redfishingboat

Box of Rocks on Flickr - Photo Sharing.

This is me.

Struggled a lot to get this shot. I used two flashes trying to 1) get my face all drama-lit, but 2) also get some notion of light on the camera lens so that it didn’t look like a black mass. I put a speedlite 90-degrees off my left about 3 feet away. At first I was using it with a shoot-through umbrella, but I didn’t like it, so I just went with the bare light, with a gobo shielding some of the background. (The gobo was a junkmail flyer laying around.) I put another gridded speedlite 45 degress to my right about 2 feet away, pointed at just the front of the lens of the camera in my hand. Since one of the speedlites was a 420EX that meant I had to rely on E-TTL. This might be the straw that forces me to get a 430. I’ve been scouring craigslist, but nobody’s selling them used for less than Amazon new. (Yes, also been looking for some Nikon SBs but nobody sells those either any more. Thanks Strobist!)

What made this so brutal to do was that I was wanted to hold my good camera, meaning I had to use the other camera to take the shot. The Canon 300D when tethered to a laptop is VERY slow to transfer RAW pics over USB. It ended up being something like 60 seconds between shots. When you’re goofy-lookin’ like me, you need a couple hundred to get one where you don’t look like a total imbecile. So it was set up, take a shot… sit and wait a minute for the download. 60 seconds at a time really starts to seem like forever! After 45 minutes of this, I was just miserable.

I am ultimately pleased with the result though not ecstatic (half-imbecile?).  The reason I set up this shot was that I needed some sort of iconic “photographer” shot to include on my “business” cards.  This ended up not even working very well for that, but I used it anyway.  By the time I saw the layout, I had packed up the rig.  Wasn’t going to endure the USB tarpits again.  I think the cards will be just “pretty cool” which is all I ever hope for.