Harmonica and Guitar

Combining my love of photography and music by photographing my Yamaha guitar with my latest addition, a Hohner Crossover harmonica. Two quality sounding instruments that do not fulfill their true potential by virtue of my enthusiastic yet somewhat limited efforts.

My only light comes from a Nikon SB910 speedlight hand held to camera left, pointed at and bounced off the ceiling for soft light, and triggered wirelessly via Nikon's great CLS system.
My camera of choice was a Nikon D300s fitted with the excellent and sharp Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 non stabilised lens, fully zoomed at 50mm, shutter speed of 1/160th of a second with aperture of f5.6 and iso set at base 200.
Edited in Lightroom.

Geisha with Fan

Same lighting as the previous post.

Geisha Warrior

I got to photograph a geisha for an assignment yesterday that involved props and a lot of makeup. The lighting was simple enough. Main light is a Nikon SB910 from camera right and about two feet higher than the model's head at 1/1.7th power bounced into a black backed umbrella. The background light was a Nikon SB700 at 1/64th power mounted on a really tiny light stand I got off Amazon which was flagged to stop spill onto the back of the model and faced sloped up towards the black background. I changed things up a bit by mounting a tungsten filter on the SB910 and setting the camera white balance to tungsten as well, which means the background light shows up a beautiful blue while all is perfectly normal with the light on the model.

Sweeney Todd does his thing...

Another from the Sweeney Todd photo session.

Lighting the same as previous photo, i.e.:
I had my main light, a Nikon SB700 shooting through a 1/8 grid at 1/20th power from high to camera right, and to fill the shadows I shot a Nikon SB910 into a black backed umbrella at about 1/40th power to camera left and just about level with the camera's height. Both Speedlights were triggered wirelessly via Nikon's awesome CLS wireless triggering system.

Sweeney Todd portrait

Took an interesting Sweeney Todd portrait yesterday that required a more "stage lighty" type look. Having worked on stage lighting many years ago I know that it can often be a little more hard and direct than we like in most photographic portraits. I had my main light, a Nikon SB700 shooting through a 1/8 grid at 1/20th power from high to camera right, and to fill the shadows I shot a Nikon SB910 into a black backed umbrella at about 1/40th power to camera left and just about level with the camera's height. Both Speedlights were triggered wirelessly via Nikon's awesome CLS wireless triggering system.