cool flash effect I saw

[fwellers]

Sorry, useless thread. I have no pics, since I don't have the equipment to do it yet.
But I was in Ace Photo last night and they were all happy about this thing they were doing. They said they were going to put a video of it out there on youtube or someplace like that ( i forget ).

Anyway, the effect was a portrait that had a completely black backround, with a brightly lit subject. Looked really cool.
The way they did it was to put a honeycomb grid ( also can use a snoot ) on an SB800. The used it off camera in commander mode, and set up the internal flash to manual 1/128 ( the least power setting ).

That's it. So the internal flash only fired off enough to set the SB off, but not enough light to reach the subject. And the directional light off the SB with the grid lit the subject and somehow blocked all other ambient light. The pic was uber sharp and looked great.

Just thought I'd bring it up here. They were happy as clams to 'discover' that.

 

[Katier]

That's fairly standard type of thing.

Uses the same principles.

 

[fwellers]

Yup, that was it.
So were you able to get that shot without putting something on your offbody flash ? Or did you simply dial down the power on the main flash ?

 

[Katier]

the flash is heavily snooted in that shot and could have done with a diffuser.. Another option to stop light at the background could have been a barrier ( piece of card ) to that side of the flash.

 

[iflynething]

On Nikons, you just set the camera flash to "--" for the commander mode and that only makes the onboard flash trigger the Wireless flash.

~Michael~

 

[JerryPH]

That is VERY basic.

BTW, with a single cereal box, you can make at least 3 different sized snoots for your SB-800.