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.

How Keith Robins Photography photographs WOW factor drips of water!
Taking photos of drips takes time and patience, plus a little bit of know-how. For instance, try lighting whatever is being reflected in the water and not the water. In fact keeping the water in the dark is probably one of the best tips I can give you.
Try firing a hotshoe flash across the liquid's surface and lighting up something as simple as a reddish coloured festive dinner mat, a photograph from an old TV Times, or a pale yellow toughened glass cutting board, which are the items I've used in these three examples.
This is a technique I learnt underground during my caving days. (Goodness me, that's nearly 30 years ago!) Keeping the water dark always returned better photos than when the flash was pointing directly at a dark muddy pool and backlighting came out far better for moving water shots. Ripples also showed up better with backlighting, or when reflecting a cave wall or a caver is beyond and carefully lit so there is something tangible to show up as a reflection.
Camera settings of 1/200th or slower takes care of the flash side of things while an aperture is chosen to go with the flash power setting.
By reducing the power to 1/16th the duration of your average hotshoe flash is reduced to around 1/5,000th, which is plenty short enough to capture the fastest of drips. Surprisingly, the aperture is still up around the f5.6 to f11 mark, even at 1/16th power.
These ultra-fast flash durations, requiring reasonably wide apertures, dictate narrower depth of field so focusing has to be spot on.
I set the camera on manual focus and zoomed in on the markings of a steel ruler which was right under the drip, then pulled the zoom back and framed up.
A tiny pin hole in the base of the plastic bottle is necessary to allow a drip at around a two second interval, just about slow enough for a battery powered hotshoe flash on reduced power to recycle in time for the next drip. It's easy to get carried away and take hundreds of photographs once you've started capturing good shots
The idea is to count the drips out loud and nod your hand up and down in time. In your hand is the shutter release for your camera and your thumb is also keeping time with the count, but only actually pressing the button every other drip, (flash tubes can overheat with fast repeated use). Keep an eye on the camera preview screen and adjust your count very slightly to capture drips in different stages of falling and splashing.
Within ten minutes you should be getting pictures like these. Of course all the kit takes a while to find and assemble, plus the setting up takes an hour or so. Even finding a pair of pliers and a needle to pierce the bottle took me over twenty minutes!
Hanging your bottle from a lamp shade with a rubber band and clothes pegs works surprisingly well. And if you can't find a large black seed tray then maybe a bin liner dipped between four lengths of wooden batten will probably last long enough for this exercise. A cat litter tray will do, but watch out for unexpected puddles from Tiddles.
Does the floor get wet? Yes, but not much. Is this exercise time well spent? Yes, most definitely! Telephoto lens? 60mm to 105mm is best. Mirror lock up? No, the flash is way too fast. Coloured water? Not neccesary, just rely on the background that you're lighting to give you all the colour you need. Angle the flash from one side to reduce glare in the reflection. Also angle it slightly upward to keep the water dark, we want backlighting only via bounced light. With the flash set to manual extend the zoom to avoid stray light touching the water. Keep checking the front of your lens for splashes.
This last image shows a short length of four inch soil pipe as a support for the flash, a toilet pan connector is holding the magazine along with a pair of enormous clips from the garden. The magazine is sagging, which I deliberately left to illustrate how nothing has to be spot - on except the exposure and the focus.

Sharpening images in Elements 4 without halos. Keith Robins Photography has written a previous post referring to a rather unusual method of sharpening in Adobe CS3, but as most photographers seem to prefer sticking to the basic Elements I thought I'd try an alternative technique using Elements 4 with very similar results. Go up to Image in the top toolbar and choose Greyscale and your image turns black and white.
Now go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask and move the percent slider up to 300%, yes really! The Radius stays around 0.8 and the Treshhold remains at Zero.
Save As under a new name so that you can reopen the same image from your files and folders, but this time you're going to keep it as a coloured photo.
Use the Move tool and hold down Shift while you drag the black and white picture into the colour image and then select the Overlay mode for this new top layer.
The colour of the lower layer shows through the black and white sharpness of the upper layer.
By clicking on each photo in turn you should be able to see which of these images has been sharpened.

