Speedlight | Christopher John Photography

August 10, 2020August 10, 2020

Hoverflies!

Out in the backyard again with reversed 50mm lens and homemade diffuser I managed to grab a few shots of some hoverflies.

Hoverfly at rest on spent Japanese Anemone flower.

Depth of field is seriously small, and with the lens stopped down it’s not easy to focus. All the same it’s quite good fun when you capture a wee beastie in focus! A few clever people seem to be able to take multiple images, hand held, focused in different places along the body of the insect and then stack them together to get a photo where all the creature is in focus. As you may have guessed, I’m not that skilled!

I use my speedlight with a snoot/diffuser made from old yoghurt pots to illuminate the insect and freeze the action. I must admit that using the snoot/diffuser provides a much more even and less harsh light than using a bare speedlight.

Hoverfly … I’ve always been fascinated with their eyes!

I’ve always been intrigued by the eyes on flies and bees and not until recently did I realise they had more than two eyes. There’s the two big compound eyes that are very obvious, but on the top of their heads they have three more simple eyes. If you look carefully at the two photos above you might just be able to pick them out.

February 21, 2015February 21, 2015

Nice reward.

I’d been admiring a hibiscus plant over the past few months. I suppose really because its flowers were so much more delicate that the larger more substantial blooms I have in my garden. A delicate pink with such a dainty flower. Anyway, after admiring the plant for some time I was given the opportunity to take a cutting. Just the one small cutting, placed in a jam jar with water and left on my studio windowsill to see if I could encourage some roots to grow. To my delight, grow they did and once they seemed large enough the new plant was transferred to a small plant pot and left to develop further on the windowsill.

20150221_125710 copy These past few days have been pretty busy for me and I must admit that it was only today that I noticed the plant. What a wonderful surprise to see my new plant in flower! I couldn’t resist and had to take a photo to show you. Click on the image and you’ll be able to see a larger version of the shot. Do you like?

The photograph was taken with a single flash with a snoot attached to camera left. The idea was to keep the background quite dark, but give sufficient light on the flower such that I could use a small aperture. I wanted to get as much of the stamen in focus as I could, so the lens was closed down quite a bit. For the technical amongst you, ISO100, 1/200s, f29, 105mm lens.

August 12, 2013August 12, 2013

Glasses and Flash

I was chatting to my son about light and some of the challenges you have when trying to take photos of glass. So, to illustrate the point, we grabbed a few glasses from upstairs – nothing fancy as there was a high chance things would get broken – and headed down into the basement! The glasses were placed on my light table which has a glossy white plastic surface. We tried a few different configurations, just to illustrate how we could change the appearance of the image by where we placed the light source.

This is the first shot. Taken with available light from the window to camera left. You can see a range of reflections on the glasses – I really must tidy up in the basement! Anyway, besides seeing all the clutter in the reflections you’ll notice the glasses seem to blend into the background. Instead of looking at the shape of the glasses you’re probably looking to see just what the clutter is in my basement!

Same setup as before, except this time I placed a speedlight under the light table. This gives quite a different effect. No longer are the reflections of the basement clutter so obvious and you get a much better idea of the shape of the glasses. One thing I’ve learnt is that when you play with glasses have a clean cloth handy so you can remove your greasy finger prints!

Next we decided instead of having the background predominantly white with the form of the glasses being black to swap things round. Now we tried a black background and had the glasses being white – or another colour! This time a gobo was placed behind the glasses and two white reflectors placed on the left and right of the glasses. The white light table was replaced with foamcore with some glass under the glasses to give some reflections. We also placed some gels in front of the flash to get some different colours.

We used the gel filters from the studio lights; yellow red and blue. The first shot used the yellow gel, but then using both yellow and blue gave us green as you see in this image.

Remember that I mentioned I had two white reflectors on each side of the glasses? Well, for the last shot we used two speedlights on low power fired through red and blue gels at these reflectors as well as a third speedlight behind the gobo as in the two previous shots.

So there you go, a bit of fun with a speedlight or two in the basement. Good fun and I think my son learnt a little as well as had some fun with the filters, reflectors and speedlights.