How Keith Robins Photography takes portraits outdoors in the dark!
You'd be forgiven for thinking these portraits were taken in a studio - whereas actually they were amid the bluebells of Sparkford woods around dusk, plus another two hours beyond.

Here's Bob, one of YPG's newer members, studying the results of his experimenting with a fibre optic ring flash while the main studio light is set off via my radio trigger. Okay, so I should have made more of the gorgeous bluebells, but I've been there, done that. Besides, portraits are my favourite area of photography.




Running a studio light away from any mains electricity is usually extremely expensive. Not anymore! Maplins sell a 1,000 watt inverter for less than £100
This picture of Charlotte was powered by a 12volt car battery, through a maplin invertor and has no trouble powering a single Elinchrom 200watt D-Lite2.
A Kenro five-in-one reflector helped lighten the shadows and eliminated the need for a second Elinchrom head. The Elinchrom D-lite2 heads have a 4 amp drain but it is only for 0.7 of a second so the 1,000watt inverter doesn't quite reach the stage where the power safety switch cuts out.



Laura, who's never done any sitting in front of a camera before, came along too and with a little verbal encouragement enabled us to capture this lovely semi black and white photo. I said that her eyes were one of her more attractive features and that I'd try to show them at their best.
I love playing around in photoshop and creating these semi black and whites with a softness produced via Guassian blur along with a layer mask.
For instance this one of Laura has a blurred copy layer, but the semi black and white effect is the result of leaving the blur at 50% then highlighting the lower layer and using the Mono button of Colour Mixer in CS2.

I love the way Emily's face is illuminated from a long way around to the left and only creates a small nose shadow in the shot on the left, plus how she's looking straight up at the large white reflective brolly. Shoot-thro brollies seem to lose a lot of power by not reflecting all the light so I'm really glad I snapped up this large bargain of a reflective brolly at a photo sale for £15.
Meanwhile, the nose shadow across Charlotte's cheek doesn't look right here and I should have asked her to tilt her head to the opposite side.
However, I still like the colour, the softness and especially the twinkle in her eye. Notice how the reflector casts a faint catchlight in her left eye?



My favourite shot of the evening is this one of Emily with it's superb soft lighting, a smile that's not over the top, a good sized catchlight in both eyes, plus the way her tumbling hair surrounds her face adding even more beauty to the finished photo.
Bluebells? What bluebells? They were there in the background, promise! I'm more than happy with these results and look forward to the next time with this trio of amazing girls.
Keith Robins.

Stuart's only had his Canon 5D mark ll one week and wants to explore flash, so he's come to Keith Robins Photography to get the low down!
He used my Canon 550EX for this pair of snaps.
Placing the flash into the hotshoe we set the camera on to manual and the flash to ETTL means that no matter what he uses as the aperture the resulting exposures will be identical.
The flash is able to read what aperture Stuart has set on his camera and automatically sends out a weaker powered flash for the second photo where he used f8 instead of f16. He did this just to see if there would be any difference - there wasn't.
Even if he'd used a higher ISO setting the flashgun would still have picked this up and allowed for the more sensitive settings.
The shutter speed could have been anywhere between 2 seconds and 1/200th of a second and it would not have made any difference to the exposure as shutter speeds have no effect on flash photos, as long as they stay below 1/200th of a second.
For the next challenge we tried a darkened room and used a pair of Miranda flashguns which someone had thrown out a few weeks previous.
(Took me a whole afternoon with a soldering iron to adapt them to work on my radio triggers.)
Both gunare at arms length, one behind my head and the other out of sight to camera right. The f14 was necessary due to both guns being permanenty set to full power manual - auto doesn't work when there are two guns facing each other. I also needed to place a thumb across the flash window as a light modifier on the gun lighting my face, which means the one behind my head shows a little stronger.

Keith Robins Photography goes flashing at the seaside! Balancing daylight and flash is not the easiest of challenges, in fact less than five percent of photographers really understand how and why flashguns work in conjunction with available light.
This blog is a mine of information about exactly that.
I'm hoping that by reading all the posts in this blog that you too will be able to handle this most creative of lighting combinations and all you'll have spent is a little time.

Burton Bradstock in early March at around 5pm is the first photo. A flash on that rock in the foreground would have given added interest and help balance the picture.
Second photo is about an hour later. I definitely should have used a flash here - set on minus 2/3rds of a stop so it is not at all obvious - which is surely the whole point of this exercise. Must clean that front filter more often!
It's getting damned cold and my trouser legs are wet through kneeling in the wet shingle with a wide angle lens. Next time I'll bring a pair of wellies, or better still a pair of fisherman's waders.
Brian is seen here struggling with the principles of daylight flash balancing, but he's a fast learner and is soon able to take pictures just like these.

I used F18 at 1/160th on 200 ISO with my canon 550EX on ETTL. Strange to say that the camera, a Canon 5D, was in the manual mode - so too was the lens which is focused on Brian.
Even though the camera is in manual mode it does not effect the ability of the flash to operate successfully in ETTL.
Why manual mode for the camera? I wanted complete control over both aperture to control the flash, plus shutter speed which governs the intensity of the daylight. Now I can make the sky as dark and threatening as I like, mean while retaining a good exposure of my maim subject - usually a figure or a portrait.

This goes against the normal everyday trend of photography where one speed up equals one aperture down to get a similar exposure.
I feel completely at ease with flashguns and this rather unusual way of operating the settings on my camera and flash and have done so for over thirty years. Some of my old manual flashes needed light modifiers such as the lenses from a pair of old Polaroid sunglasses, several layers of handkerchief, or just a thumb placed in front of the flash lens. Nowadays there are auto modes via so many menus it's baffling, plus these modern things seem to have a mind of their own and often refuse to co-operate.
The copyright was added with one click of a brush and then toned down using Opacity.
Hold down the Alt key and type 0169 in the right-hand numerical keys to get a C symbol. type your name - select it with a rectangle - go to Edit, Define Brush Preset, click OK and your logo is the very last brush in the brush palette. Open a new layer before adding your logo, then use Transform to adjust or rotate.

Brian wants to find out about using a flashgun and comes to Keith Robins Photography to use my kichen!
Brian is reasonably new to digital photography but he took less than an hour to discover the relationship between available light and flash light using apertures and shutter speeds.
His Olympus bridge camera is able to talk to Olympus flashguns and we had two guns to play with!
This first picture took one gun aimed at the wall behind me - no wires and no little slave, not even a radio trigger in sight. The popup flash on his Olympus did the talking but needed a crisp packet turned inside out to reflect the signal towards the ceiling so it didn't effect the image.

For the next one I held a flashgun in each hand at arms length out to both sides. The one in my left hand was full power while my right-hand thumb was across the middle of the other flash lens reducing the output by a whole stop. This is a trick worth remembering when using totally manual flashguns which can be picked up from E-Bay for virtually nothing - I got a matching pair for 50 pence each.





This last photo Brian took was from about four feet away and used one flash plus a silver faced gift bag about twelve inches away to camera right in my left hand.
Brian was absolutely over the moon at these results as you can imagine, but he agreed to let me do the black and white conversion using the Black and White filter in Photoshop CS3.
Next time out is a trip to the seaside for a sunset plus flashing session.