Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

I tested last night native tethering support in LR3 against Nikon Camera Control Pro. What can I say, good folks at Adobe done pretty amazing job. LR tethering works about twice faster than Nikon’s own software, and although you cannot control camera settings via Lightroom itself, you can see current aperture, shutter and ISO. File management could have been better to allow date folder selection but it will do as it is. The most important factor is stability and here LR performed really well with my Nikon D700. I used 2 meter USB cable with gold plated connectors (my old audio equipment hobby taught me to always use good cables) and took about 200 frames in short bursts. Didn,’t encounter any dropped or corrupted images. Two meter cable would be sufficient for product or food photography but I intend to test next the limits of USB connectivity. Will report on that later.

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Had beauty shoot few days ago and decided to experiment with non-traditional approach for beauty work. Instead of large lights I used standard 7” gridded reflectors and 100mm macro lens which are known for excessive sharpness. Model’s skin has to be be pretty good though for these things to work out.

It seems I’m getting addicted to gridded lights. The light produced is much harder than usual and more subtle. By moving lights closer or further you’re controlling how deep the shadows are and how much light is spilled around.

The obvious problem with gridded lights is skin. If model’s skin isn’t so good be prepared to spend quite a lot of time with Photoshop as every single bump becomes a mountain under angled hard light.

Second post for today. Not like me but here we go. Following photo appeared on Fashion Photography Blog

in the Shot Of The Week section. In the following days I received few emails asking about lighting setup so here are details about this shot. First of all I planned this to be high contrast B/W photo from beginning. I set my Nikon D300 to Monochrome setting so I can preview images in black and white (note that color version can still be retrieved from RAW file). Shutter went all the way to 1/250 sec. (max sync speed that kills most of ambient light). I used 3 Alien Bee strobes to light the model, all gridded. All of them are positioned just outside the frame, high and angled down. Following image shows approximate lighting setup. Extra speedlite was placed inside table lamp’s shade and triggered by optical slave.

I received new enormously large 86” parabolic silver umbrella from Alien Bees few weeks ago but only recently had a chance to put it to test. It comes in a fairly small package but open it and your room feels too small. The first unit I received had locking mechanism broken, so I spent about 3 minutes on the phone with customer support and new unit arrived next day. They didn’t even ask to send broken one back! Talking about great customer support. According to Paul Buff these modifiers are extremely efficient and have narrow beam of light (exactly what I like . Here is one open in the studio:

This umbrella is intended to be used with bare bulb and there is a special reflector that kills spill from the bulb. The shaft has to be adjusted so that bulb is level with outer rim of the umbrella.

I am very happy with the results. The produced light is strong, a bit hard and quite directional. If there is a space available to move this beast around it can be used very creatively. These modifiers have probably the best price/performance ratio on the market, looks like I’m going to use them quite often. Here are several shots of lovely young models taken with 86” PLM.

In the following two shots umbrella is just slightly off center and completely vertical.

Now, we’re changing angle and see shadows becoming much deeper: