Eyes in the lower third of a vertical portrait! What??? I didn't think it would look good, the balance would surely be way out, it would appear upside down. top heavy, a bad move! How wrong I was.
The eyes in this picture of Abigail are truly magnetic, they draw the viewer in so much so that all else diminishes to the point where you do not notice just how opposed to traditional composition this shot really is.
Not sure about the strap though. Is it even noticeable? Should I take it out, or would I fail to make it disappear without trace? To my mind those amazing eyes do not allow my own eyes to wander enough to even see a strap.
Black and white photos have been popular since the year dot when cave men used charcoal sticks and nothing has changed for me - black and white rules in almost every case (see below).

I worked on this image in Photoshop, which was originally taken by Sandy at our studio, and tried to make a soft focus picture reminiscent of the 1940's, but I think we went over the top with too many lights. Just goes to show that not all photos are capable of becoming black and white masterpieces.
However, it does make a very reasonable colour portrait which has the potential of becoming a pretty good high key shot. Gaussian Blur with reduced opacity and a small amount of masking has produced a beautiful portrait which both Sandy and his model Abigail, and her mum should be especially proud of.
I love working with these old lights because I have to move them, feather them, modify them with white net curtains and I'm kept really busy helping the others take better and beter photographs. They're brilliant workers and I enjoy making sure they are learning something new all the time
Roll on the next studio session!!!
Keith (Strobist) Robins.

Portrait photography is my all time favourite. There can be few pleasurable pastimes more rewarding than being able to show someone just how beautiful they look, and as for being able to give them a print to prove it, wow!
Black and white has been one of my loves since the seventies, I guess most of us who have seen an image appear from a blank sheet of printing paper in a darkroom feel the same. Even in this digital age there is something riveting about a good black and white.
I had great deliberations over this first picture of Charlotte, do I make the most of Photoshop CS3's black and white filter by bringing in just a hint of colour, or leave it pure black and white?
So I did two of the same image. In this copy I brought back some colour in Charlotte's eyes and lips - which one do you prefer - which one will Charlotte choose to give her boyfriend, or her mum?
When I first started working in a girls school attended by girls from all over the world between the ages of 13 to 19 I thought I could tell a real beauty when I saw one. Wrong!!!
They reckon a camera doesn't lie - wrong again, sort of.
The camera can be told to record an image in the way you tell it to and what better way than to manipulate the lighting to reveal the more attractive features and let the rest languish in shadows. I've found the best way to achieve this is with studio lights, or hotshoe flashguns if working outdoors.

Making the most of lights and the modifiers which go with them takes a lot of practice which over the years builds into what's known as experience and it's this experience which I want to pass onto you followers of YeoPhotoGroup before I pop my digital glogs.
Photographing two girls under studio lights can be fraught with shadows hiding features which should be more prominent. What can be used to light up this shadow and what can I do about a missing catchlight? Exactly where to put those lights, how strong, whether to go for wide or snooted light, or should it be bounced or gridded, will a reflector help or hinder - these are all questions to which the answer is practice, practice, practice!
With so many variables of required lighting and an even wider range of lights and modifiers on the market, what to buy must seem mind boggling. Of course you could spend hundreds and find the lights are way too powerful for the size of studio available to you, or you could start by using someone else's cast offs which is what YeoPhotoGroup has done, although you'd have a job to tell by looking at these pictures Charlotte and Emily.
I think that with Emily's hair hanging slightly over her left eye that we should keep her right eye as the main point of focus. So that this remains the focus point throughout I often use centre point focus and try to concentrate on keeping that nearest eye as the very centre of my images. (The BBC camera crews always use the neasest eye as a point of focus for closeups of faces)
Cropping in Photoshop's Lightroom takes care of composition later, plus, I can go back into Lightroom as many times as I like and recrop the same image. I can also change it from colour to black and white and back again as Lightroom never effects my original Jpeg images, which means this is not the final image of Emily. There will probably be half a dozen different copies of this lovely picture over the next few weeks, each one with it's own merits.
Of course by then we'll have taken loads more on lots of different locations, under a variety of lighting conditions and all the while we are learning. In fifty years time we'll still be learning but it will be someone else pressing the button by then, building up their experience, shaping their own portfolio and hopefully their career as a photographer.
The best of luck in building your experience and if I can help then please ask.
Email my your problems, thoughts and a couple of your more successful images to:- robinsrepairs@btinternet dot com I'll leave you to take out the gaps and replace the dot.
I also use a set of Elinchrom DLite 200 watt lights with softboxes - they are robust, versatile, fan cooled, adjustable by five stops, the stands are very stable and I love them. Don't confuse the 200 watts with the power of an old fashioned photo floodlight - 200 watts is the recharge rate which they manage in an incredible 0.7 of a second and tells you it's ready with a little bleep, which can be turned off. The softboxes take a minute or so each to assemble and the same to dismantle. The kit comes in two slim very manageable bags, one of them is a much stiffer hardcase for the lights. They don't come with reflectors so I ordered one and wished now that I asked for two, plus two grids which just slot in the front a 12 degree and a 20 degree which I use frequently. The bulbs are protected by the two hard plastic cone shaped covers which are included. Power leads are very generous and are the 'Kettle' variety so a radio trigger will plug in between at the flash head end. An unexpected bonus was that each flash head came with a built-in cooling fan which hadn't been in the original specifications. However, they really do prevent the heads overheating and I wouldn't be without them. Photos and details of my home setup will be in a later post.

