Ghetto Strobist: No lights? No problem!

[bitteraspects]

so tonight i met up with a couple of friends for coffee, and once the caffeine kicked in, we got it into our heads to go out shooting in the middle of the night. mind you, its now 11:30pm, and besides two DSLRs, we have no equipment on us.

we made our way downtown to the business district of Honolulu, and found a quiet place out of the way where we could fool around. unfortunately, this area was completely pitch black, and i had no lighting and no tripod with me.
so i made due with what i had.

using a garbage can as a tripod. i rested the trusty old 30D on its top, and balanced it on a ridge to try and get some kind of composition i could work with. i figured i could fix the rest in post.

for the lighting. i used my friends canon XT as a make shift strobe, by using the pop up flash and snapping pictures of them, while the 30D was on a long shutter. running back and fourth from the garbage can to set the timer, to my friends to snap away with the other camera.
with no flash power compensation on the pop up, i had to keep making adjustments to the manual settings of the other camera. but with a general understanding of OCF and manual adjustments, it didnt take long to get something workable.

the images are far from anything i would chose to keep. but all things considering, it worked well enough, and made for a fun shoot.

tried for a rim lighting effect on that last one, but it didnt quite have the same effect as my strobes. hahah