A little bit of low key.....

Hola. I had big plans to go somewhere exciting today and take some shots. Unfortunately my sleeping late and the terrible weather today (cold, wet, windy) meant that it didn't really happen. Instead I decided to play with my lovely SB900 (best Christmas present ever!) and do some high key/low key photography. These shots were sort of inspired by a photographer called Robert Mapplethorpe (linky) (some of these are NSFW) and another called Guy Gagnon (link). I'm still getting to grips with flash (as you can see) but I'm quite happy with a couple that I took.

For these shots I mainly used the flash in a cold shoe with the included diffuser (Nikon calls it an omni-bounce I think) or with the diffuser and a beauty dish. I can't afford to fork out for radio triggers at the moment to I'm just using the on-camera flash to trigger the speedlight. This has worked really well for me so far but I did find that the camera flash was interfering too much on these close ups. As a work around I held an old receipt against the camera flash with an elastic band and it worked perfectly! Still triggered the speedlight but didn't interfere with the shot. Magic. Enjoy:

I think this is my favourite shot of the day it was taken up against some white paper and my flash pointing in to an umbrella. The camera settings were ISO 200, 40 mm f/5, 1/250 sec

High key seed pods

This one was taken with my flash pointing up towards the plants(? I'm not sure what these are to be honest, just found them in the garden and thought they looked pretty cool) with the omni-bounce on and a beauty dish. Camera was set to: ISO 200, 50 mm, f/2.8, 1/250 sec

Low key plant things

The final shot here was taken with the flash pointing down from above the seed heads which, I think, makes for quite dramatic lighting. I couldn't be bothered to set up a lighting stand so I'm holding the flash in one hand and the camera in the other. Geek bit: ISO 200, 50 mm, f/6.3, 1/250 sec

Low key seed heads

New year, new blog

Ok, this is a blog to force me to take more photographs. It was supposed to be a new year thing and I'd start off 2011 a new man, a hardworking man, a committed man...... That obviously fell by the wayside as it's now the 20th Jan so I'm already nearly 3 weeks late in getting this project off the ground. Hopefully this isn't a sign of thing to come.

Anyway here are a couple of photos I took in the last day or so. Ideally I'll be updating this blog with new pictures at least every fortnight. So here goes:

This first one I actually took today I thought I'd go down to the beach and try and get some long exposures of the waves around rocks in the bay but it was just too sunny even with my aperture stopped all the way down. Still I think I got a couple of nice ones this being one. For those interested this was shot at ISO 200, 18 mm, f/7.1, 1/800 sec.

Southerndown Beach nr Cardiff

This next one was taken a couple of days ago at some waterfalls in Mid Wales. It's a great place to shoot but you and your equipment tends to get drenched from the spray so not really a place to take top of the line gear. Stats: ISO 200, 55 mm, f/16, 0.6 sec

Nant Llech River

Finally this was taken at the same place as the river shot above, I wanted to get a close up of the water beading on the mosses with my lovely new Nikon 50 mm f/1.4. It's a stunning lens and produces such sharp images. If you're interested: ISO 200, 55 mm, f/5.6, 1/250 sec

Moss covered rock near Henrhyd Falls in Mid Wales