Photographs From The Spring Rendezvous

Once again, I've been asked to help promote a club whose members enjoy reliving a pioneer lifestyle, if only for one weekend at a time. For me, it's a chance to experiment with the judicious application of some artificial lighting, delivered by speedlight.

I made some pre-pandemic photos at this same event with a seasonal autumn background and similar lighting equipment. For a portion of this shoot I used a ProMaster Umbrella Soft Box. This unit is a basic shoot-through umbrella with a back cover that confines the flash output to the inside of the soft box. This directs all of your speedlight's output foreword through the diffusion panel. This may or may not be important, depending on how reflective your surroundings are. When used indoors, there is a slight chance of color contamination from light spilling over the edges of a conventional shoot-through umbrella. 

Lighting was provided by a FlashPoint speedlight. It was triggered with a Flashpoint radio controller mounted on a Nikon D70 with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens. This particular combination of commander and remote combination does not offer a TTL option, so exposure determination is done using educated guesswork. Since the flash is actually inside the softbox, I attached a dome diffuser over the flashtube. As you can see, the resulting light spread was even across the entire surface. I used a non-descript umbrella bracket with a conventional cold shoe to hold the speedlight in place. Had I thought to bring one of my home-made Right Angle  Flash Mounts,  I could have improved the flash alignment in relation to the umbrella's axis. While it might have better centered the light spread, it would have made the flash easier to slip through the hole in the back cover. A 200 Watt-Second Flashpoint unit with a bare tube would have been a better choice, although this unit might have been more easily damaged if it were to fall.

With the lighting selected, I hoisted the lighting combo onto a 12' light stand. During this weekend's shoot, the wind managed to knock the stand over twice, and each time one of my modifiers was either damaged or destroyed. The first victim was a conventional Zumbrella, and when the stand was wind-toppled, it was damaged beyond repair. I then switched to the Promaster Soft Box, but it too was knocked over and damaged, but was still usable. All this in spite of my efforts to anchor the stand down using a rather novel "sand bag" from FlashPoint. Instead of sand or gravel, the back has partitions for four standard water bottles. While it ultimately wasn't enough ballast to prevent the blow-overs, it helped some, and served to supplement my water supply. Notice that it is placed as close to the end of the leg as possible for maximum effect, preferably on the windward side of the light stand.

I was pleased with the results, even though I saw no difference between the shoot-through Zumbrella and the Promaster Umbrella Soft Box. For me, the Nikon D70 still reigns supreme for this type of work due to it shutter synchronization speeds. Most of these shots were made at 1/800 of a second and aperture settings from F 4.0 to F 8.0, due to a variety of flash to subject distances. These two subjects were chose as my best efforts, primarily because neither one wore glasses, and both wore hats with reasonably-sized hat brims. When oversized hats and spectacles appear on set, the results were, shall I say, not quite as good.

More to follow.