was looking good for the ambiance light
• once I was happy with the ambiance exposure, I've set my flash on my left zooming it in at 70mm
• I've then added a 1/4 CTO (orange) colored gel on the flash to warm it up and give a feel of a sunset lighting the scene
• for this shot I decided to trust Nikon flash system and use CLS with iTTL and let the camera control my flash exposure and adjust it by using the flash exposure compensation

The result is a nicely lit photograph, the use of an orange gel help to warm it up as the natural light was quite dull, using bare flash produced a harsh but yet natural looking light, you could think that the sun was pointing out in the late afternoon shining thru an opening in the clouds.

After a little walk thru the forest, Gunleik took me to the beach, so we went back to the city and took the bus. The weather was going worse as the wind started to blow. With the help of Gunleik holding the umbrella on the lightstand, I took some headshots of Vivi:

Note the blue sky, it was completely dull grey. Photoshop? No. You can get this on camera and even on a compact camera by using a full CTO (orange) color gel taped on the flash and setting your camera white balance to tungsten (bulb). What a full CTO gel does is converting your daylight balanced (white or nearly) flash into a tungsten balanced (orange) flash just as if you are using a light bulb to light your subject.

Ever noticed that your pictures are all orangy when you shoot indoor under tungsten light bulb? This is because light bulbs are not producing white light but orange light. Your eye can adapt to the orange lit environment but not your camera. So to correct this you need to set your camera white balance (WB) to tungsten or bulb and the camera will try to correct the picture by adding blue to it. Just try it, set your camera to tungsten white balance and take a picture outdoor, you will see that your picture will be all with a blue color cast this is because the scene is lit by a white light instead of an orange light but your camera doesn't know that. Now if you add a flash with a CTO gel on it, every object lit by the orange light produced by that flash will looks "normal" on the picture and what is not lit by the flash will look blue. You can create your blue sky even if you live in the UK! That's cool isn't it?

Grey day in UK

Last Sunday, my friend Frank Williams proposed to go to Brighton, we ended up in Worthing another beach near Brighton. It was an opportunity for me to try the California Sunbounce micro-mini that I've won at the last Strobist seminar in London. My first impression is that it's quite a great tool, it was easy to handle even in the wind and created an artificial sun for my photographs. But I need to experiment a bit more and get some creative shots using it. For the picture below, I've added an orange color gel to the flash mounted on the Sunbounce to create a warm light.

Earlier, when we arrived at Worthing, we first went for a coffee and found a great location in a sort of gate by the beach. Behind the gate was a long brick wall with couple of arches that I've found very interesting for a portrait, using patterns are great to give a sense of depth to the picture. I took the picture below using an SB-600 speedlight mounted with DIY grid spot to focus the light on my wife's face only and casting a shadow on the wall, without the grid spot I would have lit the whole wall behind her and probably also the one next to her:

I've then chosen to shoot in the gate it self as it was opening to the beach and you could see the pebbles, the see and the sky thru it. The mix betweem the orange bricks and the blue sky can give an interesting result:

Getting closer with added cross processing effect:

The ceiling inside the gate was light cream and I thought it was ideal for bouncing my flash off of. The light cream color would just warm up the light and the ceiling will soften it. I've thus used Frank as my VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand), he held one of my SB-600 at his head level pointing to the ceiling at camera right. And I've set his SB-800 mounted with a Stofen diffuser on the floor at camera left pointing at the ceiling too. The Stofen diffuser makes the SB-800 an omni-directional flash, sending the flash light everywhere. Setting the flash on the floor did also fill in the shadows if any from below the face of the subject and also create some highlights on the dark boots. After a few shots, I decided to warm up the light even more by adding a full CTO gel on both flashes and balance it by changing the white balance on my Nikon D300 to tungsten. Why? I wanted the sky to be even bluer and by raising up my shutter speed I could darken the whole scene outside of the gate: dark blue sky, dark blue beach just as it was shot right after sunset:

I'm very happy with those two last pictures of my wife. It looks like two studio shots except that it was done nearly outdoor on a dull cloudy british day!