Take a £7 shower curtain, plus 12 feet of copper tubing and make a 3 foot by 6 foot reflector.
My wife sewed a pocket at each end of the curtain from the bathroom department of a DIY warehouse leaving an access point at one end. Into these pockets I slipped two lengths of plumbers 15mm copper tubing with a 'Tee' joint soldered in the centre of each

Cut off a seven foot length of tube and about a foot in from each end bend to almost ninety degrees, 75 degrees is best as ninety allows the joints to come apart during use and too straight an angle makes it difficult to assemble.
Use a drill to remove any excess solder from the empty socket of the 'Tee' joint which may prevent easy entry of the main support pipe.
After bending the pipe you'll need to cut the ends back until you can assemble the framework without struggling yet still keeping the material taut.
There are several benefits to bending the pipe, easy assembly, creates a natural spring which keeps material taut, easy dis-assembly, and less of a sharp shadow caused when using as a sun diffuser.
There is very little twist on account of the two bends and the positive way they lock in place whereas the mark one model suffered a lot from twisting in even a light breeze as it had no bends at all.
It's light enough to be held out level from one end with two hands and the addition of a clamp and wing nut makes for easy adjustment.
Total costs - about £15. Time to make - a couple of hours one Sunday afternoon. Assembly of the finished DIY reflector takes just twenty seconds and packing it up takes thirty. The very first time it took half a minute to put up and has since worked out at a constant twenty seconds. Rolling up the material and slipping on an elastic band takes a little longer as I try to avoid creasing the shiny material - I've taken longer to find a spare memory card!
okay, so the main pipe is rather long and unwieldy but a small price to pay when similar sized reflectors cost around £150.
A lighting stand makes this a very versatile reflector / diffuser for portrait work under all sorts of difficult lighting conditions.
I'm now working on a half sized reflector with a light spraying of golden orange paint on one side as I need a smaller reflector for helping capture golden sunrise portraits similar to those I've seen in magazines, plus I'd like to bounce a flash out of it.
Hmm, a smaller one would probably fit into that 27" toolbag I picked up in Jewsons Building merchants for £14, along with all the other bits and pieces we strobists seem to carry around on photoshoots
Keith (Strobist) Robins

Newcomer Liz learnt how to use a single studio flash really fast. Okay, so in this first relaxed picture of Jane, one of Yeovil Camera Club's prettier members, there is a small hair light at two o'clock high but then we dispensed with that and tried to be as creative as possible with just the one light.
Positioned less than arm's length to camera left and using a shoot-through brolly this light has certainly seen some faces in the last 30 years, but it's still capable of producing the goods.
Yes, I do own a set of Elinchome D-Lite 200's with soft boxes but I rarely use them for any of these YeophotoGroup posts as the idea is to press home the point that you do not need to spend lots of money to have fun with your photography.
For this second shot of Jane I think we should have moved the light a little nearer the camera, although the brolly edge might then have intruded into the specs as an unwelcome reflection.
Note how Liz has just managed to keep the whole of Jane's eyes visible behind the rims of her specs. Always try to get the whole eye / eyes as these are the make or breakpoints of beautiful portrait work.
The latest addition of a Black and White filter in Adobe CS3 is fantastic, all it needs is a slight lift in the red and yellow channels followed by a faint touch of black paint in the white mask box to bring just a hint of colour into Jane's lips, eyes and hair. For a first timer regarding portrait work Liz did exceptionally well with these three shots.
When it came to lighting a couple we decided to add a reflector.
A white shower curtain from Aldi supermarket cost me £7, add on 12 feet of 15mm copper pipe and a couple of joints and I have a six feet by three feet shiny white reflector for a total sum of under £17 - a post on how to make this will be coming up soon.
About ten shots into the couple sequence Liz caught this lovely pose of Jane and the YCC chairman Sandy perfectly. Some might say those fingers on the right are intrusive but with a simple soft edged vignette I think Liz has a competition winner here.
Well done Liz, hope to see you here again at the YeoPhotoGroup studio
Keith (strobist) Robins.

