Here is my entry for the second strobist bootcamp assignment. You can read about my entry for the 1st assignment here. I was not as pleased with the results this time around, but I was so close to the deadline that I didn’t have a chance to reshoot it. The shot’s story from my flicker post to the strobist group can be found at the bottom:

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As the deadline quickly approached for assignment 2, I decided to go and take my girlfriend 申琦’s picture on the top of 联邦名都 (Lian bang ming du) in 石家庄 (Shijiazhuang), China. I figured that I would plant her against the wall, use a snooted flash to get a nice ray of light going across the wall leading up to her face, and use a flash with an umbrella to cross light the sun.

Things didn’t quite go as planned. There was a strong wind and every time I got the umbrella positioned correctly, the wind would grab it and try to pull the light stand over just as I caught the stand before it hit the ground. It was just the two of us, so there was no one to hold the light stand as I shot.

I then went to plan “B”. I positioned the umbrella up against a door so that the wind couldn’t blow it over. This, however, was at an odd angle so I added a snooted 580EX throwing some hard light right on her face. This seemed to create a nice halo of light on the wall right behind her head, and an acceptable shadow. I had some problems with my snoot as I couldn’t find any Velcro in all of 石家庄 to secure it to the flash, and it kept shifting positions on me…but nothing too unmanageable.

I got a number of pictures as I had origonally intended–with the city in the background–but decided to take a few with the tiled wall behind her. When I got home and reviewed all the photos on the big screen, I liked this one the most. Funny how sometimes even after a whole session getting a city shot right, it is that stray odd capture that works best. Glad I saved it.

This is what the final setup looked like:

On camera left was a Canon 580EX firing into an umbrella. On camera right was a snooted Canon 580EX firing directly at 申琦’s face. They were both triggered with a shoe-mounted Canon ST-E2 wireless transmitter. I used my Canon 5D with a Canon 24-105mm F/4.0 L IS USM lens. Shutter speed was 1/125 at f/18, ISO 160 at 55mm. Both 580EXs were in manual mode, but I didn’t record their settings.

After downloading the photo, I tried flipping it since this was for the left page of a hypothetical publication, but it didn’t work as well.

Comments and feedback are encouraged. I would love some constructive criticism on what to do next time as I spent a lot of time on this shoot experimenting.

Technical Details:
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Digital
Lens: Canon 24-105 F/4.0 L IS USM
Memory Card: Ritek Pro-2 8GB
Wireless Transmitter: Canon ST-E2
Flash(x2): Canon Speedlite 580EX in slave mode
All images shot in RAW
Used Adobe Camera RAW to convert to JPG