The Photographic and Life Exploits of Jacob Vorpahl.
For those of you who know me personally, there is now one more character trait you can use to describe me (other than color blind and forgetful): winner. Yes, yours truly is now a winner. Actually…. I guess since I married a lady as wonderful as Sarah I’ve been a winner ever since March 15th, but that wasn’t really a contest (cue the “awws”). However, I have won a contest over at DIYPhotography.net and my prize is a not-so-shiney new gridspot for one of my flashes.
I won because I want to redo this shot:
The gridspot will hopefully allow me to take off most of the light hitting that back wall if I place my strobes in better positions. I’m looking forward to it. However, since I won, I have to have this done within two weeks (yikes!) so that means I really need to get moving. You also might be thinking, Jacob, you sly, sexy thing you, didn’t you also say you were trying to take a picture a day? Or at least one every two days?
Yeah, I did. And I’ve been completely unsuccessful at that. So perhaps since someone is giving me something to take a picture, I’ll get it done. Look foward to some creative use of the gridspot in the future.
[...] The above attempt was the third try. The two before it were way too blown out so I had to stop down my aperture to f36, then lower the exposure in post processing another stop just to get this. That little flash is bright! It’s not bright enough, however, to give a clear shot of all the pieces once it explodes. To get that, I put an SB800 on a lightstand directly above it, about 5 feet, then zoomed the head all the way in to focus the light. To do one better, I then put a gridspot on it to make sure it didn’t spill anywhere else. I wanted it focused completely on the firecracker. By the way, thanks again to DIYphotography.net for the gridspot. [...]
[...] The location I was shooting at (the church’s school hallways) is kind of narrow for the seperation I needed for the different subjects so I decided I would take the pictures seperately and combine them in post. The first picture I took was of the students. I wanted them isolated from all of the different distractions in the hallways but I wanted some of the lockers showing, so I put them all in a tight group against a set of lockers, then I placed an SB800 on a boom almost to the ceiling and to keep the light as tight as necessary I slid a grid on to it (one of the ones I won way back when). [...]