TBF Gathering
Its always nice to sit down and catch up with your old mates from college. The reunion was small but no less interesting. So much has changed over the years but one thing still remains, our friendship still remains as strong as the good old days.
Also had a chance to take Anthony's 60D out for a spin. The camera was definitely an upgrade from my current body and is similar to the D7000 I tested earlier although I must say that the swivel screen came in pretty handy at times.
Portraits @ work
Did some impromptu shots around my workplace as my colleague wanted a new FB profile picture. The lighting was tough as I could only work with one on-shoe flash which meant getting creative in finding ways to soften the light. Of course having an umbrella available would have been nice but I left it at home. Plus this short photo shoot wasn't planned so I had to make do with the available equipment.
Despite the lack of equipment, I'm pretty pleased with the results. :)
Reaching in.
The best portrait of the lot.
Family Gathering
A few days back we were having a family gathering at my place and as usual, I was the un-official family photographer. Not that that minded though because I could finally test out my new gears (an umbrella and light stand) on my family members. (Cue the evil laughter).
Teenagers are pretty easy to work with as they don't really mind having their pictures taken. Some of them even relish having their pictures taken. The older generation were adamant of not having their photos as they were worried about their wrinkles and crow eyes showing up in the photo. The only consolation they had was that the pictures were digital so if they didn't like it, they had to liberty to delete it.
Working with off camera lighting was rather challenging especially when you are using two strobes. Gravity nearly killed my 430EXII as the silly umbrella was too busy being seduced by the light breeze to care about the poor speedlite. Thankfully, my cousin managed to grab the light stand in the nick of time. Otherwise, I'd be looking at a pretty hefty repair bill.
Since I only had one light stand, grabbed another cousin to hold the other strobe while pointing in the general direction of the subject. So with one cousin taking care of the light stand while the other was holding the strobe, I set about increasing my shutter count.
On hindsight I should have bought the lens hood as flare was appearing everywhere in my photos. But then again, the lens flare was the least of my problems as the camera was an absolute pig at focusing in near darkness. In fairness, I wasn't terribly great at manual focus but having the lens hunting for focus was driving me up the wall. So I had to shift the subject to somewhere brighter.
A new body might solve the problem but then again, I'll probably get a Canon ST-E2 to solve the issue. The other alternative would be to pack an portable light source to light the subject so that the camera can focus accurately.
Random Portrait
It was a run of the mill department lunch and as usual I lugged my gears along. Got several shots of my colleague and then I tried to mimic Dave Hill's post processing which didn't go too well since I only had one flash to do the heavy lifting rather than a gazillion lights going off at once. After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery no?
