Flash and blur in the same shot! I said it was possible, but we did take over an hour to perfect it. Second curtain flash was already agreed long before we arrived on site, although why my Canon remains fixed in the first curtain mode regardless of menu settings does baffle me.
With a gale blowing like a demon we were on top of Hamhill frantically holding onto my Elinchrome D-Lite 200's. The softboxes nearly blew away, the rainclouds threatened but the wet stuff held back just for us.
We got beeped at by grinning motorists and Nicki received a quiet yet complimentary wolfwhistle. Meanwhile the shots mounted up as we struggled with shutter speed and panning techniques until Kelv's preview screen produced this super picture with the elusive blur.
1/20th of a second at f11 on 200 ISO - Fantastic! I've even framed it in my excitement, plus I have added a little escapism for the front wheel.

Now I wanted just that little bit extra umph. Lifting the D-Lite head off the lighting stand, which was tied to a 'No Waiting' sign to prevent the wind whisking it away, I then mounted it on the end of a decorators extending pole . I managed to hold the light with its dished reflector about six feet above Nicki's head and another six feet in front.

At some twelve feet long the unwieldy pole proved quite a handful, even though the flashhead weighs next to nothing it was over ten feet away from my hand and being whipped about by a gusting wind.
After twenty attempts we managed to finally get a natural looking background blur and becoming frustrated with trying the judge speeds and distances with one second shutter speed in second curtain flash mode
We ended this challenging shoot in damp darkness at around 9pm and were glad of our yellow safety vests which kept the traffic at bay.
I am definitely more than happy with these great results and am now busy planning the next challenge which is a flash lit subject, plus movement of some sort of ambient light or available lights in the background. Maybe the Great Dorset Steam Fair will help shed some suitable lighting. Keith (Strobist) Robins

Elite Junior Triathlete Nicola Morgan looks fantastic here, almost as good as in real life. So much confidence in one so young!
As leading light of YeophotoGroup I was originally thinking of using hotshoe flashguns for this shoot, but I'm glad now that we went for the Elinchrom studio flashheads instead.

Although it's extremely heavy the 2.8 Kwatt generator was also a good move. With hardly a break in the rythm it kept up with the Elinchrom's power demanding 0.7 of a second recycling times for nearly two hours of solid shooting.
With the wind picking up part way through the shoot there were a few time when I was glad of the milk carton counter weights keeping the lighting stands stable. Trevor suggested sand as ballast as water could leak away in transit and leave us without the safeguard of stability for our delicate lights.
Even after years of using high shutter speeds along with fairly high apertures to make the sky dark I never cease to be amazed at just how creative photography can be when using several flashes at an angle to the camera.
The choices of whether to use hotshoe or studio flash depended on the light in an early evening sky, would it be too strong and overbearing in its intensity.

You can't argue with f 16 as a means of keeping that bright sky under control. The pictures below demonstrate the point perfectly, although some would say that we've gone way over the top and I've made it too dark. My response is - show me how you can improve on these shots and I'll listen, maybe I'll even learn something new. I do like to push the boundaries though as the limits are.... what exactly???


Meanwhile, I love the high contrast between Nicola and clouds and know for sure that next time I'm on a serious shoot I want studio flash, I want great backgrounds, texture, vibrance, correct skin colour and above I want eye-popping pictures.
Many thanks to Crusader Corperate Workwear of Lufton Trading Estate, Yeovil for printing these Hi-Vis vests which make us look so professional and dedicated. Also many thanks to Nicola and her dad for their time and effort to help all of us achieve a most exciting evening. Hope you like the pictures Nicki and best of luck on your next Triathlete event.

Can't wait until the next shoot as I want to use floodlights on the background so that with a careful chosen shutter speed we'll get blur. Half the fun of photography is visualisation and then planning. The second half is adapting your plans as the situation changes and new challenges arise. Try to be prepared with an alternative method of lighting up your sleeve, just in case the genny won't start, the lights fail, a fuse blows.
Keith (Strobist) Robins.