Keith Robins Photography tries sharpening with a big difference! Black and white photos of men can stand a lot of really gritty sharpening. I absolutely love these B andW pictures of Ollie, especially the biting sharpness. Ollie was a former member of Yeovil Camera Club back in the 7o's and willing posed for us.
I tried using unsharp mask but wasn't keen on the resulting halos and colour fringing often associated with normal everyday sharpening.
I vaguely remembered reading an article on the web last year suggesting Lab Colour mode as an alternative method of sharpening - so I gave it a go.
First thing is swap to Lab Colour mode, which is found under Image in the top toolbar.
Next, click on Channels in the Layers palette and select the Lightness layer. The other three layers will turn off when you do this. Find the normal everyday Unsharp Mask and whizz it up to 300% - don't worry it'll turn out just fine! (Obviously this 300% is not set in stone so just use that as a starting point, I have used as much as 500% with extremely good results.)
In the Radius box just beneath I went for 0.8 pixels and the bottom box, Threshold, was left at zero - click OK.
Click on the top layer to open up all the other channels again, then go back to Image and swap back into RGB mode. Select Layers as opposed to Channels and you're back in the world of good old layers which we all known and love.

In case you haven't realised I'm a supporter of Jpegs - I have tried RAW but found it decidedly soft and absolutely everything needed working on wityh evry single image - time wasting! I'll continue to let the camera do the donkey work and I'm not tempted to bother trying RAW again, thank you very much. I take around 400 pictures a week, mostly experimenting with lighting and unusual effects and I want to see them right away, full screen.
Besides, I can still use all the Adobe Camera Raw tweaks on my Jpegs prior to opening them in Photoshop. However, if you want to prove me wrong - go on then, I challenge you to make a better picture via Raw in the camera!
After sharpening these photos were changed to black and white using a Black And White adjustment layer in CS3 and moving the red channel slightly to the right and the yellow channel a little bit further. This lightened up the shadow detail in Ollie's features without blowing the brightness of his shirt collar.
I guess one day I'll get used to how Actions operate and that'll speed things up enormously, but for now I enjoy using Photoshop so I'll plod along slowly. Even so, each of these images took less than ten minutes to start looking really good, then I started playing around with oval selections, inverting them, feathering to 130 pixels and finally using another adjustment layer, Levels this time, to introduce a little darkness around the outer edges.
I also use the same 130 pixel feather to make a selection and then press Control + M to bring up the Curves adjustment box and then drag the line down a bit to darken, make another selction and use Curves again to make that selection slightly lighter. This seems to work in a more pleasing manner than using the Dodge tool or the Burn tool.

There were two lights used here, one via a shoot-thro brolly and the other bounced into a silver sunshield. Originally designed for a car windscreen on sunny days this £4 makeshift reflector is now supported on a couple lengths of plumbers piping. (See a previous post for info on how to make this easily assembled gadget.)
Ialso used a black blanket background supported on plumbers waste pipe and a short length of plastic guttering fixed atop a single lighting stand. I designed that litle gadget over twenty years ago and still find it extremely quick and simple to erect.
The tip of the brolly was less than eighteen inches from Ollie's nose and to camera left, while the reflector was about two feet away to camera right with the flash only just out of camera view. These lights are ancient and rather warm in tone so I either use a DIY colour balance card, or carry out a custom white balance which is easy on the Canon camera, plus just a little tweak in Adobe Camera Raw before opening up into CS3.

A setup like this uses very little space and most living rooms / lounges / or a large kitchen can be utilised. The studio flashes used here on Ollie are thirty years old and have no power controls, so my alternative set of Elichrom D-Lite 200watt would have been an absolute dream to use.
I ought really to sell those old lights on EBay but hey, old habits die hard. Alternatively, I could have used a couple of old hotshoe flashes with equally good effect. What I'm trying to say is, use whatever lighting you have lying around and instead spend your money on a better lens, or some versatile software such as CS3, or maybe a more patient or attractive model.
Incidentally, I recently spent a couple of hours making up a whole arsenal of tiny diagrams to suit my own lighting needs. These are saved as a huge number of layers and kept as a PSD file, which enables me to move them around, rotate, turn off the ones not needed and flipping over those facing the wrong way. I love Photoshop!!!