Light Painting With Strobes

Below is my take, my shot, and my view on Oakley's TEN... Click on "Read more..."  below and see how I did it.

Details, details, details...

Stained Fork

Got myself excited to shoot some detail shots over the weekend as it was very gloomy and rainy outdoors. Here are some of what I was able to take last Saturday night. How I did it at the end of my post. :D

Don't Fret

Pegged

Glitz!

Fedora Stitch

Here's my favorite shot of the night:

Cookie

I made my bunch of cookies as my midnight snack after photographing it as it really made me hungry.

Sunday, blessed me with a slight overcast afternoon with a little sun peeping through the clouds. Since the rains have stopped since morning, little critters were out too and so was I. :D

Crab Spider

Big Red Eyes

I'm Hairy

Red Bulb

White Veins

The leaf shot reminds me of science class where we used to peek into a microscope to look in closer on leaf structure though this is nowhere near as a microscope photo.

Cereals???

I just found this interesting.

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The How.

I used an extension tube coupled with my 85mm with the shots that were produced on Saturday night and then with my defective-AF kit lens for the Sunday afternoon session.

The extension tubes that I used were the dumb cheap ones. It's really like a tube except that it has mounts for the lens and the camera body to be coupled together. Using the extension tubes meant physical manual focus. I said physical is because it's either I or the subject moves forward or backward to get the part I wanted in focus as this type deals with really narrow DOF (depth-of-field).

I used a flash with a diffuser cup with varying light intensity and distance to light the subject. The built-in flash can also be used but I wanted to control the direction of the light thus I used an external flash. Another tip, I used my maximum flash sync speed (1/200 sec for my camera) to eliminate camera shake and get photos that are sharp enough.

The physical manual focus was really a challenge but my love for macro has just been revived! :)

Cheers!

The rest of the other photos are in this album:

Macro

Brown Flower (Chico flower)

Overly Drooling For A Speedlite

Most of the time when my family and I go to Las Pinas (LP), where I grew up, I would be lugging along my camera bag. Yesterday, we were off to LP to have some time with my parents, my older brother, who is in the country for a short vacation as he works abroad, and his family.

My older brother is also into photography as well as my neice -- my older brother's eldest daughter. By the way, my eldest daughter, who is only turning four this year is somewhat into photography too. I guess it's in the blood. Actually, my dad was also into photography in his earlier years and an uncle -- my father's brother, of mine too is into photography. They even once had a studio.

Anyway, to cut all the introductions, we were at my brother's house for dinner. As usual, my brother and I exchanged some conversation about photography until he let me borrow his speedlite. I don't know much about speedlites but I have been reading a lot about flash photography. With his speedlite on my camera, I clicked once, twice, and I said to myself, "Wow!". On my third click, I took a photo of my youngest daughter and I said to myself, "sluuurp!". I was mentally drooling over the photo I just took.

Take a look at the photo below! My pop-up flash can't deliver anything close to it. Kit lens + 580EX II = wOw!

Oh well, it's drooling time for the 580EX II.