Peter and the Umbrella

Chris’ mother and sister are visiting us. They don’t get together very often, so it seemed like a good time to get some pictures of them together. And since I was going to be taking a bunch of portraits, it seemed like a good time to get more camera equipment. I just got this light stand from Cowboy Studio.

It’s pretty basic, but it seems sturdy enough and it fits my Speedlight well, although that’s not in the picture because I used it to take the picture. The flash goes in that holder with the red knob, and it aims towards the umbrella. It reflects off that and out towards the subject. You can adjust its position and then leave it while you worry about adjusting the camera. The flash operates in slave mode and fires automatically whenever you take a picture. The whole rig is pretty straight forward and easy to use. The hardest part is reading all of the instructions. They use awfully tiny fonts in those user manuals.

I used Peter as a guinea pig to adjust the setup and figure out how everything works. Here he is with my first whack at a basic one-light Rembrandt setup.

I think I need to move the light up and towards the camera a little, but I think that it looks pretty good anyways.

In addition to the Cambridge in Colour tutorial I linked to above, I found the intro articles on Strobist to be very helpful.