Posts

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Hard Light verses Soft Light

Breaking out the soft box is what most people do in the studio, the larger the better.

If your after that soft romantic feel it is hard to beat. Sometimes though a harder light source can provide a more interesting light.

Here is a hard light shot with a little fill from a soft box and a hair light. The hard light from the beauty dish really sculpts the face. Many photographers would be but off with the shadow under the neck but this can be controlled with a soft box or reflector underneath. Sometimes a very large brolly on axis can also be used to control the shadows well.

This is basically the same image but with a soft box instead of the beauty dish, a much softer light but in some ways a more boring shot that does not suite the outfit or mood as much.

Knowing when to use a soft light and a hard light is half the battle.

Hard light from a magnum reflector.

Soft light from two very large Oct Soft boxes.

Think about the model, her look, the clothes, the mood and feel you want, then select the light modifier to enhance this look you are after.

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Car Boot Season has started

Here in rural England Sunday mornings in the spring and summer are traditional car boot days.

COVID-19 stopped all of this and many have not restarted. Hopefully the traditional car boot will come back. Nearby to where I live, with the spring now here, the first car boot of the season was this last weekend. Not many people in attendance but hopefully as the weather warms things will pick up.

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DPReview to close

DPReview has been one of the top photography review sites and forum hosting for photographers for over twenty years.

This week we were all shocked to discover its closing down. I never knew that the site was owned by Amazon, and in the current cutbacks that Amazon are making the site is one of the loses.

There’s a lot of knowledge that is going to be lost. Hopefully Amazon can be persuaded to at least keep the site available for people to read even if there is no new updates, but so far to looks like the site will be deleted.

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Hard light and Profoto Magnum Reflector

Hard light is often considered a no no, and I have a post on hard and soft light coming. If your into hard light, then I can recommend a magnum reflector.

Here we have a Profoto B10Plus with a magnum reflector. The magnum reflector is not a modifier I call upon often but if you’re after very strong directional light, and a good stop of light boost to what your flash can produce its quite a useful device.

Here I am using it to mimic strong sunlight flooding onto the landing off to the right.

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Mirrorless and the features we want

An optical high quality viewfinder is extremely useful in many situations, but the electronic viewfinder also gives photographers aids to getting the shot.

You will never please everyone, so highly customisable cameras are what we need. Someone may want nothing but the scene in their viewfinder; others like in the shot above, where blowing out the highlights was way to easy needs for me a camera with realtime histogram.

Also on the subject of high contrast scenes like above, blinkies, zebra guides etc are available in any mode on Leica and Sony mirrorless cameras. The photo above, I needed to ensure that whilst the window could blow out at all white, none of the highlights on Lilly’s back did so. With highlight warnings this is easy to achieve, but for some unknown reason, neither Canon or Nikon allow them when in photography modes, only video modes. I could take a shot and review it with highlight warnings but not while taking the shot. In a changing light situation this is not good enough. I have to give a shout out to Sony and Leica, as their high end mirrorless models do allow custom highlight warnings, live in the viewfinder in real time.

Leica M10, 50mm Summilux-M 1.4 ASPH

So what do you want in a viewfinder?

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Goodby Brenda

Our oldest chicken Brenda died last night, she was still boss of the coop right up to the end. Its always sad but she had a good life.

She had a good last summer, it was just a shame the last few months she has been stuck in a enclosed run due to bird flu restrictions.

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Profoto Desktop App

If you’re a registered Profoto user, you may have received an email today about their new desktop app. You have been able to control your Profoto flashes from your phone for a while and update the firmware. Now with the desktop app you can also control your flash heads.

I have only done a quick test with my A10 but despite being beta it seems to work well. For when your working tethered in the studio it could prove very useful.

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Lightroom and Broken Cloud Sync

I was updating my portfolio site https://rbphotographic.co.uk and was unable to pull some photographs from an online Adobe Album.

Looking at my Lightroom classic I realised the sync arrows were all missing. My new album could not be selected to sync.

I restarted a few times, but the trick to get them back was to go into settings, Lightroom sync. Going in here restarted it.