My Vivitar 285 flashes over 4oo times instead of only 60.
Take a six volt motorcycle battery, a block of wood and about four feet of wire, a couple of clips and Hey Presto, an external battery pack at a total cost of less than £30.
I successfully carried out similar adaptions to three of my caving flashguns back in the seventies, plus three video cameras during the nineties so I guess it follows suit that now it's the turn of my digital lighting equipment to be, shall we say personalised via a little cheap DIY.
I think the most complicated part was soldering the mid-wire joint together - these are commonly used for radio controlled car power leads as they are capable of carrying plenty of current, yet are quickly detachable in the event of smoke emerging that very first time you connect up your delicate electronics.
Be Very Careful to get the polarity correct and use a multimeter frequently during this build.
I went to Maplins for the electrical bits such as a Maplin six volt - 4.2amp battery at £9-99, charger at £11-99, twin wire, HF10L spade terminals and FE65V plastic teminal covers, a two part snap joint with part numbers GZ99 and JG05 = £30 the lot.
Incidental extras consisted of block of wood, two pan-head screws, a soldering iron, saw, screwdriver - all of which I found in my shed.
As with any alterations to any photo equipment the warranty becomes void if you go tampering within the guarantee period - that said then go for it!
First off you have to figure out which are the positive and the negative contacts inside the battery compartment. Two of them merely carry the power from one battery to another and will show a dead short when both are touched with the two multimeter probes.

Set the multimeter on Ohms for this test and a reading of zero means there's a dead short, or a figure one in the digital display means open circuit, any other reading means there is something electrical or electronic component between the probes.
If you're new to the use of a multimeter try testing a 100 watt household light bulb. First off try touching the two probes together and you'll get a reading of zero. Now touch the two blobs on the base of your bulb and you'll get a reading of approximately forty ohms as the filament is acting as a resistor between one terminal to the other, (think electric fire bar glowing red, that is one heck of a resistor, meanwhile the bulb filament glows white hot).
Let's test the terminals inside your flashgun. If it's a Vivitar 285HV like mine the two terminals closest to the front are linked and this shows up pretty clearly via bright shiny metal. The other pair of contacts are what carries the battery current into the flash unit, but which is neg and which is positive? The answer is to look at the battery assembly where each battery is clearly marked with a + sign, it's the pointy end. Of course most other flashguns have neg / pos diagrams marked in white paint inside the battery compartment.
Right, grab a piece of wood and make it the same size and shape as the interior of your battery compartment. For a Vivitar it's rounded on three corners and square on the fourth corner. There's a saw blade width groove running down one face of your block which will slide over the protruding plastic down the front facing side of the battery compartment.
Fit two screws into the end of the wooden block which will be carrying your external power supply. These go towards the rear face of the compartment with positive terminal closest to the hotshoe. Check the polarity with a multimeter before inserting it that first time!
Go to either the battery assembly, or the battery + markings to figure out which screw on your wooden block is going to be positive.
The length of wire for my setup has been kept long enough for the flash to be 8 feet up on a lighting stand and the battery on the floor, this way it can't fall any further and risk damage to my rather marvelous 285HV flashgun.
You can either leave the battery door open a little to allow entry of the wire or, for if yours is the hinged sort, file / drill a hole on the door edge. To facilitate this entry point you will have to drill a hole for the wire right down through the wooden block at an angle, from one edge nearest the door catch down to the centre being careful avoid the screws.
Recycling time for the flash on full power remains at 7 seconds for a couple hundred flashes and very gradually drops towards 15 seconds over the next two hundred. Compared to normal AA batteries this is a Godsend, a whole wedding without waiting an eternity for the damned flash to recycle!
One of these pictures shows a caving battery belt, actually an old car seatbelt on which I used for abseiling, caving and to carry a twelve volt burglar alarm battery for video cameras, (I try to save money where possible, but I must try to go get hold of one of those lightweight gardening belts for this flash battery setup).
The wide metal plate belt loop in the same shot is so I can be totally portable with my Vivitar 285HV and my DIY brolly bracket, (see a previous post for those details).
Before, with AA batteries, I was waiting thirty five seconds within twenty full power flashes and a whole minute after fifty flashes!
I do tend to use the Vivitar flashgun on 1/4 power for brolly photography and recycling time is just two seconds. Without the brolly I'd be using 1/16th power which means recycling time is virtually instant. I am far more than happy with this little bit of DIY.

