Tag Archive for: strobes

Digital classroom Small flash

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Digital classroom is a live broadcast from our studio which we do every month for free.
I started digital classroom to introduce people a bit to what we do with our instructional videos and workshops, of course these go more in depth and are a bit more technical but for a free broadcast I strongly believe it’s a great educational tool.

 

Digital classroom is not possible to create without the help from some sponsors of course, so we are very grateful for our friends at BenQ and Rogue/Expo imaging to help us out with this.

 

This time the theme of the Digital classroom is “using small flash”.
It’s a 2 hour instructional video so take your time, sit back, grab your notepad and enjoy.

Radio triggers and if they don’t work

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Radio triggers are awesome, they will trigger your strobes without needing a “line of sight” and they should work for 99% of the shots without a problem, so in theory one could say “you never loose a shot with radio triggers”, but……… sometimes there are problems.
Problem with your radio triggers?
We hear this a lot, people having trouble with their radio triggers in the studio or on location, here are some tips we found out can make a HUGE difference.

 

1. WiFi
This is the biggest problem.
If you have a lot of WiFi traffic in your area this can interfere with your system, in fact we installed a WiFi security camera and this rendered our complete setup almost useless, we changed the camera from WiFi to wired and everything worked again.


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2. Antenna
They are not there for show, make sure to aim them up and you will get that little bit of extra range.

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Many different looks from one setup

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Often I’m asked what kind of setups I use and what kind of modifiers.
What people often don’t realize is that with only one modifier you can chance a lot just by playing with the angles and controlling the contrast/lightfall off. In fact placing a light closer or further away also makes a huge impact on the image look, add to this the option to feather a light source (using the sides of the light) and you know that there is a lot possible with one modifier and light.

 

It gets even more interesting when you are combining two strobes and for example add a gel to one of them.
During the workshop this weekend I made a setup like this with our model Lennaa and decided it would be a cool thing to share on the blog.

 

I started out with one strobe with a red gel.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142025

To get a bit more “punch” in the image I added another strobe without gel under the same angle to mix the two.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142035 Read more

Just between two walls

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“My studio is not big enough”
“I can’t shoot full bodies because….”

 

Well we all heard the excuses, or maybe even used them ourselves.
In reality however it’s often much less dramatic than one might think, often it’s just a matter of being creative with the area you have available, don’t just think about shooting full bodies (or whatever) against seamless where you have to have the model 2-3 mtrs from the background (although close to the seamless can be very interesting as I will show in another blog post), but think about what you can do with small spaces, and trust me, often the smaller the space the more interesting it can get.

 

In these shots I shot the model in between two walls in our studio, it’s just a small area where we normally walk on the stage, it’s tight and not really an area where you would think you would shoot, but when we prepared the studio with walls I did let the painters paint the walls because I thought I saw the potential… 😀 in the end it indeed is one of my favorite spots.

 

Roosmarijn Mei 22 2014 (57 of 155)-Edit-Edit

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