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Paul kindly lent me his SB-800 and two brollie (strobist kits), I had a shoot today for Katie's cousins which went pretty well, never used the brollies before so I got Katie to sit in for some test shots.
For both of these shots I wanted to achieve soft and subtel lighting with the brollies that brought katie out of the shadows she was in, and kept a nice balance with the brigher ambient.. (first time go at this so harsh criticism is very welcome).

Tomorrow I'll post some of the actual shoot and perhaps a few setup shots if anyone is interested.

Craig,

Your lighting technique is looking good, but are you using auto-wb?

It looks like you may, because it's different on each of these two images.

Remember that with these sorts of lighting conditions, you are creating a set of constant lighting conditions, and that means that exposure and wb should both be constant and fixed.

Gary, I considered setting the white balance at the start of the shoot, but I was constantly moving the setup here there and everywhere, so the environment was always changing (still would of helped), but the WB on all my shots from this shoot are tinkered with when I bring the Raw into CS2 (not a clever workflow but I'm PPing less then 40 shots, so I don't mind it).

Craig, I am a complete novice in this area so treat my comments with the complete and utter contempt they deserve .

That said, I like what you have done so far and the hairlight in the first is very good. I would be inclined to move at least one of the brollies closer to the front (perhaps near where the camera is but higher) to get more of a catchlight in her eyes. Perhaps keeping the second off to the side (say, at 45' to Katie) would create a few more face shaping shadows? (If you konw what I mean)? The overall light looks a little flat to me.

Great start, nonetheless.

Cheers,

Patrick

Alpha_7 wrote:Gary, I considered setting the white balance at the start of the shoot, but I was constantly moving the setup here there and everywhere,

Ok ...

Moving the setup around will certainly affect your exposure settings. That's always a product of the light- to-subject distance, and the total number of lights, and their intensity.

But that's still not likely to be hitting your wb, which is based upon the primary light source's type, be that flash, direct sun, shade, cloudy, incandescant, whatever.

.

so the environment was always changing (still would of helped), but the WB on all my shots from this shoot are tinkered with when I bring the Raw into CS2 (not a clever workflow but I'm PPing less then 40 shots, so I don't mind it).

For wb, for this sort of setup, you should be doing zero work.

On the two images posted (from looking at them at home, on my calibrated monitor) the wb on the two images seemed, to me, to be different, hence my comment.

As I said, exposure good, light quality, also good, but wb seems to me to need some work..

Your right patrick it does look flat, for most of these I was playing it fairly safe, while I have the brollies I want to try some more hardcore strobist style stuff, but I didn't want to get too adventurous before I took the family portraits.

Here is one.. (the lighting probably isn't the best, I can see some shadows that are a bit distracting, and I've blown the highlights... not that I mind that too much as its just the background.