Portrait lighting experiments lesson one. Broad lighting is a good place to start off with when you're new to portrait work. By broad lighting I mean the main light should be coming in from the same side of the model's face as the most prominent ear you can see from your camera position.
Here, Trevor and myself are using YeoPhotoGroup's new studio for the very first time and immediately found ourselves on a steep learning curve of real-life lighting arrangements. You have to remember that until now we've never had the room, or the time, to setup and alter the lights around quite as much as this. This first image is probably only about ten minutes into a ninety minute session and proves that lighting skills is a little like riding a bike, you never forget how it's done.
To off start with we sorted out the white balance as these lights are absolutely ancient, (30 years plus), and haven't been used for twenty years. Next we explored the possibilities of using a shutter speed which could include some of the window light, but as this revealed a ridiculously low 2 seconds we chose to ignore daylight altogether and settled on a pretty standard 1/200th of a second. The ISO is at 100 and an aperture of f14 was settled on.
YeoPhotoGroup is all about doing every thing on a shoe-string budget and these old lights have no power controls, although they do both have built in slave units. Of course there is the old fashioned 'power modifiers' of altering the flash to subject distance, either a shoot-through brolly or a bounce brolly which allowed us to retain some degree of control over flash output.
We decided that a reflector would help light the darker side of my face so a smooth white emulsioned board was held about 12 to16 inches off to camera left. Also, the fairly sharp shadows created by the full-on studio heads with built-in reflectors needed rectifying.
For the second image we added an old faded white shoot-through brolly at two feet from brolly tip to my face, which softened the shadows beautifully. (I must remember to remove that string from my glasses next time.)
An Edison screw mini flash, which has its own slave unit built in, became our hair light and was positioned about three feet behind me. In some situations it can help to use a pocket hanky as a method of light reduction - one layer equals one stop and two layers equals two stop.
A second ancient studio flash is lighting the background from tight in to one side of the textured blue sheet and low down, creating a graduated tone behind me, (keep this to the same side as the nose for best results).
The reflector was held a little higher and angled downwards to help reduce glare in my glasses, (see third picture). As the reflected light wasn't quite strong enough we angled the brolly so it aimed halfway between me and the white board.

The complete lighting setup is shown here revealing just how small a space can be used to produce perfectly acceptable portraits.
The high voltage flashes were fired by Trevors 550EX canon flash set on 1/125th power and pointing up at the grey ceiling. I did once blank my Canon by firing these monstrous studio heads direct off the camera contacts. Since then I've got hold of a radio studio head trigger for £42 from PhotoDeals UK.
All in all a brilliant evening's work with many lesson learnt. We even had time for some outdoor flash merged with daylight the results of which will be coming up in a later post.

My DIY brolly bracket was designed and made in about an hour late Sunday evening. The first outing with this monstrous gadget was Monday at the second evening of Yeovil camera club's Summer Programme. I'm encouraged by these super results, especially the lack of sharp shadows. Also as the flash is now so far above and to one side of the lens the modelling of subject's features have more character and the lighting appears so natural that it's not obvious whether there is any flash fill-in or not. All in all a great success!
All three of these photos were taken with a shutter speed of 1/200th at f7 with an ISO setting 200.
As the flash was firing through the small translucent white brolly it was turned up from its normal 1/16th power to 1/4 power.
Why I use a flashgun set so low? By using a lower power I can achieve a recycling time of just one second and it's possible to shoot off about six photos before I need to briefly pause while the flash capacitor fully recharges.
Note the soft shadows in the picture of Liz and Perta.
Ian's jumper and especially his nearest hand is not burnt out.
Cyril, our oldest member at eighty four, was the only one sitting in direct sunlight and turned out to be the most difficult to get the exposure right. I like this shot as he appears not to have been obviously fill flashed. His picture gives the impression of having the shadows lit via a large reflector.
The strange phenomenon of using this tiny translucent brolly is that the light appears equal in front, behind and off to both sides. This means there would be a fair amount hitting a low ceiling and bouncing back into the picture, great for groups. This makes my brolly bracket even more versatile than I first thought.
More experiments and results with the brolly bracket will be posted up soon. Keith Robins - strobist.