My flashgun suddenly starts bellowing smoke!! I connected a 6 volt motorcycle battery via a 4 foot length of wire and it didn't whine when I turned it on. Now that's funny, it's supposed to make a whining sound - hang on a minute, what's this, smoke? Oh Nooooo!!!
I had shaped two blocks of wood to act as dummy batteries in one of my old flashguns plus one of Trevor's guns - trust me to pick up the wrong one!
I had just soldered the ends on and then connected it up without double checking the polarity - silly!!! Always check, double check and then triple check that the polarity is exactly as it should be before turning on the power.
I took ten screws out of the casing and yanked the electronic innards out thinking this was the end of my Starblitz flash, but could see no signs of burnt circuitry. The smoke? Thankfully it was merely the insulated card at the bottom of the battery compartment getting rather warm due to a dead short. Also there are now two battery springs with hardly any springiness left in them. Luckily it's the two that I don't need.
Oh, and yes I pressed on and connected up, correctly this time and Bob's yer Uncle there's that good old familiar whining sound from the flashgun, a little orange light comes on. Yippee!!
Now to see what this baby can really do. Full power recharges in about three seconds. In the mid auto position this drops to about one second and in the low auto (weakest) I can just keep on hitting the firing button and the flash keeps up, the orange light stays on continuously.
Will I ever go back to normal AA batteries again? I doubt it. It's not a cost thing it's all about speed of recycling. I want a flash that recharges quickly, before the client starts to think that you've finished taking photos and wanders off. There is nothing worse than waiting, waiting, waiting for a flashgun to recharge.
High energy AA's are okay for around the twenty flash mark but then they begin increasing the length of down time, then after forty flashes we're up around the half a minute depending on temperature, battery age, flash power setting, etc.
Total number of flashes per six volt battery charge is up around 500 at full power and over 1,000 at low auto setting on the Starblitz. The Vivitar produces over 400 full power flashes but closer to 2,000 on reduced power setting! Now that's what I call Rocking, Man!
The photos accompanying this article are of my Vivitar 285 HV which I successfully converted last year.
Things to watch out for? Short circuits if you carry one of these six volt batteries in your camera bag, picking up the wrong block of wood, dropping the battery on your foot - Ouch! Hop, hop.
Some of you have asked how I clip this battery onto my belt. Two pieces of old car inner tube, they're like heavy duty elastic bands. One goes twice around the battery top to bottom while the other splips inside near the top, down through my belt and out around the lower half of the battery. So quick, it never jumps off and whacks your foot, plus it will hook over one of the adjusting knobs on a lighting stand. I used to work in a tyre company over forty years ago and I still had an ancient inner tube in the shed, 155X13 from a Ford Cortina I believe. Never throw anything away lads!

Nicola is an Olympic triathlon hopeful for 2012. On Sunday the 2nd August she won a bronze medal in the London Junior Elite Triathlon - Wednesday evening I spot her picture in the Western Gazette sports pages and intend asking her ref photos. An hour later and she is in our studio ready for a few portraits. Are we fast movers or what!!!
This is my favourite image from about forty studio flash shots taken last night. Okay so it's not in colour - you should know by now that black and white and I go back a long, long way.
It's now five-thirty Thursday morning and I can't sleep, so I fire up the computer, make a drink and open Photoshop.
I produced this black and white soft focus image of young Nicola via the amazing Black And White filter in Photoshop CS3 by lightening the Red and the Yellow channels. Two stages of softening were added along with a couple of masks and finally, drag in our YPG copyright slogan. I'm sorry we have to do this but there are people out there who think our work is so good that they'd rather pinch than take their own photos for their websites. Bit of a compliment in a way I suppose, although I'd prefer they accredited the images to YeoPhotoGroup, in which case I'd probably give it to them for free.
Levels and curves produced an improvement in the overall lighting, which was a little below our normal high standard due to there being six people in our cramped little studio.
We also tried some daylight shots, (left), plus the shadows are filled using a silver surfaced sun visor for a car windscreen costing just £2-99 at Aldi supermarket - it's held rigid by a large 'H' shape of 15mm copper tubing (what else?).
The gorgeous catch-light in the lower half of Nicki's eyes is a reflection of this 2 foot by 4 foot reflector which I held horizontal just above waist level while Kelv took this image. Kelv definitely knows his Nikon camera and his grasp of lighting is growing week by week.
We're both impressed at how incredibly successful this reflector is in producing soft fill-in lighting and I shall certainly be using this gadget during all my outdoor portrait sessions. Will post up the details of how to build my 'Super Silver Bouncer' as soon as.

Meanwhile, Nicki wants some sponsorship photos of herself in action which is going to produce its own set of challenges as far as lighting is concerned. Flash and daylight balanced, the shutter speed right down around 1/10th of a second for blur and my Vivitar 285HV on full power for main lighting at a three o'clock position. A Starblitz at seven o'clock position for fill lighting - Nicki would be running left to right in this particular setup.
I want to go for late evening, brow of a hill, running and cycling past at various speeds, use second curtain flash to capture a sharp shape with a faint blur trailing behind Nicki due to the slow shutter speed. I want sharp detail on tracksuit, logos, and Nicola's lovely features.
Must also leave enough room around Nicola so that the background, lit by really weak daylight, is attractively blurred but not over-lit. Over this blurring will appear the sponsors logos etc.
This is going to be some shoot! Anyone willing to help carry the kit and hold up the lights and reflectors on this shoot? You'll certainly learn a lot about lighting on the hoof!
I might even try my Elinchrome D-Lite 200's outdoors by running them on a borrowed 2.3Kw generator.
Once I know the generator is capable of handling the power requirements then I might get around to making up a lighter, more portable 12 volt power inverter. I mean, how difficult can it be to knock one of those up in the shed!!? Now come on, don't jest, I'm serious! Watch this space.

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