I had some free time yesterday some took Rhowan and Harmony to an abandoned building a few kilometres from our village to play around with off-camera lighting. I had intended to shoot some hard-light shots, using a HonlPhoto 1/8 Speed Grid, but after playing around with it for a while I realised that I wasn't making much progress. I did get one shot that I like, that I'll post next, but it required a lot more post-production than I was hoping for.

Anyway, rather than abandon the shoot I switched to using my 41" shoot-through umbrella – which produces light that I find much easier to work with – and ended up with a few shots that I like. If you're interested, the original is here:

.../archives/lighting_diary_3.php

One thing you might notice is that the light in the background is much colder than the light from the flash. This was because I used a CTO filter to gel the flash and switched my white balance to tungsten. When I came to post-produce the shot though I decided that it didn't work for this shot, at least not especially well, so ended up converting it to black and white.

I also discovered that shooting impromptu portraits of your kids is a whole lot easier than asking them to stand there while you take numerous shots at different settings. Fortunately, Rhowan does like been photographed, but she was getting rather bored by the time we had finished :)